Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/38

 to his own home, while her ladyship prepares to enjoy herself in London, determined, however, first to get Frederica married to Sir James without delay, whatever may be the girl's own wishes.

Here the correspondence, which is almost entirely confined to four people—Lady Susan and a friend on the one side, Mrs. Charles Vernon and her mother on the other—ceases, perhaps because Jane Austen found it impossible to wind up the plot satisfactorily by it; so in a concluding chapter—which is rather long and heavy but may have been written at a later period, as it has more of her usual mannerism in it than any other part of the story—she tells us, what we already foresee, that Frederica held out firmly against Sir James, that her mother got heartily sick of her and sent her back to Churchhill, where, of course, in due time, she became Reginald de Courcy's wife, while Lady Susan herself was eventually married to Sir James Martin.

The story cannot be considered up to Jane Austen's standard, and she probably felt this herself, for she never tried to incorporate it in anything else that she wrote. It is curious that so young an author should have selected a heroine of thirty-five years old, and unsatisfactorily to have made the hero fall in love with both mother and daughter. There are greater faults than this, however, in the book; the characters are too slightly sketched to excite much interest, there is little or no dialogue to relieve the monotony of the letters, and the events do not fall out naturally. In short, few even of the author's most devoted admirers would call it a good novel; and it can only interest those who like to trace the steps by which a great writer advances to fame.

Lady Susan is not well written, and between it and