'Only Four Months a Widow': The Softened Colours of Lady Susan's Wardrobe in Whit Stillman's 'Love and Friendship' (2016)

Wetherall Dickson, Leigh (2018) 'Only Four Months a Widow': The Softened Colours of Lady Susan's Wardrobe in Whit Stillman's 'Love and Friendship' (2016). In: After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings. Palgrave. ISBN 9783319958934

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Abstract

This essay examines the impact that cinematic sartorial choices have upon Jane Austen’s most audacious and amoral protagonist and, by extension, what the name ‘Jane Austen’ conveys to a modern audience. The full mourning implied in the source text makes clear Lady Susan’s Machiavellian character and gives real bite to Austen’s satire upon the discrepancy between surface and substance. The softer colours in which Lady Susan is presented in Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship (2016) reduces her ruthless manipulation of social propriety to a gentler comedy of manners and marriage that has become synonymous with the ‘Austen’ heritage brand of visual pleasure and cultural tourism.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	P300 Media studies Q300 English studies
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User:	Paul Burns
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2018 09:25
Last Modified:	11 Oct 2019 14:47
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/35430

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