Lady Susan Plays The Game

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd''s ''naughty-Austen'' reimagining of the epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.

Austen''s only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her widowed life in the countryside, Lady Susan embarks on a serious of manipulative games to ensure she can stay in town with her first passion - the card tables. Scandal inevitably ensues as she negotiates the politics of her late husband''s family, the identity of a mysterious benefactor and a passionate affair with a married man.

Accurate and true to Jane Austen''s style, as befits Todd''s position as a leading Austen scholar, this second coming of Lady Susan is as shocking, manipulative and hilarious as when Jane Austen first imagined her.