Stephen Frye as Mr Johnson coping with Jenn Murray as Lady Lucy Manwarring and Xavier Samuel as Reginald de Courcy (2016 Love and Friendship, scripted and directed by Whit Stillman)
Dear friends and readers,
I confess to a real let-down and disappointment upon my first viewing of the film. Since Love and Friendship is a Stillman film. Given the high literary quality of his scripts, and depth of emotion he invested Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco with, I assumed he’d do real justice to the sardonic nature of the central hypocrite, Lady Susan (played by an almost unrecognizable Kate Beckinsale — since her face-life her face resembles that of a Barbie doll) and her real potential destructiveness (however thwarted by her lack of money and need of other people’s and their houses) and perniciously cold and egoistic values. I knew it would not be presented as an “inverted protest novel” (the way I had read it recently).
Beckinsale as Lady Susan – a rare moment in the clear light
From The Last Days of Disco when Beckinsale had some character in her face and Sevigny was thinner
Beckinsale as a bright hard mean Emma with Samantha Morton as a comically sensitive Harriet (1996 Emma by Andrew Davies)
I’d just taught Lady Susan, so could not easily forget, how hard, mean, at moments raw (towards her daughter, Frederica) Austen’s Lady Susan reveals herself to be in her letters to her confidante, Alicia Johnson (played by Chloe Sevigny whom I regret to say is as wooden and incapable of conveying a witty line as ever — she twice throws away “what man could deserve you” saying straight). The single moment of steel in the 92 minutes was supplied by Stephen Frye as Alicia’s husband: when Mr Johnson sees his wife still in a close relationship with Lady Susan (which he has strictly forbidden) and is confronted with the helpless and therefore hysterical grief of Lady Lucy Manwaring (Jenn Murray) whose husband is adulterously entangled with Lady Susan, he informs hers that he understands the weather in crossing the Atlantic this year is tough. (She has told Lady Susan Mr Johnson threatens to remove her from Lady Susan by taking her back to Connecticut if she does not stopping seeing this friend.)
Yes, Alicia Johnson is made into an American. Ang Lee and James Schamus are on record since their The Wedding Banquet if you want big funding from an American company, especially in the case of costume drama seen as having a smaller audience, a woman’s film in the first place, you are pressured into having one American character. American producers cannot believe the average American will like a film that has no American in it. Thus recently Julian Fellowes made Miss Dunstable in the self-consciously costum-y Dr Thorne improbably into an American.
Sevigny as Alicia (the promotional stills photograph her from a distance or angle)
Instead he has opted for slow artifice, insistence on playful theatricality (each character is announced in a still with their name written across their face, and their familial or work relationship with the other characters), a full-scale imitation or throw-back to 1970s BBC mini-series costume dramas. Everyone and everything is dressed or outfitted, decorated super-elegantly, not just Laura Ashley style but the hats are pure Gainsborough films (1940s costume dramas rather like Saul Dobbs’s The Duchess). The non-sourced music is often 18th century and as ironic background to the closing marriages, Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte. Sometimes he seemed to be imitating Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s super-successful 1996 bejewelled Sense and Sensibility. Xavier Samuel as Reginald de Courcy’s stiff body gestures, his pained facial expressions, the occasional astonishment reminded me of Hugh Grant’s Edward, only Hugh Grant at the close does suddenly invest his character with a depth of tender affection nowhere felt or seen in this movie.
Catherine de Courcy (Emma Greenwell) and Reginald Vernon
Stillman imitates the many walking scenes in Sense and Sensibility too. This is what a Jane Austen movie is supposed to be many of its fans feel; this is what they go for: emasculated men, women so gussied up to rape anyone would take excruciating efforts over corsets first. And both times I went I could see the audience was pleased: Beckinsale changed outfits almost every time we saw her, some of them quite lovely, especially her impeccably unruffled hats and curls. It is a relief after the alpha male, action-adventure movies crowding theaters with their 11 second scenes, non-literate scripts, and token women acting as male as their sexual roles permit.
Those reviews which have been favorable have picked up on this unbroken surface, these masks. For example, Adam Thirkwell’s Unserious Austen. Thirkwell is one of those who believes Lady Susan is a work of a teenager (the hagiography that surrounds Austen makes it possible to attribute this kind of sophisticated understanding of the nuances and circumstances surrounding adultery to an 18 year old) and looking at Stillman’s other films, Thirkwell reads the film as about the seriousness of surface; the insistence that the way to live life is by staying shallow, encasing yourself in the frivolous, to be unserious and insist anyone with an emotional attachment that is unchangeable is deluded: that is to take Lady Susan’s view of the world as accurate, or good enough, a way of getting through the actual coldness, meanness, mercenary motives of everyone else.
Except that Metropolitan, Last Days and Barcelona are rather about happiness coming from the integrity of the heart, from intelligent people seeing the limitatons of say worldly success (a great concern of Metropolitan is where you will be placed by your mid-30s). A few essays in Mark G Henrie’s collection of essays on Stillman’s films, Doomed Bourgeois in Love, argue that Stillman is highly unusual not only for his open identification with and interest in the upper class, but because his films are ironic Christian comedies. He is a thinking Christian and sees Austen as an optimistic ethical writer.
An unusually emotional scene: Lady de Courcy (Jemma Redgrave) and Catherine Vernon meeting Frederica (Morfyyd Clark) (not in Lady Susan but implied)
Thirkwell omitted a series of scenes not in Lady Susan, and certainly not the lines: except for the local vicar, the unnamed “local curate (played by Conor MacNeill) no one knows which position on the 10 commandments a particular instruction has. This curate is an invented character not in any of Austen’s texts: pious and trying hard to make the Christian message he understands doable. The joke about the 10 commandments is brought back three times. They are also all clueless on the story of Solomon judging which woman is the mother of a baby. Lady Susan alludes to it at least three times too as if it shows just what a good mother she is; she does not seem to know the parable contains two mothers or what happens in it, nor does anyone else. Frederica (Morfyyd Clark) Vernon, Lady Susan’s daughter, presented as unqualifiedly virtuous is so guilty over having finessed her mother’s injunctions not to tell her uncle Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards) or his wife, her kind aunt, Lady de Courcy by telling Reginald goes to church to find guidance and solace and comfort. (Something that never occurs in Lady Susan.) The lighting of the film throughout is exquisitely beautiful, like a golden Vermeer painting, and especially of Frederica reading books here and there, but this scene is luminous. Our new local curate looks at her lovingly, and for a moment I thought maybe Stillman would make this a match. As she emerges, she meets Reginald and he is clueless over why anyone would go to church on any day but Sunday. He asks twice about this peculiarity of hers. But by the end of the movie he has apparently “gotten it,” understood why, for at their wedding, he cites a verse written in 18th century style celebrating Frederica’s virtue, where virtue means religious as well as marital constancy. We then see James Fleet as Reginald’s father, Sir Reginald beaming down on Jemma Redgrave, with slight comic over-doneness (James Fleet like Fyre is able to act the part with comic effect).
James Fleet as Sir Reginald looking on at some ridiculousness
Stillman does have to soften the story somewhat. In general until near the end of the movie he sticks literally to events in the book. Then instead of Reginald finally waking up to what Lady Susan is (Reginald is an anticipation of the denseness and delusions of Edmund Bertram) and throwing her off, Stillman has Lady Susan break the engagement. Reginald’s pride is hurt we are told, and he is still in danger of returning to Lady Susan. If he does not, another change is that Lady Susan is pregnant by Manwaring at the close of the film. This gives her a less mercenary incentive: in the book she wanted to marry Sir James to her daughter so with her ability to bully her daughter, she could have (in effect) enforced regular marital sex and children on her daughter by taking the money herself. Stillman adds a silent scene where we see Sir James giving Lady Susan money. He adds wedding scenes which however ironic underneath are on the surface social happy affairs. So too dancing.
A particularly gorgeous hat == the cloaks provide further eye-candy (the film recalled McGrath’s 1996 hit Emma with Gweneth Paltrow in this respect)
So I should not have been surprised at the genre Stillman has opted to use for Austen’s story: highly traditional familial costume drama undercut gently by ironic music and for the thoughtful more critically by what is actually happening and the distance between what’s said and what’s done in the case of Lady Susan. Rich costumes bring audiences in; there are people who insist on the meaninglessness of Downton Abbey for them personally: they are watching for the costumes and to look at the lovely rooms and buildings.
One of the houses glimpsed in the distance (there are few photos of distant shots in promotional images)
Certainly in this film a number of older grand mansions in various states of decline were filmed (like the 2007 Northanger Abbey by Andrew Davies this film was done in Ireland). And it fits into his outlook, the way he professes to understand Austen. He’s not a typical Janeite though as he finds Fanny Price a likeable (appealing) character in Mansfield Park. He has his heroine in Metropolitan defend Fanny against the strictures of Lionel Trilling as well as the story’s taking seriously whether amateurs should do a salacious play in a private house.
Myself I don’t find this kind of tone characteristic of Lady Susan. Since it is all in letters, she can drop the social mask and reveal herself more than once very directly as a bully, mean, aggressive, with an expectation that everyone will be as nasty she is (rather like Fielding’s Bifil). A couple of time Stillman acknowledges the centrality of letters by having one read aloud, and he shows characters communicating through them, but his theme of the effectiveness of social mask and that Lady Susan never drops it is not true of the book. She can be very raw as can her friend Alicia; these lines are divided in the film:
My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying
a man of his age!–just old enough to be formal, ungovernable
and to have the gout–too old to be agreeable, and too young to
die. May the next gouty attack be more favorable
As I read Lady Susan and have listened to it read aloud by Blackstone and other audio-readers, it’s close to Les Liasions Dangereuses, or Stael’s Delphine (1805, with a Madame Susan Vernon as worldly villainess and very bad mother). If you were puzzled why there are so many brief scenes between Alice and Lady Susan — I mean how she does manage to whiz up to London from the country and back again repeatedly: Stillman is presenting the matter of their letters brief scenes. Epistolary narrative can be looked at as inner dramas on a stage with the characters represented by letters in lieu of dialogue.
The heroines exchange bits from the letters — sometimes they lurk outside amid columns in unspecified areas
But I did find it startling to see the transposition of the original language of the letters into dialogue, often without much change. This is very like some of the 1970s film adaptations and the closest in the Austen canon is the 1979 P&P by Faye Weldon, only Weldon had an omniscient novel with characters talking to one another. The effect is stilted, and I could see from other viewers they were growing restless. Since the 1990s these costume dramas have been trying for some compromise between the language of the originals and intelligent and demotic talk of today. The audience were clearly glad to have the more obvious jokes, or seemingly obviously funny lines which they got and laughed a bit too determinedly I thought — as if to feel they were enjoying themselves. I wondered if some other of the lines given to Lady Susan gave them pause, but after all Stillman’s Lady Susan never for once breaks her surface of sweetness and she never offers more of her real values and norms than she has to even to Alicia. So no one leaving this theater could think from this film Austen seriously questioned our society, except maybe if you were seeking something, you could say see how desperate women were. This jusifies Lady Susan’s behavior in part, and it is the way a couple of favorable reviews took the movie. It’s about how women are oppressed.
To me this kind of review is a caricature of the idea: no woman in the movie is ever pictured as less than well-fed, comfortable, and on the surface complacent. If you can control the surface this way, what can the depths be? The one hard statement in the film comes from Catherine Decourcy Vernon (Emma Greenwall) when at the close of the film she calls Lady Susan a cold snake (to her mother). It’s a good thing this utterance does not need an ability to utter irony for Greenwall is another actor in the film who cannot do it; nor Justin Edwards as Frederica’s lummox of an uncle.
Moment of obvious astonishment: Catherine de Courcy and Charles Vernon
The overt joke here is that uncle Charles is astonished that any woman of intelligence could marry a fool, by which he means Sir James Martin (Tom Bennet). At the close we learn that Lady Susan has married Sir James, and as Charles drivels on in his usual “candid” way (of seeing all good everywhere) to say Lady Susan has fallen in love with him, Greenwall turns aside to grin. In Austen’s book, Sir James is not a harmless rattle, but a stubborn and dense man who would not (as Sir James does here) not realize that he’s being cuckolded by Manwaring; as Reginald is a permutation of the obtuse Edmund Bertram so Sir James is a version of Rushworth in Mansfield Park. In the book Frederica is right to dread marriage with this man and in the film to assume she will be just fine with Reginald. After all her aunt Catherine is doing just fine; her uncle does whatever the aunt wants. Stillman has picked up that Charles Vernon is a version of Charles Bingley (P&P), easily led, only left out that he could be led by bad people.
Talk I heard from people coming out both times included asssertions “it’s an odd film.” One woman didn’t quite know what to make of it, but then she’d not read Lady Susan. At least most people leaving seemed to realize there is such a novel, and they realized perhaps that there is another juvenilia called Love and Friendship which because he so likes the title and thinks it appropriate Stillman chose to call Lady Susan. Disingenuousness can work but it’s transparent that someone hoped there might be Austen readers who’ve read the wildly hilarious Love and Freindship and be drawn into the theater that way. In my own anecdotal experience really faithful fans do know of Love and Freindship: they learn bout it in an effort to find more Austen to read, and when they start it’s burlesque wild jokes lead them on to the end.
Nonserious Austen indeed. No one will leave this film disquieted or having been brought to think about our society seriously through an Austen text. The Guardian gives the expected comment: this is a racier, naughtier Austen than we have known. But the second time I knew what to expect. I’ve seen many Austen films. It’s intelligent and literate and if you can extrapolate out from Lady Susan’s behavior and how she is thriving at the close, you can say cold performative people utterly without any humane compassion for anyone, in fact despising anyone who has that as weak fits in just fine with our world. Stillman gives Beckinsale a line just before the credits as she looks at her daughter now married, to the effect she is delighted to see Frederica is becoming more manipulative though where I couldn’t see. This is a more usual transposition into modern talk of a passage in a letter where Austen’s Lady Susan indicates an active dislike or distaste for her daughter; she finds Frederica “contemptible” precisely because she has sincere feelings and acts on them. Doubtless had Lady Susan been able to read Mansfield Park she would have despised Fanny Price too:
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Lisa Berglund:
“Thanks for this interesting commentary, Ellen.
With regard to Dr. Thorne, I assumed that Miss Dunstable was changed into an American to avoid dealing with the novel’s hints that she is Jewish. I also regretted the omission of her relationship with Dr. Thorne, as that was always my favorite part of the novel.”
A thorough and interesting review. I liked the film— mainly because I have learned not to expect anything from Austen based films. I did wonder if people in the audience were able to follow the story if they hadn’t read the story. You make valid arguments. I hadn’t realized before how Susan was never shown as being particularly nasty even when she is hoping that his next attack of Gout would carry off Mr. Johnson. I did think that both Frederica and Manwaring’s wife were presented as being less pretty so that it seemed as though Lady Susan’s beauty was all the excuse she needed. I was surprised that Charles Vernon was so friendly and tolerant considering how Lady Susan ruined his brother and deprived him of the family home. Mrs. Vernon was shown as being unfriendly without reason. The lines telling how Lady Susan worked against that branch of he Vernon family was almost thrown away. I wanted someone to state strongly and clearly exactly how Lady Susan had ruined her husband and worked against Catherine and Charles.
I know Jane Austen would never make a character as stupid as Sir James. However, she knew one who probably acted pretty much like that in the Earl of Portsmouth who an insanity commission found to have a mental capacity of about a 10 year old boy and lived for several years and the birth of two children with his wife and her lover. . It took the brother nearly a decade to invalidate that wedding and cut the children pout of succession to the earldom.
Tyler: “Okay, Ellen, now I understand. It’s named Love and Friendship but really Lady Susan. What’s next? A remake of Mansfield Park named Pride and Prejudice so it will sell more tickets. How utterly confusing and rather off-putting to play with the title like that. I thought from the previews I saw that it was a comedy but then I was viewing it through what I remember of the juvenile story. I would think since it’s Jane Austen, the title could have been Lady Susan and people would have gone to see it regardless.
Tyler
Me: People will believe anything if they want to. Now that more people are going and discover they are not seeing the hilarious burlesque they had read, perhaps somehow blended with Lady Susan, but Lady Susan alone, Stillman is saying he named the novella this because he liked the title. Just happened to have the name of the hilarious burlesque which has had some readership. It seemed so apt for the story. What? Not at all. Major theme is hypocrisy, and after that adultery and cruelty. And you get people parroting this.
It has long been a habit of producers to rename a story from a novel if the novel is not well known. Why it must be different from the original title I don’t know.
I agree the name Jane Austen would have been enough. The movie might have been called Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. why not? Shakespeare plays turned into film are sometimes called “Shakespeare’s Macbeth or some such title. Davies called his last Austen film: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Though I don’t say so in my review (I try to be polite) I think Stillman was anxious to make a commercial success insofar as he could, that was one of the reasons he made a film that would please Janeites. He would like to make more films and he has to have a previous success. Last Days of Disco was a success d’estime but a box office flop. Metropolitan became a bit of a cult favorite but was never a money-maker. Barcelona his third film disappeared quickly.
Nancy further: I thought the movie gave Lady Susan an unfair advantage in regard to Manwaring’s wife. It was as though they were asking the audience to agree that Manwaring had a right to consort with the beautiful Lady Susan rather than with his less than attractive wife.”
My reply: I made the point in the blog that Mrs Manwaring is seen from Lady Susan’s point of view — as are a number of the characters and scenes. It’s as if we had Sense and Sensibility seen from the perspective of Lucy Steele.
Diane Reynolds (her blog, Austen and Other Writers, her book, The doubled life of Bonhoeffer):
I saw Love and Freindship yesterday. I loved the costumes, which were lush and eye-catching (and I hope earn an Oscar nomination) and the settings. The film was simply visually beautiful, unashamedly so, and reminded me of Barry Lyndon, (and of the similar satiric aspects of that work: the brutality beneath the veneer.) I thought the acting good, and I appreciated t the movie for catching Austen’s sharp satire and the way it was true to Austen in telling the story primarily from Lady Susan’s pov. I did, however, find the film a little too choppy and episodic for my taste. I am used (thinking, among others, of Downtown Abbey) of the very short scene followed by an abrupt cut, but in this movie, I wished for less of that. I also wished, on the other end of the extreme, for less of the static, as I remember, 1962 Tom Jones style, of showing stills of the characters with subtitles–and yet on the other hand, I appreciated the visuals of lines of poetry and lines from the letters.
The movie, in other words, chose the mode of framing quick realist vignettes/snapshots that drew the viewer in but then pulled back to a frame that put a layer of distance between the narrative and the viewer. This may have been a way to emphasize that the story is fragmentary or epistolary, but I would have preferred a more conventional narrative that didn’t keep pulling the viewer of the story for static stills comically explaining who the characters were. All in all, however, I am glad I saw this. Thinking about it in juxtaposition with P&P and Zombies, I would say Austen suffers from the current mode of very choppy, episodic, camcorder like filming–Austen is certainly a master of brevity compared to someone like Richardson, but all the same she lets scenes unfold and lets the story comes out of this unfolding. I am interested in others’ comments.
SA friend:
We saw Love and Friendship the other night. The frocks are wonderful, the acting very fine (Jemma Redgrave was a favourite, though Xavier Wotsisface looked to me like a robot — is his mouth real?) and the script literate and often witty. The plight of women in that cruel society is richly drawn. However (unlike the domestic comrade, who relished it all) I found it too cynical and (although I read Lady Susan far too long ago to remember much of it) unAustenlike.
I have dragged my ancient Penguin of Lady Susan off the shelf (which includes also The Watsons and Sanditon), and will re-read it very soon. And then read your review. ‘Cynical’ may not be the word. Clever-clever is perhaps more like it. (Is that term familiar to you?)
I am not interested in fashion, but I am interested in textiles and decoration, and so costume is something I can relish. But it is not enough to redeem a film. I did not like the film very much, and I am struggling to say why. I want to say that Jane Austen wouldn’t have liked it, but really that is a very silly thing even to think.
Have you seen this:
http://hazlitt.net/feature/theres-either-gun-or-wedding-interview-whit-stillman
Stillman’s tone is a total betrayal of Lady Susan by taking it literally. When I’ve listened to Lady Susan read aloud, it is so unpleasant. It’s as if Becky Sharp wrote a novel or worse yet Lizzie Eustace (if you’ve gotten through Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds). He’s made his film from its surface, from the way Lady Susan is presented as maintaining her persona in public. But the same is said of Madame de Merteuil in Les Liasions Dangereuses. I think Austen had LaClose and Stael in mind. She recommended Corinne over Milton in a letter. Frear had it right in his film: if in the book we are told everyone is fooled by Merteuil’s gentle sweet surface, the book is about showing the sewer beneath. Austen was a spinster, probably genitally a virgin, but she was trying for that. Or so the best way to see Lady Susan could be.
You disliked LS because it’s mean and nasty. Austen could be just so mean in her letters. She is wildly rebarbative at times, as if fending off what might disturb her too radically. I tried to write about this in the paper I wrote on the depiction of widows and widowhood in Austen:
https://www.academia.edu/9666861/The_depiction_of_Widows_and_Widowers_in_the_Austen_canon
especially the last paragraph which the software of this site will not permit me to copy and paste.
Ellen
I can’t comment more on the film since I have yet to see it, but I will say your description of the action films playing at the same time is spot on.
Tyler
I’ve noticed this is the underlying pattern even in these apparently politically progressive films. It’s a juiced-up suspense story of an alpha hero/heroine with continual climaxes. Stillman’s film is an oasis in that sense — as was 45 years and The Lady In the Van. One person told me she found the film disappointing, and partly proof that films on TV (HB0, the too few mini-series) are often better than films made for cinema.
Julie Taddeo: ” Very disappointing,especially for Whit Stillman. The entire film consisted of traveling back and forth from one home to the next, a few witty lines, and other than Kate Beckinsale’s great dialogue, everyone else was as flat as could be. First movie I’d been to in ages, reinforcing my belief that TV has become better than the movies.
Me; Good perspective, and yes, now that you bring it up, yes — within limits. The spate of thrillers on PBS is not superior stuff. I have access to a BBC iplayer and know there are numerous fine adaptations we never get here in the US.
Sarah Miller: Iwas at a screening with the director last week and had wondered why the title. He said he liked the characters and plot of Lady Susan but thought Love and Friendship was a better title for a film and he felt it fit with the themes plus the subtitle for Love and Friendship is Deceived in Friendship and Betrayed in Love which is pretty apt I think.
Me: Well I don’t believe it. He knows there is a juvenilia called Love and Freindship which far more people have read than Lady Susan. Part of my disappointment was the result of discovering the signpost is a lie. I expected a blending of the two texts – as do many others. It’s improbable he didn’t know of the other title and it’s not particularly apt for Lady Susan which is about hypocrisy and egoism and sex.
Sarah: It’s a reimagining of Lady Susan and he was quite honest that he’d used the title because he liked it better. He’s read all the juvenalia (and was quite knowledgeable about Austen). He isn’t keen on the story of Love and Friendship but liked the title. What he’s done is take an epistolary unfinished piece and made a film with the characters, basic plot and quite a bit of the original text and has had some fun doing it. After talking to him, I got a sense that he really appreciates her wit and the great characters she created even if he hasn’t made a definitive Austen adaptation. I really liked it…much more than I was expecting to.
Me: He does love Austen and has his own point of view on her: he Christianizes her in the film (ironically). I think Last Days of Disco also has an Emma character in it (played by Kate Beckinsale before she had her face-lift) and a book of essays on his art I’ve read quotes him to the effect that the film began as an effort to do something with the heroines of S&S. But because he likes her doesn’t mean he is authoritative nor uncommercial. It is improbable he didn’t mean to evoke the known juvenilia to get an audience into the theater. As for Lady Susan, it is finished. He uses its ending — a far harder more ironic one but basically her marrying the coarse stubborn oaf Martin. Not because she has to because in the novella she’s not pregnant. It’s finished in the way the truncated Persuasion is. Love and Freindship is complete too. The story is unimportant and hard to follow (there are several stories); what’s important are the wildly funny scenes the story is an excuse for.
Sarah: I think looking at the original draft manuscript, Lady Susan was something Jane Austen worked on and reworked but as she never tried to get it published I think it was a draft that she saw as unfinished. I also don’t think Love and Friendship is that well known outside serious Janeite circles and would have not been any more likely to bring in an audience on it’s name and reputation…in fact a piece of epistolary juvenilia by a 14 or 15 year old Austen is very unlikely to have been classed as commercial. I think adaptations are like Marmite, you either like them or hate them…I personally liked this one even though I wasn’t really expecting too. He had access to a lot of primary source material whilst writing this and although he’s not a scholar and doesn’t pretend to be, I found him knowledgeable, enthusiastic and animated about her work and totally charming.
Me: On Lady Susan I reviewed the Cambridge later manuscripts and while I didn’t see the literal draft manuscript I studied the fair copy on the 1805 paper (using an online facsimile) and came to the conclusion it’s as finished as Persuasion. Much shorter, a novella, a hard satiric work. I think she longed to publish it and knew her family would never permit it. I’ve done studies in Renaissance women and it’s appearance reminded me of their manuscripts (where I have seen a couple literally) where they make a copy they like to pretend is or looks like a book. Hard to say about L&F: it’s an impression I have that if there is a text outside the 6 famous books Janeites and other readers read, it’s Love and Freindship. People are drawn in by the hilarity. Just a lot of people I’ve talked to who would not read say The Watsons (or heard of it) will have read L&F and know some of the jokes.
Sarah: It doesn’t feel as well crafted or as fully formed to me..but I’m not an academic just a Jane Austen fan and a writer. As for knowing Love and Friendship, I think it depends on the circles you move in as most people I know (who are not Austen fans but read a lot) didn’t know much about the juvenilia at all.
Me: I don’t think it is as full or detailed as the four books published by her in her life and was continually revising for nigh on 30 years — nor the two she was working on towards the four. We can agree to differ; I’m happy to. I saw the film a second time and liked it better. I’ll try in a blog to explain why I still found it disappointing. I hoped for better from Stillman.
Sarah: Ellen, I agree and funnily enough, Persuasion is my favourite novel even though it isn’t her best crafted…something about it’s simplicity and emotional resonance makes me love it and don’t get me started on the adaptation of that with the ridiculous …See More
Me: Probably he is, and in my view it’s his take on Austen that’s limited.
Sarah: I suppose we all have our own Jane Austen and view of her and her work and I think it’s part of her global appeal that she touches, impacts and affects so many of us in many different ways almost 200 years after her death.
Me: I wouldn’t mind a good adaptation of Love and Friendship, say along the lines of The Cock and Bull Story taken from Tristram Shandy. For me there was just not enough original filmic thought in this movie. It was too conventional.
Come to think of it, the title of the epistolary novella that has been titled Lady Susan since James-Edward Austen-Leigh published it in 1870 is not Jane Austen’s. It is a title thought of by JEAL. That Stillman does not make the obvious argument why should he follow someone else than Austen’s title suggests to me he knows little about the actual scholarship — if he did, he is too smart to say it’s juvenilia. He’d notice the date of the manuscript at its earliest only can be 1805. He’d then account for the difference of tone between this epistolary novella and the one written at least 10 years earlier, Love and Freindship.
NA and Persuasion are Henry or Cassandra Austen’s titles; The Watsons and Lady Susan are James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s titles. Family hearsay as repeated by Catherine Hubback (somehow still ignored though a third niece who actually wrote good novels, and really finished one of her aunt’s in a way that sheds light on its opening) said it was called The Younger Sister. Emma Watson is the younger sister as was Jane herself. Family hearsay did not speak of this novel about an adulterous woman. Austen’s letter shows NA to have been Susan and then Catherine as titles. Persuasion was The Elliots (and thus Isabelle de Montolieu subtitled it La Famille Elliot appropriate she felt). Sanditon was The Brothers.
By changing the titles this way her family erased the quiet and real parallels of Austen’s life with her novel’s characters and stories. Maybe Austen had a title of her own for Lady Susan; but if so, she didn’t put it on the fair copy which argues either she didn’t have one (unlikely as most writers have a working title in their mind) or she felt her family would not have appreciated it and she wanted the book to survive. That’s why she wrote it out so beautifully.
When a film-maker changes the title of the eponymous book it’s a sign that he and his producers do not think a wide enough audience recognizes it to justify using it. They prefer to title it themselves in accordance with what they think will pull in most viewers. You can see Henry James’s rise in recognition across the 20th century by looking at how much more frequently his novels are given the titles he gave them than before 1960.
Bob Lapides:
I just saw the Jane Austen adaptation and thought it was utterly bad. Aside from the film’s weaknesses, what struck me was the story’s unrelieved cynicism. Was this present in Austen? How much was typical of late 18C/early 19C farces?
Bob”
The answer is it depends. I have a volume of the farces printed in 1804. Some are pandering, some are sweet (like one based on Rousseau), some remind me of situation comedy in the US (High Life Above Stairs or some such title) but there are some brutal ones, especially those stemming from the Don Juan/Libertine plays. On the whole when they are serious (not too often) they show an amoral violent mercenary world.
My objection is Stillman has turned a hard book into a somewhat stilted period drama — with all the conventions of the form. He does not parody the genre either. I regarded it as a bad sign when he gave the novel the title of an earlier juvenilia which is not hard satire but burlesque romance.
The novel is cynical if you think that Austen is bonding with Lady Susan, then strongly; if you see irony and distance there is still a point of view that does justify Auden’s famous poem about how Austen frightens him: the characters are cold and manipulative. I was invited to teach the novel or give a lecture a few weeks before precisely because the movie was coming and this was a Jane Austen class. Naturally, another blog:
I do think it’s a protest novel in the way Fielding’s Tom Jones is. Listening to it can be very unpleasant. I’ve tried two different readings and apparently that is the way it must be read to make sense. The ancien regime world was an ugly place, and for once I saw the connection between Austen and Sade I have been surprised to find others making.
Lady Susan is a mid-career desperate book whose humor is deadly. I think it’s heavily influenced by books like LaClos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Madame de Genlis’s books — she was a utter hypocrite and her books advise hypocrisy as piety. Like Talleyrand though she survived and survived.
Ellen
Bob: “What annoyed me is that there is no decent alternative to the fools and villains in this, except for Susan’s daughter. Also, every one of the men is either a loser or a rogue. The film’s point of view, though seemingly amused by the emptiness and the manipulations it depicts, offers no positive counter-example.
The first few stories Dickens published (in 1833-34) were similar, in that everyone is ridiculous. No pain is taken seriously, etc. But underneath all of this is Dickens’s disapproval. I didn’t see that in this film.”
Me: There is disapproval in Austen — though an implied ironic narrator and through some of Lady Susan’s really cruel behavior to her daughter. The trouble is the character who is supposed to be the one to carry the “positive message,” Catherine Vernon is a suspicious and manipulative woman herself. She only becomes warm to Frederica when she discovers Frederica is virtuous (i.e. obedient to her). Her values are for rank, conformity — and I don’t feel Austen likes her. Nor her mother. Reginald is a dunce like Edmund Bertram in MP.
Stillman gives us these religious dialogues. Did you notice those? He’s on record that he sees Austen as a Christian optimist. So the “alternative” is that no one cares about religion or understand ethics, and if they did, then they might be better people. They are all too dumb — or in the case of Lady Alicia’s husband in the film, who is like Mr Bennet, helpless. In Austen’s book, we hardly see Mr Johnson; we only hear of some decent just decisions and very harsh rejection of Lady Susan and anything that smacks of immorality, impropriety, probably he’s a prig.
Austen was living in Bath and having a terrible time — as she said. She had so little private space, so little free time, hardly any money; she was there to be sold to someone for a wife in effect. She ended up spending her time with other spinsters.
I instanced Fielding because I recently read Tom Jones. It’s similar. Fielding disapproves strongly of what he shows, but he had no decent alternative . Mr Allworthy leaves a lot to be desired; he is a dupe and a narrow minded one. And it’s that way in LaClos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Dickens is just another world. Trollope and Eliot too.
Ellen
12/23/2020: more recently comments to me about this blog prompts this reply:
“Mary, I did not mean it as praise when I say that Stillman openly Christianizes his Love and Friendship. Jane Austen’s religion was not one of testimony nor was it overt. If by 1820 there were preachers reading the books overtly as Christian religious-moralizing, that reflects them and their constituents in another era. To do Stillman justice, in neither Metropolitan or Last Days of Disco does any overt Christianizing come out.
What the movie most reminds me of in this respect is the Christianizing of the European canon acted out and influential in the 1950s McCarthy era, both through very conservative American southern poets and the romancing group at Oxford (Tolkien, CWLewis &c).
Ellen