As he observed in his famous book After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that “Jane Austen’s moral point of view and the narrative form of her novels coincide.
Austen uses the novel’s form to contemplate such themes as an indirect way of doing moral philosophy. The contemplation is one of virtue, as seen through the novelistic lenses of irony and comedy, just like Austen. Stillman’s efforts in Love & Friendship, to finish a project that Austen started, result in his most explicit and refined literary contemplation to date. With his return to Jane Austen, who seemed overtly to be a main inspiration for Metropolitan, since mentions and sightings of her books play a highly significant role in that movie’s plot, Mr. There is an essay in that volume by George Sim Johnston, “Whit Stillman, Novelist,” and the designation seems apt for a director whose refined literary sensibilities always shape the way he tells a story on screen. Stillman aficionados will also want to add the fine collection of essays edited by Mark Henrie to their collection of books, Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman (ISI Books, 2001). But the screenplay to Metropolitan, along with the screenplay to his second film, Barcelona (1994), has nonetheless been published in a nice edition with an introduction by Graham Fuller: Barcelona & Metropolitan: Tales of Two Cities (Faber and Faber, 1994). Stillman likes to take his time on his projects, in order to get things just right. To his credit, because of a meticulous attention to detail, Mr. Stillman also had a novelization of his highly impressive first film, Metropolitan (1990), in the works once upon a time, but that project fell by the wayside when an impatient publisher apparently couldn’t agree with him on a timeline for delivery of the manuscript. You may have trouble tracking down a copy, but the book is certainly worth the effort. After his third film, The Last Days of Disco (1998), he also published a 339-page version of that story as a novel: The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Publishing a novel to complement his film project is not unprecedented for Mr. Austen’s Lady Susan is included in the back of the volume, as that book’s letters make a magnificent supplement to the main pages. Not only that, but also he has reworked Austen’s story into a novel of his own, Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated (Little, Brown and Company, 2016), to accompany the film. Stillman takes this piece of Austen juvenilia, an epistolary novella, and fleshes it out into a screenplay faithful to the spirit of Austen. Whit Stillman’s new movie, Love & Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan.
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