The solution proposed was to build up Susan’s mistreated daughter, Frederica, as the story’s true heroine, which smelled of formula - besides which I then had no good ideas for her beyond what was in the original.
Many saw the amorality, conniving and heartless commentary of the two principals as an insurmountable barrier. While the script, especially Austen’s pre-Wildean flights of humor, started to become entertaining as a document to be read, as a potential film it still lacked the spark of life. The back and forth of several letters, cut up and shuffled, became dialogue scenes between the epistolary principals - talking that advanced narrative, sometimes in leaps, but that more often consisted of the amoral Susan and her friend Alicia’s plotting before and gloating after their plots were sprung. However, the letter form also provides a wealth of first-person thought and declarations, which with Austen is apt to be funny and insightful. ” In adapting an epistolary work, the initial barrier is geography - characters writing each other letters are normally far apart, those in comedies within earshot. Reading the back matter to an edition of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” I stumbled across her concluded-but-unfinished novella “Lady Susan” - the title her nephew gave the story when he published it half a century after her death.Īt first glance, “Lady Susan” seemed slight and awkward, but it had a quality of anarchic Oscar Wildean humor and a sensational lead female role that a favorite actress could have played brilliantly - had she been 10 years older.Īusten had left Lady Susan Vernon’s story in the 18th century epistolary form in which she had also started “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice.
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