Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated by Whit Stillman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved this reworking of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan. The title evokes her hilarious juvenilia Love and Freindship, although the first part of the novel is not written in letters, but ostensibly by the nephew of Lady Susan as a narrative vindicating her in the face of the scandalous version given by the spinster authoress (Jane Austen). This nephew writing about his aunt deliberately evokes the biography of Austen written by her nephew. The nephew author (who, it transpires, is in prison) also provides Austen’s novel as a counterpoint to his narrative with annotations explaining how Austen prejudices the reader against Lady Susan.
Lady Susan is a widow who has spent all her husband’s money and now relies on extended visits to relatives and friends to live in the style she expects. She is determined to marry her daughter off to a dim but wealthy noble and flirts outrageously breaking up marriages and attachments in her wake. She is viewed with suspicion by her relatives but is able to charm men into viewing her actions benignly.
A fun read which promises to be a great film with Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan