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

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