love and friendship and other early works

Lady Susan has no virtues she merely excels in affecting them. Lady Susan knows herself to be the smartest person in the room, but she is not required to submit to her intelligence to humility, as some of Austen's later heroines must.

Love and Friendship is very funny, funnier still for its absence of moral reckoning.

Stillman is free to invent conversations, and does so with a wit sharp enough to match Austen's. It is an epistolary novel there is no direct dialogue, an absence that Stillman, who scripts his own films, has turned into his own kind of opportunity. It was written early, around 1794, when the author was in her late teens, but remained unpublished until 1871. Lady Susan is an outlier among Austen's works. 'In one's plight lies one's opportunity,' she observes. She charms, she dissembles, she strategises like a military general. For sheer cunning, however, Lady Susan outdoes them all. The dilemma is common both to Austen's heroines and to this American director's: his five films have charted the romantic fortunes of young bourgeois women whose allowances won't quite support their aspirations, and whose relationships with men are, in large part, tactical alliances of wealth and status. Before the scandalizing gossip can run its course, though, romantic triangles ensue.Ī SPECIAL EDITION FEATURING JANE AUSTEN’S ORIGINAL NOVELLA AS ANNOTATED BY THE NARRATOR.'I have no money and no husband,' comments Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) in Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman's adaptation of Jane Austen's novella, Lady Susan. Here she intends to take refuge – in no less than luxury, of course – from the colorful rumors trailing her, while finding another avenue to ‘I do’. Unannounced, she arrives at her brother-in-law’s country estate. But when her attempts to secure their futures result only in the wrath of a prominent conquest’s wife and the title of ‘most accomplished coquette in England’, Lady Susan must rethink her strategy. Recently widowed with a daughter who’s coming of age as quickly as their funds are dwindling, Lady Susan makes it her mission to find them wealthy husbands – and fast. Impossibly beautiful, disarmingly witty, and completely self-absorbed: meet Lady Susan Vernon, both the heart and the thorn of Love & Friendship. JANE AUSTEN’S FUNNIEST NOVEL IS ALSO HER LEAST KNOWN – UNTIL NOW. Love & Friendship is a sharp comedy of manners, and a fiendishly funny treat for Austen and Stillman fans alike. With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility and wry social commentary, filmmaker and writer Whit Stillman cleverly re-imagines and completes one of our greatest writers’ unfinished works. ‘Lady Susan remains deliciously wicked’ Vogue ‘Lady Susan is finally getting some long overdue respect’ New York Times ‘If, like me, you like your Austen subversive, cruel, funny and outrageous, then you will love Stillman’s Love & Friendship‘ The Times

Love and friendship and other early works