Reading Austen’s Lady Susan as Tory Secret History

Anne Elliot famously observes to Captain Harville in Jane Austen’s Persuasion that men have the advantage over women in having written the literature that depicts women as fickle. Austen was also critical of male-authored national history, including Oliver Goldsmith’s Whiggish History of England, which she mocked in notes scribbled in the margin of the family’s copy and satirized in her own unabashedly Tory “History of England,” which she wrote when she was sixteen. While most histories of England available in Austen’s time were written by men, two prominent eighteenth-century women wrote widely read histories of the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688, an event central to Whig historiography. Delarivier Manley’s best-selling Tory secret history Secret Memoirs and Mannersof . . . the New Atalantis (1709) retells the political events of 1688–89 as the work of ungrateful courtiers, including John Churchill, subsequently the Duke of Marlborough, who put their own ambition above the binding bonds of chivalry that should have prevented them from deserting James II. Manley’s work, which satirizes the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough at the height of their power, may be read against the Duchess’s subsequent Whiggish version of the same events in her An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (1742). Although we do not know whether Austen had read Manley’s and Marlborough’s narratives, she would have been familiar with the partisan political discourses that they depicted. Moreover, her depiction of false friendship in Lady Susan, a novel that hearkens back to the eighteenth century through its epistolary structure, offers an echo of the competing Tory and Whig discourses of friendship and political loyalty first articulated by her equally biased and partisan female predecessors in historiography. What is immediately striking about Austen’s Lady Susan is how much it feels like an eighteenth-century text, both because it is epistolary and because it has a devious and fully unrepentant heroine who recalls, for example, the heroines of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725) or Anti-Pamela (1740). Most biographers have assumed that Austen wrote Lady Susan during the mid 1790s although the extant fair copy is on paper some of whose leaves have a watermark of 1805. Whether or not Austen first drafted the novel in the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century, she was clearly still interested in the project at a time when she had already drafted several other novels that, at least in their final published form, have a much more nineteenth-century feel to them, with morally upright heroines and sophisticated third-person narrators. Many critics have responded to Lady Susan as a depiction of female power, and some have considered it in light of the politics of the French Revolution. Other scholars have considered the novel’s stylistic debt to earlier eighteenth-century genres; however, no one has yet suggested that Austen may have chosen to hearken back stylistically to the eighteenth century in order to comment on early eighteenth-century politics. Nevertheless, several names in the novel allude to important figures from the reign of Queen Anne, and Austen herself, as is indicated in her marginal notes to Goldsmith, was perfectly familiar with a standard Tory critique of that era. One significant thread in Lady Susan is the theme of women deceiving other women. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is almost entirely honest with her sister Jane, and in Sense and Sensibility, Elinor largely tells Marianne the truth, although the heroines of both novels do withhold information at key points in order to protect their sisters from an emotional shock. By contrast, in Lady Susan, the heroine glibly deceives almost everyone …