The Female Voice

In the Introduction to Desmond, Antje Blank and Janet Todd explain the feminine association with the epistolary form of novel. Throughout literary history, women have been praised for their “natural ability to produce the ideal epistolary style – unpretentious, ingenuous, emotional, and spontaneous” (20). Alexander Pope described the style as “so many things freely thrown out, …. thoughts just warm from the brain without any polishing or dress, the very dishabille of the understanding.” Authors of epistolary novels, like Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen, were expected to maintain a female voice throughout their work. “An idealized female voice” lacked “scholastic rhetoric” and relied on uncalculated, spontaneous emotions. In Lady Susan, however, I feel as though Austen paid very close attention to each letter in an attempt to portray varying tones and to illuminate the motives of her characters. Furthermore, the characters writing the letters in Lady Susan seem to put careful thought into each of their correspondences, especially in the case of Lady Susan herself.