The novel Lady Susan was composed in the early 1790s, and written out as a fair copy in Bath in 1905. It is not known whether this version was sent to publishers, and whether Jane Austen planned to have it published at all. Lady Susan is considered by critics as the first major novel of Austen’s œuvre, yet it was only a posthumous success, rediscovered in 1871 in the second edition of the biography A Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. 

With Lady Susan, the author tried her hand at the epistolary genre, undoubtedly influenced by reading Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses) – an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos that gained a cult following, possibly recommended to her by Eliza de Feuillide, who lived in France for several years (1779 to 1790)*. After Lady Susan, Jane Austen began writing Elinor and Marianne, which later became Sense and Sensibility.