Lady Susan Plays the Game [Paperback]

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd's 'naughty-Austen' reimagining of the epistolary novelLady Susanwill capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.

Austen's only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her widowed life in the countryside, Lady Susan embarks on a serious of manipulative games to ensure she can stay in town with her first passion - the card tables. Scandal inevitably ensues as she negotiates the politics of her late husband's family, the identity of a mysterious benefactor and a passionate affair with a married man.

Accurate and true to Jane Austen's style, as befits Todd's position as a leading Austen scholar, this second coming of Lady Susan is as shocking, manipulative and hilarious as when Jane Austen first imagined her.

Janet Toddis an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volumeCambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austenand editor ofJane Austen in Contextand theCambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works areWomen's Friendship in Literature,The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800and theCambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. Lady Susan Plays the Game is her first foray into fiction.