The declarations cited above occur during the course of Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated, Whit Stillman’s novelization of his 2016 film, Love and Friendship, itself an adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella, Lady Susan. Many, though, have urged me to recount my own part of this story, that I relate something of my connection to it and my own history from which I have hitherto refrained, with a few punctual exceptions. The reader will perhaps appreciate the restraint I have exercised in removing myself from the narrative. John Murray, has chosen to include is the last she prepared, in which she turned her account of this history (already decidedly false) into the “epistolary” form then fashionable. Most of these letters, in fact, never existed. The author meanwhile hides her identity under the mask of anonymity, a privilege not afforded her victim, whose actual name is announced in the very title. . . Calling this farrago of misrepresentation a “True Account” is the boldest of libels.
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