![]() ![]() ![]() The young Austen signals her audacity by turning the figure of the predatory male seducer into a highly unconventional (and middle-aged) seductress. In his fiction, resourceful young women record their efforts to resist the advances of scheming libertines. In her youth, Austen, along with many of her contemporaries, was a fan of Samuel Richardson, who turned epistolary novels into a high art. Many novels of the late 18th century were, like Lady Susan, written entirely in letters. Interview: Whit Stillman on Jane Austen and Love & Friendship The filmmaker discusses the value of Austen’s prose, his interest in tailoring films for multiple viewings, and more. The young Austen was experimenting with an unusual variation on a conventional form. ![]() Indeed, the book’s problem – as the tyro author must have soon seen – is that the monstrous, calculating protagonist is the only really engaging character. The letters penned by the other characters are not half as much fun. ![]() Thats not quite as heretical as it sounds. The young Austen clearly felt a frisson in having a protagonist who, in the privacy of her correspondence, openly scorned codes of propriety and morality. The writer-director Whit Stillmans Love & Friendship is an improvement on its source, Jane Austens novella Lady Susan. Alicia is unfortunately married (for money, naturally) to the gouty and morally upright Mr Johnson, a man who is “too old to be agreeable, and too young to die”. We know all this because the novella is written entirely in letters, and we have before us the missives written by Lady Susan to her equally cynical and pleasure-loving confidante Alicia. ![]()
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