Lady Susan Vernon is a widow who loves to manipulate and seduce men. Single, married, it's all the same to her. She has two goals--first to marry off her daughter to a man who has enough money to care for her, and second to marry someone even richer herself. The story unfolds in epistolary form, and is quite different from Jane Austen's other work. For example, Lady Susan is more than a match for any man she meets, she's not only beautiful and smart, but tends to seduce younger men--in Austen's novels, her heroines always go for older men. A very interesting change of pace, this novella was written before Sense and Sensibility.