Beckinsale – more familiar to us of late as the tooled-up super-heroine of the Underworld vampire franchise – reminds us again what a subtle and delicate performer she has always been, giving us a Lady Susan whose desperation to find good husbands for herself and her child is mixed with a beguiling slyness and cast-iron self-assurance. Widowed with a marriageable daughter, Lady Susan is country society’s most dreaded houseguest, ever swanning into drawing rooms filled with people determined not to be swept up in her schemes.
Lady Susan is the titular heroine of an Austen fragment, a 60-page epistolary novella that went unpublished in her lifetime, to which Stillman has appended the title of another scrap of Austen marginalia, the story Love and Friendship.
Love and Friendship is reaching an audience delighted to find Stillman simultaneously moving into period costume drama and literary adaptation, while retaining that familiar whiff of “doomed bourgeois in love” that is the trademark of his other brittle comedies of manners.
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