Lady Susan

The novella is told through a series of letters, presumably to demonstrate multiple perspectives so that the audience is permitted to intimately know the characters’ thoughts and emotions. However, the novella demonstrates a vast representation of female voices in comparison to male. Austen chose this particularly female method of storytelling to give voices to the women who were typically made voiceless within 18th-century British society. Although the multiple perspectives effectively erases the author/narrator by presenting little authorial interference, it also lends a subjectivity to the purported realism of epistolary narratives. Whereas epistolary narratives are typically associated with realism and even history, the nature of the letters written by these female characters demonstrates how truth can be manipulated to serve one’s own purpose. This narrative becomes a kind of record of subjectivity, demonstrating how knowledge is constructed and eliminating the delineation between rumors and memory. The words themselves become powerful, specifically because they enable the characters to create truth.

However, these words—and subsequently, this truth—are both something that can be inspected, as referenced multiple times throughout the novella. At the end of the narrative, the anonymous and previously unseen narrator admits that Frederica’s letters to her aunt Catherine are probably inspected by Lady Susan before being sent: “[B]y the style of Frederica’s letters […] they were written under her mother’s inspection” (81). The narrator calls into question the truth of Frederica’s letters, as she must subject them to the scrutiny of her mother and therefore limit her own voice. This limitation of the female voice also demonstrates the hidden nature of femininity within society itself, as a woman’s true thoughts and emotions were required to remain hidden from view. However, Susan’s inspection of Frederica’s letters also represents the continued scrutiny of the female condition common within the time period. That which was female was constructed as existing solely within the gaze of the external male; femininity was considered to be a public trait, one that only existed under the scrutiny of someone else.

The nature of being publicly female is also interrogated in the letters of Lady De Courcy to her daughter, Catherine, wherein Sir De Courcy inspects Catherine’s letters, much to the chagrin of these women. Lady De Courcy writes:

Unluckily I was confined to my room when your last letter came, by a cold which affected my eyes so much as to prevent my reading it myself, so I could not refuse your father when he offered to read it to me, by which means he became acquainted, to my great vexation, with all your fears about your brother. I had intended to write to Reginald myself (25).

The nature of the epistolary narrative, while lending women some power to manipulate the truth, also indicates the relative helplessness of women within the 18th century. Through happenstance, Catherine’s letter to her mother is intercepted by her father, who then interferes in the women’s machinations. Catherine’s mother expresses annoyance at this presumably because she believes that Sir De Courcy lacks the grace and subtlety to manipulate Reginald out of Susan’s clutches. The audience quickly sees that this is the case, as Reginald’s subsequent letter to his father summarily dismisses any of his father’s concerns, despite the audience knowing that these concerns are valid. Lady De Courcy and Catherine are ultimately rendered ineffective in their interference with Reginald’s growing attachment to Susan primarily due to Sir De Courcy’s own intrusion into the female world. The epistolary nature of the narrative demonstrates how little agency these women have as it can be so easily revoked by male intrusion.