In her mid-thirties, Lady Susan is recently widowed. One cannot help but be dazzled by her, if only momentarily. 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 It was written early, around 1794, when the author was in her late teens, but remained unpublished until 1871.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. '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.
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