I’ll be speaking on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country at a Jane Austen Society of North America meeting in Brookline, MA this coming Sunday, November 14th. Please come and visit if you’re in the Boston area.

The talk is at 2pm at Wheelock College, Brookline Campus, 43 Hawes Street, and my title is “Everything She Ever Wanted: Marriage and Power in the Novels of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton.”

From Letter 16, Lady Susan to Mrs. Johnson:

Never, my dearest Alicia, was I so provoked in my life as by a Letter this morning from Miss Summers. That horrid girl of mine has been trying to run away. I had not a notion of her being such a little Devil before; she seemed to have all the Vernon Milkiness; but on receiving the letter in which I declared my intentions about Sir James, she actually attempted to elope; at least, I cannot otherwise account for her doing it. She meant I suppose to go to the Clarkes in Staffordshire, for she has no other acquaintance. But she shall be punished, she shall have him.

Jane Austen, Lady Susan, edited by Christine Alexander and David Owen (Juvenilia Press, 2005).