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Sebastian Ritscher
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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

Whit Stillman

In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated

Cult-filmmaker Whit Stillman cleverly re-imagines Jane Austen's unfinished early novella Lady Susan.
Jane Austen's funniest novel is also her least known-until now. A sharp comedy of manners set in the 1790s, LOVE & FRIENDSHIP centers on Lady Susan Vernon: impossibly beautiful, charming, witty, and completely self-absorbed. Recently widowed, Lady Susan arrives, unannounced, at her brother-in-law's estate to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances circulating through polite society. While there, she becomes determined to secure a new husband for herself, and one for her reluctant debutante daughter, Frederica, too.

As Lady Susan embarks on a controversial relationship with a married man, seduction, deception, broken hearts, and gossip all ensue. With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility, Stillman breathes new life into Austen's work, making it his own by adding original narration from a character comically loyal to the story's fiendishly manipulative heroine, Lady Susan.

The publication date to May of 2016 is to take advantage of the theatrical release of Whit’s movie of the same title --starring Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, and Stephen Fry!!

Whit Stillman was born in Washington, D.C., and attended Harvard, where he was an editor of the Harvard Crimson before working in book and magazine publishing. He has written and directed five films, including the award-winning Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, and Damsels in Distress, as well as the TV show The Cosmopolitans. His first novel, The Last Days of Disco, won the 2014 Prix Fitzgerald. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Harper's, The Guardian, Vogue, and other publications.
Available products
Book

Published 2016-05-17 by Little Brown

Book

Published 2016-05-17 by Little Brown

Comments

Zippy and witty and gorgeous.

You can't help but love Lady Susan because of the evident joy she takes in being so duplicitous. Her energy is infectious.

Love & Friendship is an upcoming romantic comedy film written and directed by Whit Stillman. It is based on Jane Austen's 1871 epistolary novel Lady Susan. The film stars Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel and Stephen Fry. It centres on Lady Susan Vernon (Beckinsale), who seeks refuge at her in-laws estate while rumors about her private life circulate through society. Lady Susan then decides to find a husband for both herself and her daughter. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016. The film is scheduled to be released on May 13, 2016, by Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios.

With biting humor, Stillman makes Love & Friendship an accessible battle of the aristocratic sexes and a delight for Austen acolytes who've awaited a Lady Susan adaptation.

A supremely elegant and delicately filigreed adaptation of Jane Austen's epistolary novella Lady Susan.... [Stillman] knows just how to give her pointed social satire an extra stab of wink-wink postmodern drollery without breaking the spell.

Delightfully droll.... Stillman so effortlessly, elegantly bridges the gap between his conniving aristocrats and Austen's that it's difficult to say where one's sensibility ends and the other's begins.

Jane Austen has never been funnier.... [Love & Friendship is] flat-out hilarious.... One of the deftest feats of literary interpolation in ages. And it grafts wicked surprises-things even Austen didn't quite dare conceive, plot-wise-right onto the merry finale.

The perfect marriage between Stillman's absurdist wit and Austen's period manners.