![]() “Keep your swords as sharp as your wits,” Mr. Their father (Charles Dance) refers to them as his “warrior daughters,” and in the movie’s reimagining of Austen’s society, training in martial arts and weaponry is as important for young ladies as learning to sew or play the piano. The rigid gender roles of Regency society force people like Lady Susan to use whatever means they have at their disposal to achieve some level of independence, and the same goes for the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, whose life of constant peril paradoxically affords them a degree of autonomy that Lady Susan is denied. She always finds a way to blame others for her scheming, making it appear that it’s their fault for not always giving her the benefit of the doubt.Īnd yet Stillman and Beckinsale make her into the most fascinating, vibrant character in the movie. “If she were going to be jealous, she should not have married such a charming man,” Lady Susan says of Lady Lucy Manwaring (Jenn Murray), whose husband Lady Susan takes pleasure in seducing. Various rules of decorum often prevent the characters in Austen stories from saying what they truly feel, and part of what makes Love & Friendship so deliriously entertaining is that Lady Susan always finds a way to speak her mind without breaking those unspoken rules. She’d be a formidable match for the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Lena Headey), the eye-patched zombie-slaying champion of England. If there were zombies around in her version of Regency England, Lady Susan would most certainly have them doing her bidding. There are occasional implications that the death of Lady Susan’s late husband may have been deliberate in some way, and both Lady Susan and her American best friend Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny) - the only person as unsparing and unsentimental as Lady Susan is - lament that Alicia’s much older husband (Stephen Fry) has not succumbed to some illness yet. “There’s a certain pleasure in making a person predetermined to dislike instead acknowledge one’s superiority,” she remarks to her fawning companion Mrs. Reginald is intelligent, attractive and wealthy, but for Lady Susan, perhaps the most important thing is that he’s a challenge. Upon arriving, she sets her sights on handsome young Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), brother of Charles’ wife Catherine (Emma Greenwell). ![]() Lady Susan’s reputation as “the most accomplished flirt in all of England” precedes her as she takes up residence at Churchill, the country estate owned by her late husband’s brother Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards). ![]() As a widow, Lady Susan is financially dependent on the generosity of others, but she’s romantically free in a way that few women of her time period are, and she indulges in that freedom by engaging in dalliances with pretty much any man she chooses, regardless of his marital status. But Lady Susan is entirely selfish, interested in her own position and comfort, even at the expense of her timid daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). As much of a busybody as Emma Woodhouse is in Austen’s Emma, at least her intentions are honorable. In Love & Friendship, Kate Beckinsale plays the delightfully passive-aggressive Lady Susan Vernon, a freeloading widow who revels in meddling in the lives of others, generally to secure the best outcome for herself.
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