Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell), who alone seems to see through the woman’s pleasing manners and the unfailingly seductive effect they have on the men in her midst. Beautiful, sophisticated and recently widowed, Lady Susan is also an inveterate schemer - “the serpent in Eden’s garden,” in the words of her sister-in-law, Mrs.
#LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP REVIEW NYT SERIES#
To the possible chagrin of Austen purists (though with “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” around the corner, they probably have bigger fish to fry), Stillman has not only finished the story in his own way but also adapted the work with a free hand, doing away with its epistolary structure and granting breezy yet full-bodied shape to scenes and incidents that Austen mainly described through a series of variably reliable narrators.Ĭertainly the more casual Austen buff may be surprised to encounter, in Lady Susan Vernon (Beckinsale), the sort of duplicitous and diabolically self-interested heroine who seems not to have sprung from the same pen as Lizzie Bennett and Emma Woodhouse. “Lady Susan” was written early in Austen’s career (probably around 1794, according to scholars) but published posthumously in 1871, and “Love & Friendship” pointedly refers to the source material as “unfinished,” perhaps in reference to the rather hasty, impatient manner in which the author concluded her otherwise delightfully barbed experiment with the novella-in-letters format.
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