But Lady Susan’s plans are waylaid by the sudden arrival at Churchill of her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), who has run away from school, and who clearly lives in fear and dread of the mother who has never shown her honest affection. And her extended flirtation with her young suitor is a master class in manipulation: She knows just the way to disarm his prejudices, flatter his ego, and lure him into dismissing the occasional rumors of her indiscreet past as vicious slander. Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), she’s determined to secure her financial future by marrying Reginald. There, not coincidentally, she has a mutually charming first encounter with Catherine’s handsome and eligible younger brother, Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel).Īs Lady Susan describes in her regular visits to her similarly duplicitous best friend, Mrs. Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards), at their countryside estate of Churchill.
And so she’s immediately suspicious when Lady Susan decides to pay an extended visit to her and her husband, Mr. Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell), who alone seems to see through the woman’s pleasing manners and the unfailingly seductive effect they have on the men in her midst. Beautiful, sophisticated and recently widowed, Lady Susan is also an inveterate schemer - “the serpent in Eden’s garden,” in the words of her sister-in-law, Mrs.
To the possible chagrin of Austen purists (though with “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” around the corner, they probably have bigger fish to fry), Stillman has not only finished the story in his own way but also adapted the work with a free hand, doing away with its epistolary structure and granting breezy yet full-bodied shape to scenes and incidents that Austen mainly described through a series of variably reliable narrators.Ĭertainly the more casual Austen buff may be surprised to encounter, in Lady Susan Vernon (Beckinsale), the sort of duplicitous and diabolically self-interested heroine who seems not to have sprung from the same pen as Lizzie Bennett and Emma Woodhouse. “Lady Susan” was written early in Austen’s career (probably around 1794, according to scholars) but published posthumously in 1871, and “Love & Friendship” pointedly refers to the source material as “unfinished,” perhaps in reference to the rather hasty, impatient manner in which the author concluded her otherwise delightfully barbed experiment with the novella-in-letters format.
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