Listen to co-curator Juliette Wells talk about the only complete fiction manuscript by Jane Austen to survive.
A FAIR COPY
The only complete fiction manuscript of Austen’s to survive, this epistolary novella features Lady Susan Vernon, a beautiful widow, unscrupulous flirt, and shamelessly neglectful mother. The watermark on the paper is dated 1805; scholars debate whether the work was composed near that date or was initially drafted in the 1790s.
Under the title Lady Susan, the novella was first published in 1871 as part of the second edition of A Memoir of Jane Austen, by Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. Belle da Costa Greene, the Morgan’s first director, acquired the manuscript in 1947.
Jane Austen (1775–1817)
Lady Susan
Autograph manuscript, ca. 1805–17
Pages 2 and 157 in facsimile
The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased in 1947; MA 1226
The novella that we know as Lady Susan centers on letters exchanged among Lady Susan Vernon, her brother-in-law Charles Vernon, her devoted friend Alicia Johnson, and others. On display are the first three pages of the work as well as the final three, in which a narrator provides a conclusion to the story.
Scholars speculate that Austen may have used the epistolary form in her early novels, First Impressions (which became Pride and Prejudice) and Elinor and Marianne (which evolved into Sense and Sensibility). Letters play important roles in both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, allowing characters to express themselves at length in their own voices. Most memorably, after Elizabeth Bennet angrily refuses Mr. Darcy’s proposal of marriage, he writes her a very long letter to explain himself and entrust her with a family secret.
Lady Susan differs greatly from Austen’s six completed novels not only in its mode of storytelling but also in its plot, which can be described as the triumph of an unrepentant wrongdoer. Lady Susan is manipulative, careless of people’s feelings, and deeply unkind to her daughter. She is as charmingly ruthless at the end of the novella as she is at the beginning.