In Lady Susan’s and Charles Vernon’s first meeting with Miss Summers, that lady continued the pretence that her concern was Frederica’s conduct rather than payment for her school’s excessive fees. Whit Stillman has also created a film version of Love & Friendship, starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny, which opened in select theaters on May 13th. Love & Friendship brings a healthy helping of scandal, along with lots of laughs, to Georgian and Victorian London. As much homage to its muse’s perennial influence as testament to its author’s brilliance, Love & Friendship is a sharp comedy of manners, and a fiendishly funny treat for Austen and Stillman fans alike. With a devoted Austenian sensibility and absurd theological commentary, filmmaker and writer Whit Stillman ingeniously reimagines and completes one of our greatest writers’ unfinished works. 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.” Before the scandalizing gossip can run its course, though, romantic triangles ensue. Unannounced, she arrives at her brother-in-law’s country estate. 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.īut 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.
Impossibly beautiful, disarmingly witty, and completely self-absorbed, Lady Susan Vernon, is both the heart and the thorn of Love & Friendship. Despite many indications to the contrary, Rufus insists that Susan is, “the kindest, most delightful woman anyone could know, a shining ornament to our Society and Nation.” Rufus then appends his earnest tale with a collection of his aunt’s letters, which he claims have been altered by Austen to cast the estimable Lady Susan in a bad light. Whit Stillman has taken Austen’s never-finished epistolary novella, Lady Susan, reimagined it as a straight narrative, and added the hilarious new character of Rufus, Susan’s apologist nephew, who aims to clear Susan’s good name come hell or high water (even if he is doing it from “the ignoble abode” of debtors’ prison ). Also, there’s a chance to win a copy of the book. Today I offer my dear readers an excerpt of the novel, Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated, which is a companion novel to the new film Love & Friendship and is based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. I’m thrilled to be part of The Janeite Blog Tour of Love & Friendship, which runs from June 13 to June 24.
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