Lady Susan

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Finally! ~ Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” on Film, a.k.a. “Love & Friendship”

Love_&_Friendship_poster-wpJust posting here all the reviews that have been piling in from Sundance – we have been waiting all year for this film – from the very first announcement that Whit Stillman was going to film Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, but bizarrely calling it “Love & Friendship.” Starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny.

Now if you know Austen’s Juvenilia, you know that “Love & Freindship” is one of her funnier over the top pieces (my favorite line: “run mad as often as you chose, but do not faint….”). It has nothing to do with Lady Susan of course – but whatever the reason for the title shift,* by all accounts it is a terrific film, with a Heroine just like other of Austen’s  delicious “baddies” – Lady Susan the queen of them. At least there are no zombies to worry about…

And when can we see it? Maybe an April release??

Location images of Love & Friendship, a Jane Austen film adaptation starring Kate Bekinsdale and Chloe Sevigny, directed by Whit Stillman. CHURCHILL PRODUCTIONS LIMITED. Producers Katie Holly, Whit Stillman, Lauranne Bourrachot. Co-Producer Raymond Van Der Kaaij. Also Starring: Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenwell & Morfydd Clark

Chloë Sevigny (l) and Kate Beckinsale (r)

Here are links to several reviews:

[will add more as they come in]

Other links of interest: 

lady_susan penguin cover

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*In the above cited interview, Stillman explains the title change:

She had no title on it. I’ve seen the manuscript. It’s in the Morgan Library. Her nephew, when he published it in 1871, put the title Lady Susan on it. Austen had sort of shifted as she went along from character names to imposing noun names for titles. Sense and Sensibility was supposed to be called Elinor and Marianne. So we took the title from a juvenile short story to give it that Austen sound.

c2016 Jane Austen in Vermont
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On My Bookshelf ~ Jane Austen Scholar Janet Todd Turns to Fiction and Takes on Lady Susan!

Well, not sure if an ebook can be termed “on my bookshelf” but no matter – this new book out today by Austen scholar Janet Todd has already made its way to my kindle, so a virtual bookshelf it is … and I shall drop all my other reading and begin this immediately!

cover-ladysusan

Professor Todd has taken on Jane Austen‘s Lady Susan in her fictional account Lady Susan Plays the Game – this is from the Bloomsbury website:

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd’s bodice-ripping reimagining of Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.

Austen’s only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her widowed life in the countryside, Lady Susan embarks on a serious of manipulative games to ensure she can stay in town with her first passion — the card tables. Scandal inevitably ensues as she negotiates the politics of her late husband’s family, the identity of a mysterious benefactor and a passionate affair with a married man.

Accurate and true to Jane Austen’s style, as befits Todd’s position as a leading Austen scholar, this second coming of Lady Susan is as shocking, manipulative and hilarious as when Jane Austen first imagined her.

Published: 15-07-2013
Format: EPUB eBook
ISBN: 9781448213450
Imprint: Bloomsbury Reader 
RRP: £6.99  [ in the US, the kindle price is $7.19 :  Amazon.com

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You can read a post by Janet Todd here at the Bloomsbury Reader blog –  where she “tells us her thoughts on writing, language, and the pressure of re-imagining Jane Austen:”

Anne Elliot, virtuous heroine of Persuasion, was ‘almost too good’ for Jane Austen. ‘Pictures of perfection… make me sick and wicked,’ she remarked towards the end of her life. All Austen’s novel heroines are indeed ‘good’: two of them initially hazard improper or injudicious remarks—Elizabeth Bennet and Emma—but later they learn to repress such high spirits.

Now look at Jane Austen’s own letters. Recollect that most of them address her beloved Cassandra who, after Jane’s death, guarded her sister’s image by burning anything she deemed unsuitable—not so much for the public, since Jane was not yet famous enough to have her private correspondence of general interest, but for the younger members of the extended family now living in high Victorian rather than racy Regency times.  Yet even the unburnt letters show a woman very different from the fictional heroines, a woman with a naughty propensity sometimes to laugh at the virtuous, the vulnerable or the just plain unfortunate—a wife with an uncomely husband experiencing a still birth or young girls lacking beauty and unable to compensate for it.  This Jane Austen emerges very fully in a little work she wrote just as she was entering adulthood and long before she’d published any of her masterly novels: ‘Lady Susan’….

Continue reading…

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About the Author:

janet_toddJanet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England’s first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton. She is also the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor of Jane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works are Women’s Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women’s writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women’s Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

 

Further reading:

book cover-LadySusanpenguin

c2013 Jane Austen in Vermont

 

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If you can wait until November ~

This is a tad ahead of schedule, but Mark your Calendars! 

The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City will be hosting a Jane Austen exhibit to begin in November 2009:

Jane Austen
November 2009 through March 2010

austen-lady-susan-ms-morgan-library

 Jane Austen, Lady Susan, autograph manuscript, written ca. 1793–94 and transcribed in fair copy soon after 1805. The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased in 1947; MA 1226.

 

 

 

 

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This exhibition explores the life, work, and legacy of Jane Austen (1775–1817), regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the English language. During the past two decades, numerous successful motion picture and television adaptations of Austen’s novels have led to a resurgence of interest in Austen’s life and work. This show provides a close-up portrait of Austen, achieving tangible intimacy primarily through the presentation of her autograph manuscripts and personal letters which the Morgan has not exhibited in a generation.

The Morgan’s collection of Austen’s autograph manuscripts and letters is the largest of any institution in the world, and includes the darkly satiric Lady Susan, the only surviving manuscript of any of Austen’s novels. The exhibition will also include first and early illustrated editions of Jane Austen’s novels and letters, as well as contemporary drawings and prints depicting people, places, and events of significance in Austen’s life.

Responding to the revival of interest in Austen’s life and work, the exhibition provides a deeper insight into Austen’s essentially enigmatic character and personality, the craft of writing, and the historical context in which she lived and wrote. The exhibition will explore not only Austen’s personal reading, and the literary influences that inspired and informed her work, but also the response to Austen by later writers as diverse as Scott, Bronte, Nabokov, Twain, Chesterton, and Auden.

[From the Morgan Library website]