
Kate Beckinsale plays Susan Vernon, newly widowed.

Most of these, though not all, are juvenilia, and “Lady Susan,” an epistolary novel that probably dates from the middle of the seventeen-nineties, has been transformed by Stillman into a brisk and cutting comedy of manners. Just when we thought that all of Jane Austen’s work had been exhausted by TV and cinema, Whit Stillman reminds us of the short fictions and fragments that still remain to be mined.
