This was my private fun project that I’d work on when I wasn’t doing anything else. Why did it keep getting shoved to the back burner? It was planned to be on the back burner. She’s a beautiful widow, unabashedly living off the hospitality of her brother-in-law’s family while seeking to secure her own future by marrying off her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), to the wealthy, dimwitted Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett). Stillman, the director of late-20th-century cult classics like Metropolitan and Barcelona, takes certain liberties bringing Austen’s slim novel of letters to life, but his Lady Susan, played brilliantly by Kate Beckinsale, is nearly as Machiavellian as Austen wrote her. (Read to the end and you’ll find Austen’s original text in the appendix.) And earlier this month, Stillman published an equally funny companion novel, Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated. Tomorrow, the director’s hilarious Love & Friendship, a 12-years-in-the-making movie adaptation of Austen’s book, hits theaters. If Whit Stillman has his way, that may change. Then again, it’s likely that few have cracked Lady Susan, the comic, epistolary, zinger-filled novella about an unscrupulous, gold-digging widow that Austen penned shortly before embarking on an early draft of Sense and Sensibility, and never published in her lifetime. Jane Austen’s novels are delightful, amusing, entertaining, and witty, but even her most zealous fans might hesitate to call her laugh-out-loud funny.
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