I discovered a Jane Austen novel I never knew existed! So of course within days of this hugely important finding, I went and got the book. I'm actually listening to it. I downloaded it off of LibriVox (librivox.org). Which, by the way, is absolutely free. Not bad, right? It's how I read (or listened to, whatever) Emma and Northanger Abbey. This one is called Lady Susan. It seems to be really unknown. I found out about it from that quiz several posts down (looking at "view all results" to see which heroines the quiz covered). It's about Lady Susan Vernon, a selfish, scheming woman, and it's written in epistolary form (letters from various people to each other- really interesting way to write a book and Austen makes it work very well). So far it's good, but Lady Susan herself is absolutely awful. She actually says to her friend that her daughter is stupid. She puts her in a private school in London, not thinking that she'll actually learn anything (too much of a dunce) but to put her in a miserable situation so that she'll HAVE to accept the guy her mom wants her to marry. Who appears to also be a simpleton. Meanwhile, Lady Susan is cleverly manipulating the emotions of her in-laws, with the purpose in mind to humiliate them and show them her "superiority". Wow.

So it promises to be very interesting. Several different characters, all with a different view of what's going on. That's the cool thing about the epistolary style in which it's written; you get everybody's side of the story from their viewpoint and with the influence of their likes, dislikes, and prejudices. So yup! Neat stuff.