Lady Susan and Love and Freindship(sic)

I recently saw the movie Love & Friendship, an adaptation of one of Jane Austen's early novellas, Lady Susan (#575).  I quite enjoyed it, especially as the costumes and locations were beautiful.  I rushed home, eager to see how closely the film followed the original written work, since I had never read it.  Lady Susan is an epistolary novel which I think they did a reasonable job of turning into dialog format.  Of course, they had to take a number of liberties to pad out the story, so there are characters added and scenes inserted to move the plot along, but I think they did get the gist of the novella quite nicely.


Lady Susan, if you're not familiar with this Jane Austen work, tells the tale of an attractive widow who always seems to find a way to live in comfort on other people's hospitality while she hunts for a wealthy husband.  But first things first; she has a daughter to marry off to a rich but silly rattle.  The success of her matrimonial campaigns form the nucleus of the plot.  Kate Beckinsale plays Lady Susan with relish in the film version.


Lady Susan was included in a volume of other short Austen works, and I was surprised to find that the book included a novella named Love & Freindship (sic).  Of course I had to read that as well, expecting it to be the further adventures of Lady Susan and her coterie.  It was not.  Love & Freindship featured an entirely different cast of characters!  It was also an epistolary novella, purporting to be an instructive screed from a woman whose unfortunate past might provide a salutary lesson to the unmarried daughter of an old friend written at the mother's urging.  I frankly found it a hoot.  It was so over the top it verged on parody rather than the social satire one usually associates with Jane Austen.  All her original misspellings were left in which adds another layer to the refined voice the narrator assumes.  I would love to see a movie version of this story with all the fainting and running mad by our heroine!


What remains a mystery to me, though, is why the folks at Amazon who made this film based on Lady Susan decided to call it by a different title; they could have done that, but why choose a title of another existing Jane Austen work?  That's like going to see a film called Pride & Prejudice and seeing Northanger Abbey instead!  Very confusing.


I still benefited from seeing a entertaing movie and having a chance to enjoy not one, but two previously unread Jane Austen works.  Summer reading doesn't get much better than this!