There’s a scene in American director Whit Stillman’s debut Metropolitan (1990) where his Manhattan debutantes start riffing on Jane Austen. Eventually her detractor Tom (Edward Clements) – a middle-class kid who’s fallen in with a self-styled socialite rat pack,whose epic was drawn heavily from Stillman’s own – admits he’s never actually read any of Austen’s work. “You don’t hold to hold read a book to hold an opinion on it,” he says with conviction. Some critics considered Metropolitan a modern take on Mansfield Park, and though the influence of Austen’s astute comedies of manners can be seen throughout Stillman’s oeuvre – an...
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