Does L stand for lesbian or Lady?

A different reading o Jane Austen’s Lady Susan

Abstract

Understanding the existence of an intersection between feminist criticism and queer studies, this paper offers a reading of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan with special attention to the question of lesbian invisibility. As part of Austen’s juvenilia, Lady Susan has not received a lot of critical attention in the world of Portuguese-language studies and much less attention has been diverted to the issue of the protagonist’s sexuality, often presupposed as a heterosexual woman. Engaging with discussions regarding the study of the novel (Vasconcelos, 2002, 2007; Kettle, 1972) as well as the problem of lesbian (in)visibility (Faderman, 1981; Castle, 2001), this literary analysis employs the concept of lesbian continuum (Rich 2020) as a means to understand the relationship between Lady Susan and her friend Alicia Johnson at the end of the 18th century, in tandem with the problem of the ideology of domesticity (Vasconcelos, 2007). In the end it is concluded that Austen’s epistolary work ends not with a letter, but with an epilogue as the formal process of the lesbian invisibility in the 18th century.