Lady Susan (The Jane Austen Library)

These three works - one novel unpublished in her lifetime and two unfinished fragments - reveal Jane Austen's development as a great artist.Lady Susan, with its wicked, beautiful, intelligent and energetic heroine, is a sparkling melodrama in letters that takes its tone from the outspoken and robust 18th century. Written later, and probably abandoned after her father's death, The Watsons is a tantalising and highly delightful story of vitality and optimism which centres on the marital prospects of the Watson sisters in a small provincial town. Sanditon, her last work, left unfinished at her death, is set in a seaside town. Its themes concern the new speculative consumer society and foreshadow the great social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.