Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen's Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated

Author: Whit Stillman

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 29.99 AUD
  • : 9781473639843
  • : Hodder Stoughton General Division
  • : Two Roads
  • :
  • : 0.31
  • : May 2016
  • : 216mm X 135mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 29.99
  • : May 2016
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Whit Stillman
  • : Paperback
  • : 716
  • : 288
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9781473639843
9781473639843

Description

***NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING KATE BECKINSALE, CHLOE SEVIGNY AND STEPHEN FRY*** With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility and wry social commentary, filmmaker and writer Whit Stillman cleverly re-imagines and completes one of our greatest writers' unfinished works. As much homage to its muse's perennial influence as testament to its author's brilliance, Love Friendship is a sharp comedy of manners, and a fiendishly funny treat for Austen and Stillman fans alike. PRAISE FOR LOVE FRIENDSHIP - THE FILM 'A DEVIOUS DELIGHT' Guardian 'THE WITTIEST AUSTEN ADAPTATION TO GRACE THE SCREEN' The Times 'JANE AUSTEN HAS NEVER BEEN FUNNIER' Telegraph 'WHIT STILLMAN IS THE MODERN CINEMA'S JANE AUSTEN' New Yorker 'A SUPREMELY ELEGANT AND DELICATELY FILIGREED ADAPTATION' Variety JANE AUSTEN'S FUNNIEST NOVEL IS ALSO HER LEAST KNOWN - UNTIL NOW. Impossibly beautiful, disarmingly witty, and completely self-absorbed: meet Lady Susan Vernon, both the heart and the thorn of Love Friendship. Recently widowed with a daughter who's coming of age as quickly as their funds are dwindling, Lady Susan makes it her mission to find them wealthy husbands - and fast.
But when her attempts to secure their futures result only in the wrath of a prominent conquest's wife and the title of 'most accomplished coquette in England', Lady Susan must rethink her strategy. Unannounced, she arrives at her brother-in-law's country estate. Here she intends to take refuge - in no less than luxury, of course - from the colorful rumors trailing her, while finding another avenue to 'I do'. Before the scandalizing gossip can run its course, though, romantic triangles ensue. A SPECIAL EDITION FEATURING JANE AUSTEN'S ORIGINAL NOVELLA AS ANNOTATED BY THE NARRATOR.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR LOVE FRIENDSHIP - THE FILM Kate Beckinsale is a devious delight... Beckinsale is a hoot to watch as a character with no redeemable qualities, except for her cunning ability to get what she wants. You can't help but love Lady Susan because of the evident joy she takes in being so duplicitous. Her energy is infectious. Despite its period trappings, Stillman's film never feels stilted, largely thanks to his bracingly modern heroine who takes no prisoners, and makes no apologies for her conniving behavior. Guardian Jane Austen has never been funnier... Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it's also Stillman on the form of his life...Kate Beckinsale's best role in 20 years... a deliciously controlled and self-aware performance, playing the Austen title character as a born manipulator so devious she can spin the rest of the ensemble around her little finger... The performances, even from some of the more surprising cast members, are uniformly sharp... Perhaps only by reading the book after you've seen this is the skill of Stillman's treatment to be fully grasped - it's one of the deftest feats of literary interpolation in ages Daily Telegraph A fresh, beguiling movie, and the wittiest Austen adaptation to grace the screen The Times Whit Stillman, whose incisive comedies of bourgeois mores make him the modern cinema's Jane Austen, adapts one of her early novels inLove Friendship... fast, precise, and giddily dialectical costume romp... By way of his cast's mercurial verbal jousting and gestural elegance, Stillman captures the exquisite eroticism of high-society manners. New Yorker Whit Stillman may have fashioned the finest Jane Austen movie this year: the delightfully droll Love Friendship, based on Austen's novella Lady Susan... Stillman so effortlessly, elegantly bridges the gap between his conniving aristocrats and Austen's that it's difficult to say where one's sensibility ends and the other's begins. It's a misfortune that Stillman and Austen were born in different centuries, but Love Friendship is a perfect match of two sly observers, each with the capacity to be at once cruelly satirical to, and fond, of, their creations. Beckinsale is superb... Love Friendship is a most particular pleasure New York Post Whit Stillman returns - and on absolute peak form - with this drastically delightful Jane Austen adaptation... Superlative... Kate Beckinsale astonishes Little White Lies The central character is Lady Susan Vernon Martin, a widow of diminishing means played with high duplicitous verve by Kate Beckinsale BBC Culture A supremely elegant and delicately filigreed adaptation of Jane Austen's epistolary novella Lady Susan... Whit Stillman proves an unsurprisingly intuitive fit for Austen, but he also knows just how to give her pointed social satire an extra stab of wink-wink postmodern drollery without breaking the spell... Beckinsale magnetizes the screen Variety Snappy...Cheeky in its approach as well as spirited and good-natured, this enterprising adaptation of the author's relatively unfamiliar early novella Lady Susan remains buoyant through most of its short running time Hollywood Reporter the perfect marriage between Stillman's absurdist wit and Austen's period manners, further propped by Beckinsale's vibrant, rhythmic hysterical performance Deadline