This is a very early work of Austen’s and it’s not a very early work of yours. If I get an idea and if I do remember to write it down, which is rare, I write in such a way that I can’t read a letter. And, unfortunately for me, maybe fortunately for the reader, it’s very often illegible. How’s your penmanship? I can fake decent penmanship, but generally it’s really just terrible. To my eye it looked pretty: straight lines, beautiful letters, the letter C had this lovely design. I’m not talking about how great her prose is I mean how great her penmanship was. Seeing the manuscript in person, was there anything that really struck you? I was really glad I hadn’t seen it before I wrote the script because I would have been more intimidated. The watermark of the paper of the manuscript we have, which I actually saw yesterday, is 1805, but that means she could have written it years later. And those she turned into modern dramatized novels. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were written as epistolary novels shortly after Lady Susan. She would go back to things and redo them. I can’t remember if she’s a fast writer or not. It was a lark.ĭo you happen to know how long Jane Austen worked on Lady Susan? No, we don’t really know. This was my private fun project that I’d work on when I wasn’t doing anything else. Why did it keep getting shoved to the back burner? It was planned to be on the back burner. She’s a beautiful widow, unabashedly living off the hospitality of her brother-in-law’s family while seeking to secure her own future by marrying off her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), to the wealthy, dimwitted Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett). Stillman, the director of late-20th-century cult classics like Metropolitan and Barcelona, takes certain liberties bringing Austen’s slim novel of letters to life, but his Lady Susan, played brilliantly by Kate Beckinsale, is nearly as Machiavellian as Austen wrote her. (Read to the end and you’ll find Austen’s original text in the appendix.) And earlier this month, Stillman published an equally funny companion novel, Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated. Tomorrow, the director’s hilarious Love & Friendship, a 12-years-in-the-making movie adaptation of Austen’s book, hits theaters. If Whit Stillman has his way, that may change. Then again, it’s likely that few have cracked Lady Susan, the comic, epistolary, zinger-filled novella about an unscrupulous, gold-digging widow that Austen penned shortly before embarking on an early draft of Sense and Sensibility, and never published in her lifetime. Jane Austen’s novels are delightful, amusing, entertaining, and witty, but even her most zealous fans might hesitate to call her laugh-out-loud funny.
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