After being introduced to Jane Austen’s Lady Susan via A Soiree for Lady Susan, Austenprose’s rollicking cyber group read, replete with wagging tongues and fluttering fans, I delighted in discovering this ‘most accomplished Coquette in England’. So different from other Austen heroines, I welcomed her all the more for her flagrant flaws and mercenary machinations. Regretfully, as Jane Austen never got the chance to revise this novella, the limitations of the epistolary form did leave me with a desire for more.
Enter Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway’s novel Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which certainly fulfills this desire… and more! This clever re-imagining by a mother and daughter team turns my previous notion about this heroine on its head. It intriguingly opens with an Austen inspired witticism:









