I love Jane Austen. There’s something about knowing her history and the time period in which she was writing that just makes her that much greater. She was so far ahead of her time and wrote about issues that are still pertinent today, if not in the exact manner.
I thought each of these three novels were unique and amazing in their own way. Lady Susan was the first and it was a bit difficult to get into but ultimately turned out to be brilliant. Jane Austen wrote it in the epistolary style, similar to how some of her other well known novels originally began. If she would have rewritten Lady Susan, I have no doubt people would treasure it as much as her other six completed novels. There was drama, intrigue, scandal and a love story. In today’s over-sexed drama-ridden violent society (on TV and in books at least), this novel would clearly be (and remains) invisible. A movie would never be made unless it was turned into a sexy drama with a murder or something.
I first want to say it irks me that the title is grammatically incorrect on the US version (Hornet’s versus Hornets’). It is a nest of hornets not one hornet’s nest.