When tackling Jane Austen’s unfinished early novel “Lady Susan,” Whit Stillman stripped away the epistolary structure, but the characters’ desire to dish remains as strong as ever. In ostensibly polite London society, nobody is a bigger cause and purveyor of gossip than Lady Susan Vernon. Her scandals will be inhaled and savored in Stillman’s “Love & Friendship,” which opens this Friday, May 13, in New York.
Lady Susan and her long-suffering daughter Frederica have just been evicted by their hosts, Lord and Lady Manwaring for reasons we can quickly deduce. It is fair to say Lord Manwaring is sorry to see her go, but go she must. The Vernons temporarily find shelter with Lady Susan’s closest friend Alicia Johnson, a former American Loyalist. Of course, her fuddy-duddy husband does not approve of such a wicked woman, so she arranges a long term residency for them in Churchill, the estate of her good natured brother-in-law, Charles Vernon and his rightfully wary wife Catherine (of the prominent DeCourcy family).
