Lady Susan

Outrageous, and wickedly funny, Lady Susan introduces Jane Austen at her most scandalous Recently widowed and dangerously charming, Lady Susan Vernon arrives among her relatives determined to secure her own advantage. Through a flurry of letters, alliances shift, affections are tested, and reputations quietly unravel. Lady Susan is Jane Austen's sharp, mischievous portrait of a woman who refuses to behave. Bold, manipulative and irresistibly alive, it reveals Austen at her most daring - and her most amused. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.