It will be hard to find a sharper comedy this summer than Love & Friendship (which will arrive on Amazon Prime later in the year, for all you streaming fans). In Love & Friendship, for better or worse, she's the Walter White of polite British society, charging into quiet drawing rooms with only her self-interest in mind and attempting to finagle her way into an advantageous marriage, all while marrying off her daughter to someone the poor girl has no interest in. What's more, it just might make you a believer in Kate Beckinsale, who had a number of rich roles in British film and TV before she broke through in the US with Pearl Harbor and mostly ended up playing a bunch of wives and girlfriends. But it's mostly an incredibly funny comedy of manners about how to deal with those unpleasant people who insist on forcing themselves into your life. Here is one famous passage toward the conclusion, which I find so amusing.The new adaptation of her novella Lady Susan (confusingly, Austen also wrote a novella called Love and Freindship, but this film is not an adaptation of that) has its romantic elements, sure. They are in turns hilarious and overly sentimental, a parody of the cult of “ sensibility” that Jane Austen would revisit in a more serious light with her novel Sense and Sensibility. The novella contains 15 letters which begin with the narrator Laura and her friend Isabel, and continue with Laura and Isabel’s’ daughter Marianne. The misspelling of the third word in the title “freindship” is the customary spelling as it appeared on the original manuscript in Jane Austen’s hand. It was first published in 1922, and can often be found in versions of her work entitled “ Minor Works“. Love and Freindship, (note the original misspelling on friendship) a novella written as an epistolary inscribed “Deceived in Friendship & Betrayed in Love” was dedicated to Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide (Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza Hancock who married a French Count, Jean-Francois Capot de Feuillide) and completed on 13 June 1790 when she was 14 years old.
I have been reading Jane Austen’s Juvenilia and find it delightful.
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