There are at least two good reasons to read Lady Susan as a work that bridges the juvenilia and Austen's first finished novel, Northanger Abbey. Chronologically, Austen produced a fair copy of the epistolary novella, Lady Susan, in 1793–4, a date overlapping with the completion of the juvenilia. Thematically, Lady Susan crowns the ruthless quest for self-gratification started in her juvenile writings. If we agree with Mary Poovey that ‘The Proper Lady was difficult for contemporaries to challenge’, Lady Susan carries out this task by turning the tables on the code of propriety. Lady Susan's affiliation with Northanger Abbey is justified by the identification of oppressive gender construction as the cause of epistemological uncertainties. Both Lady Susan, Austen's most gracefully artificial heroine, and Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland, the most inexperienced, raise the question of a socially sanctioned morality.

The previous chapter made the following two arguments: first, Austen's juvenilia registers a processual behavioural change that expresses itself as the moderation of spontaneous emotions, the reduction of physical violence and the development of the capacity to perceive events in terms of cause-effect reactions. Second, the reading of ‘Henry and Eliza’ suggested that gender is pivotal in the making of social roles to the extent that the distinction of sex entails a distinction of rank and, as such, it influences the production of knowledge.