It is a very shaming thing for me to admit that it has taken me this long, in all my seven years of being a Janeite, to finish reading Lady Susan, the only other story besides the major six novels that Jane Austen completed during her adult life. Such a fact is so very dreadfully mortifying.
But now I have finished it. I still did not read the whole thing: I listened to most of it. Which I used to think didn't exactly "count". I have since changed my mind, having become a very busy young lady who has little time to read, and when she does have the time, has little energy for anything that requires more thinking than watching a movie or scrolling through Pinterest. Driving to work, however, takes me 25 minutes each way, and therefore I have almost an hour of spare time right there-- but of course I can't read. I can listen, however. And so I have been doing.
It was hard for me to get into Lady Susan to begin with, and I think that's because I wasn't used to reading Jane Austen's epistolary style, even though it's predominantly how she wrote all of her earlier stories. The characters and character names and complicated relations to each other can also be very confusing. I found that listening to it (taking advantage of a free recording from Librivox) helped immensely because there was a different person to read each character.
Lady Susan is technically a "novella" and was written by Jane Austen roundabout 1795 (which means she was 19-21ish). It was during her prolific beginnings of being an author, when she also wrote First Impressions and Elinor and Marianne. It's very different from her other stories, however, and more easily compared with her juvenilia. Unlike our beloved favorites, it's not romantic comedy-- it's just comedy.
