Lady Susan

Lady Susan Vernon is newly widowed, entirely charming, and busy arranging a marriage for her daughter that the girl would rather die than make. Austen wrote it at about nineteen, in letters, and never published it — a portrait of a woman who lies as easily as she breathes and is more entertaining than anyone else in the book. It is the coldest thing she ever wrote. Fifty-eight plates of portraits and scenes by painters including Thomas Lawrence and Joshua Reynolds, spanning 1750 to 1850, match the novel's cool appraisal of a society that judged women by the matches they made.