Shadow Portraits: Jane Austen, Lady Susan and Silhouettes

This chapter explores Jane Austen's connection to silhouettes (in terms of her own silhouette image, her family portrait, and the contemporary kitsch market around her shadow profile) along with the idea of the nature of "shadow portraits" in her works, particularly in her early novella Lady Susan. The liminal place of Lady Susan in Austen studies echoes the ‘in between’ status of the silhouette as an art form – poised between craft and high art, amateurism and professional practice, likeness and embellishment. Close attention to the dynamics of shadow narratives, reversals, traces of embodied selves, and layers of verisimilitude in Austen’s Lady Susan connects the text to the material composition, hybrid nature, and binary black/white structure of the silhouette as an artform and a cultural artifact.