Love & Friendship: A Successful Movie Adaptation Of Lady Susan
When making Jane Austen’s classic, much-loved writing into films, a key aspect of her style is often overlooked. No matter how much I love them, many movie adaptations of Austen are longwinded and static to the point of being boring. As is often the case with books we consider ‘classics,’ audiences have an awe for the source material that prevents them from being amused. And you should be in awe. I am in awe. It is decidedly awe-inspiring that a woman of Austen’s economic and social standing wrote such brilliant, insightful and lasting works. But these works also happen to be hilarious.
Love & Friendship, the movie adaptation of Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan that came out earlier this year, gets the comedy of Austen exactly right. The film is fast-paced, modern, and as a result laugh-out-loud hilarious. Yet around the time that it came out I read and heard many complaints. People seemed to think that this was not “the real Austen,” whatever that means. They were of the opinion that something had been diminished, some injustice had been done to her original works. I wholeheartedly disagree. Continue reading