Lady Susan Review and Analysis | The Danger of Scandal

Hello and welcome back to Lady Disdain Reads! My name is Beatrice, and today we'll discuss Jane Austen's novella Lady Susan. Enjoy!

Helpful reviews of Lady Susan:

Books and Things:    • Jane Austen Week: Lady Susan  

Blatantly Bookish:    • Review of Lady Susan & Love and Frien...  

Spinster’s Library:    • Lady Susan by Jane Austen | Book Revi...  


Epistolary Novel: genre which consists of a fictional exchange of letters between
characters.

Scandal: from the Greek ‘skandalon’, literally a ‘trap’, in the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas agrees with Saint Jerome that ‘Scandal is…fittingly defined as "something less rightly done or said, that occasions another's spiritual downfall."’

Theological Virtues: complementing the cardinal or classical virtues of fortitude,
prudence, justice and temperance, in Christian theology the three virtues of charity, faith and hope are distinguished in that they are not achieved through practice and habit, but through God’s grace.


From Lady Susan:

- ‘command of language’, Letter XVI

- ‘fortitude’ and ‘duty’, Letter I

- ‘first earthly duty’, Letter XXIV

- ‘strongest conviction of duty’, Letter XXX

- ‘set herself violently’, Letter II

- ‘violence of her feelings’, Letter XXXIX

- ‘he gave way to the most violent indignation’, Letter XXII

- ‘artifice’ in Letter XVIII and ‘artful coquetry’, Letter XI

- ‘not detected the smallest impropriety’ in Lady Susan’s behaviour, ‘nothing of vanity, of pretension, of levity’, Letter XI

- ‘I blame myself severely for having so easily believed the scandalous tales
invented…to the prejudice of Lady Susan’, Letter XIV

- ‘dull and proud’, Letter IV