Whit Stillman’s latest film is based on a little-known novella written early in Austen’s career. Will it work on screen, and is it worth reading today?
Director Whit Stillman began his film career with Metropolitan, a contemporary courtship tale set in Manhattan but shot through with allusions to Jane Austen’s novels. Now, with his new film Love and Friendship, out next week, he gives us his version of a story by Austen, though one that is little known. He has adapted a novella – or, more accurately, a sharply curtailed novel – called Lady Susan, which Austen probably wrote in the mid-1790s, when she was 19 or 20. Confusingly, however, he has taken the film’s title from an entirely unrelated parody of fashionable sentimental fiction that she wrote when she was 14. Neither of these tales was published in her lifetime, and neither was intended for publication.
Lady Susan promises much. The eponymous leading character is intelligent, accomplished and utterly amoral. Lady Susan is a beautiful widow in her mid-30s who gets her kicks from flirtation and psychological manipulation. At the beginning of the book we find her entertaining herself by causing emotional mayhem in a household in which she is a guest. She gets her friend’s husband to fall in love with her, while also tempting the idiotic aristocrat who is courting her own daughter to turn his attentions to her instead. This being England rather than France, she is too canny to let any of these men get anything more than sweet talk from her.
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