![]() We’re often caricatured as fussy, tea-drinking spinsters who stop knitting only long enough to brush cat hair off the antimacassar and shriek in horror at any suggestion that our cherished author wrote about sex. We Janeites are used to those exasperated sighs. ![]() Again with the pedantic obsessiveness! What humorless purists! Was he planning to meld the two stories? Underlining a point about Austen’s oeuvre? Trying to make Janeite heads explode? What could Stillman mean by appropriating the earlier title for a film based on the later work? we Janeites wondered. ![]() Lady Susan, a cynical story about a predatory widow’s romantic scheming, dates from the mid-1790s, when Austen was approaching twenty Love and Freindship, a madcap satire of the sentimental novel, was written a few years earlier, when she was a formidably accomplished fourteen-year-old. No, our problem was that Stillman’s title reminded us, distractingly, of another relatively obscure epistolary novella by Jane Austen, Love and Freindship (misspelling in the original). Not that we were wedded to “Lady Susan,” a title chosen decades after Austen’s death by the nephew who first published her manuscript. Most of the world saw nothing remarkable about indie director Whit Stillman’s decision to adapt Lady Susan, a relatively obscure epistolary novella by Jane Austen, into a movie called Love & Friendship.īut to us Janeites-Austen’s most devoted, not to say obsessive, fans-the change of title was a big deal. ![]()
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