summary of love and friendship by jane austen

A duplicitous anti-heroine, Lady Susan is highly attractive and has an “uncanny understanding of men’s natures” which she always puts to use. The character at the heart of the story, Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), is a griefless widow who schemes her way through British high society to find an “advantageous” husband for her daughter (Morfydd Clark) and, more importantly, one for herself. She initially planned to write Sense and Sensibility in the epistolary form, so perhaps this novella acted as a letter-writing test run. Lady Susan is an epistolary novella that Austen wrote when she was 19 or 20 but left unpublished. Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan in Love & Friendship (2016) Instead of tackling one of her frequently adapted classics, Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, Stillman builds from a smaller and more obscure work that showcases Austen’s talent for comedy. Unlike many of the Austen adaptations already in existence, Love & Friendship manages to bring something new to the source material while also capturing the essence of Jane Austen onscreen.

Love & Friendship is Whit Stillman’s first Austen adaptation, but for the writer-director’s cult following - fans who cherish his sharp comedies of manners and Austenian approach to character dynamics - this film has been a long time coming. Love & Friendship (2016) is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s little-known novella Lady Susan, which was written around 1794 and published posthumously by Austen’s family in 1871. Much of the dialogue in Love & Friendship comes straight from Austen, but Stillman altered the style of the narrative so that the action unfolds in-scene as opposed to in the form of a letter. The film is adapted from Austen’s somewhat obscure epistolary novella, Lady Susan, which was published over 50 years after her death, in 1871.

Quick Answer: In Love & Friendship, filmmaker Whit Stillman successfully captures the spirit of Jane Austen’s writing onscreen.

Summary of love and friendship by jane austen