Love and Friendship

[Ecurb]

I went to the film version of Jane Austen's "Lady Susan" last night. Austen wrote "Lady Susan" when she was 17 or 18. It's an epistolary novel about the titular lady and the swath she cuts with her seductions, plots, and machinations. It was published posthumously, and it certainly isn't as subtle, complex, or realistic as Austen's six finished masterpieces. Instead, it's more straight comedy and serves to dispel the notion (common among Austen lovers) that Austen was some sort of spinster prude, shocked the notion of sex.

The movie stars Kate Beckinsale, who played Emma in an earlier Austen film. It's good fun, but not a can't miss flick. Same with the novel, although I prefer it by far to Austen's two fragments, "The Watsons" and "Sanditon", both of which seem unfinished and amateurish compared to the completed novels (which makes me think Austen may have added a lot of her humor in second drafts after writing for plot the first time around).

[Danik 2016]

Thanks for the post Ecurb, I didn´t know this text. The film will come to Brazil only in October, presumably because that´s the month of the International Film Festival. I´m looking forward to it.

[Jackson Richardson]

Love and Freindship (sic) is a bit of juvenillia poking fun at the romantic, epistolary novel. And very funny it is too.

Lady Susan is a completed early work. So is the movie based on Lady Susan but with the title of another work. As I remember Lady Susan herself is a schemer with no close friends she trusts. There are no explicit sex scenes, but there is far more implied sex than appears in the later novels.