Pride and Prejudice: Adaptations of Austen

[Pearly Di]

In the BBC version, I felt like they wanted her to represent impetuosity and sort of "the animal in humans". She was always tired, or hungry, or thirsty or whatever. Very into self gratification, etc. I wasn't entirely satisfied with their Lydia either, but I liked her a good deal better than this one! :D:D:D:D:D

That's a very good observation about BBC Lydia. I think that's what Book Lydia is meant to convey too, isn't she? Julia Sawalha, who was Lydia in the BBC P&P, was about 26 when she played the part. It's an amazing piece of acting because she really looks and acts just like a 15 year old!

What was your opinion of the newly acted Georgianna???

Since she seemed to be in the film for all of 5 minutes, I can't honestly say I have a strong opinion about her. I thought Emilia Fox was pretty good as Georgiana in the BBC production, despite the fact that she bore no physical resemblance to Firth. Book Georgiana is even shyer than Fox made her.

In the film, I seemed to miss Wickham being a villain too.

That whole sub-plot was given such sketchy treatment I wondered why they bothered.

And how did you feel about them skipping the meeting with Miss Bingley at Pemberly?? I think Firth captured Darcy's "...it is now many months since i thought her the handsomest woman...." speech, and shut that mean Miss Bingley right up!!

Well, that's film adaptation for you ... a lot of things get truncated. I love that scene in the BBC, and Anna Chancellor was superb as Caroline Bingley (what a cow!!) but I thought Kelly Reilly also did a great job. She was perhaps rather more sexually knowing than she ought to have been, but on the other hand, perhaps that's not implausible. This is Regency England, after all, not Victorian England.

[Actually, I think it's Georgian England, since the film is set in 1797 (the year Austen began P&P), whereas the BBC adaptation is set later on, around 1810 (which is closer to the date of the book's actual publication). ]

I have always loved Austen's observation that Miss Bingley is left to enjoy the triumph of having made him say what gave nobody but herself any pain! :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

Jane Austen, Mistress of the Snark. Nobody does it better.

I'll tell you who else was really brilliant in the BBC ... Joanna David as the terribly nice and very astute Aunt Gardner. Man, is she on the ball!

Penelope Wilton played the aunt in the film. She's Ian Holm's ex-wife.

[Wildwood]

Amanda Chancellor....I have to remember her name!! She has become one of my favorite actors, because in everything that I have seen her in, she completely owns the part. She disappears into it so entirely that I believe her to be whatever-it-is.

The first place I saw her that she made a real impression on me was Four Weddings & A Funeral. Duckface! She was hilarious with it! Then I saw her in the BBC P&P, and she just became Miss Bingley. I totally despised her. Wanted to just smack the smirk right off her face! :D:D:D:D

The new Miss Bingley didn't even register with me. Like the Wickam subplot, I think they short-shrifted her!

Anyhow -I have seen Ms Chancellor in a couple of other things - but my poor memory will not cough up names at the moment - and I have enjoyed her every time! :D:D:D:D:D Very good at her craft!

I agree with you that they should have done more with Wickam. But then - they were hampered by time, weren't they?? Maybe if they'd had five hours to play with????

No matter what, though, I don't plan on every forgiving them for their treatment of Mr. Bennet. Altogether a different man than in the BOOK!
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

And - totally off topic - Diamond....did you encounter "Lady Susan" yet? I found it by accident when I bought an omnibus of works by Jane Austen. It has all her stuff in it. I reread them all, just because I could! :D:D:D:D:D

And when I got to the end, there was an as yet unknown-to-me epistilary novel: "Lady Susan". And it is hilarious!! Right up there with Persuasion, in my opinion. :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[vison]

I enjoy anything written by Jane Austen, but did not at all enjoy those attempts that were made to "finish" the unfinished works. A little pure Jane Austen is better than a lot of imitation Jane Austens, IMHO.


Persuasion. Well, I love Persuasion a lot, but it shows Jane Austen at once at her most tender and at her most savage, don't you agree?

[Primula Baggins]

I've never seen a sequel or completion of an Austen work that was worth the time I spent reading it. There is one "reimagining" that I think stands on its own as a good book: Joan Aiken's Jane Fairfax, which is a retelling of Emma from Jane's point of view. But it's not an Austen pastiche or imitation; it's just an enjoyable book in its own right.

In the same vein, but on a more ordinary plane, I also enjoyed Pamela Aidan's trilogy Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, which of course is Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view (and heavily influenced by the BBC film). It's got serious flaws, but again the author doesn't try to write an Austen pastiche—which of course she can't, as Jane Austen never wrote from a man's point of view.

Most sequels I've tried have been dreadfully written (the Berdoll one that spells Elizabeth's name wrong throughout, for example, even besides all the sex) and/or completely "off" in period details and/or about characters with the same names but otherwise no recognizable trace of the Austen characters and/or boring.

I can understand wishing to know more about the characters, but the fact is that the stories end where they do because a novel by Jane Austen can no longer be written about the characters—all suspense is at an end, and they're happily married or about to be.

[truehobbit]

But instead he puts his own dignity on the line, repeatedly. I think if the BBC adaptation had not shown us so clearly that his attachment to Elizabeth was strong and passionate, his behavior would not have made sense dramatically. As it doesn't in the book, if the reader doesn't fill in the missing information.

The problem is that something has to be shown in a film—much more than in a book, where Austen can simply not tell us things and leave them to our imagination. In a film, we see Darcy in scene after scene. We have to see something going on behind his eyes, or he might as well be a mannequin.

I think it's all shown in Darcy's face. Firth does that quite well, and so does McFayaden, IMO. As you say, this something goes on behind his eyes. Not in the bathtub.

Julia Sawalha, who was Lydia in the BBC P&P, was about 26 when she played the part. It's an amazing piece of acting because she really looks and acts just like a 15 year old!

Except that she sounds as if she'd been a two-packages-a-day smoker for the last ten years.
Ok, I've known girls who sounded like that, so it's not impossible. Maybe she's had a throat inflammation when she was younger or so.

But the added scenes of Lydia and Wickham in the BBC version - *shudder* - what on earth made them come up with that nonsense?
Taking away the surprise about Darcy's intervention, too.
Made those of my hairs that are puristy stand on end.

[Wildwood]

Vison, I totally agree! Anne seems to be the only person in her family with any real sense. Austen really skewers the rest of her family. :D:D:D:D:D

SO - am I the only person who has found "Lady Susan"? I don't have the book handy, but I fell pretty certain the info in the book indicated that Austen, herself,had written it. I don't *think* it was written by anyone else, or finished by anyone else, after her death. But now I am on fire with curiosity to know it for sure. Probably have to send the tall, dark and handsome to find my book so I can say for sure!
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

Really and Truly, no one else knows anything about "Lady Susan"??
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Wildwood]

Hey! Look what I found:

http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ladysusn.html

According to their information, she wrote this little novel around 1805-ish. But it was published after she died. Someone connected with her provided the title but it doesn't say anything about that person having done any of the writing.

So - I leave it to the Janeites among us to school me on this issue. This is just one website after all. (Tall, dark, and handsome just retrieved my book for me. It was outside in my very cold car. I use it for my emergency read when I have doctor appts, or traffic jams, or just need to wait for any length of time!!) :D:D:D:D:D

Anyhow - I will read the foreword, again, to see what the publisher had to say on it??? Who knows something more of this??? We wants to know......... :D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I googled Lady Susan, and found no indication that any of it was written by anyone other then Jane Austen.

[truehobbit]

Hmmmh, it's not in my collection of Austen's early works. Or maybe it used to go under a different title...

ETA: nope, there's nothing as long as 40 letters in that collection.

If it's 1805 it's not an early piece anyway, though, so maybe that's why it wasn't included.

[Wildwood]

I just zipped around that site for a little while. There are a lot of her letters to various people posted there. I was quite enteretained, just reading them. She really could turn a phrase, couldn't she?
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

I feel confident, at least, that she did write "Lady Susan". I have read it several times. It's really really funny. Oh - by teh by - that site I referred to, above, has "Lady Susan" posted there. You can actually read it there. I assume this is legal?? No idea! :D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Primula Baggins]

Jane Austen is long out of copyright—anybody can publish her work anywhere.

[vison]

Jane Austen wrote "Lady Susan". It was an early work and not published in her lifetime.

[Wildwood]

Vison - have you read it?? I found it very entertaining, obviously. I love the way Lady Susan expertly manipulates her situation, to get things lined up the way she wants them to be. I also love that Austen finally skewers her; like Saruman, trying to use his entrancing speech on too many diverse people, all at once, Lady Susan tries to work her arts on too many people at one time. It shows how deception really only works when used in small, controlled doses! :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

Clearly - it is not on par with the fully developed, published novels, as far as writing goes; but in terms of making me, as a reader, understand the characters of the various letter writers, and - through their words - giving me insight as to events that are occuring among them - it is very very satisfying!

When I read it, I always wish she'd turned it into a full-blown novel; but I think it must have been at the outside edge of how far she was willing to go down the path of exploring unseemly behavior in a woman, etc! Just a guess, though.....
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Aravar]

As an aside on other authors using Austen's characters, I found this in a cynical novel called 'A Very English Agent' by Julian Rathbone (the protagonist is being used by the Government as a spy and agent provocateur against Radicals and the like). This action takes place at a safe-house in Derbyshire, where the owner is seen:

"A Mr_________", the man from the Foreign Office continues. "Lives in the west wing now. Once a very wealthy man but lost a packet when the negroes created all that trouble in Jamaica back in thirty-four. Before that happened he married beneath him, that is to say his wife came from a family who were almost poor, she being one of five sisters. It was a marriage of the heart, which means of course that they soon tired of each other. It has been said he beat her [ ] She now lives in Bath with her sister, the widow of Colonel________ who, you may recall, made a fortune in India....

Charlie turns back to the window. Mr _______ is indeed behaving very oddly. He is divesting himself of all his clothes. When he is quite naked he dives into the lake and comes up with his head festooned in fleshy lily-pads and their succulent stalks. His dogs bark at him. This is not, Charlie decides, the behaviour of a real gentleman, however unfortunate or touched.

The two blanked out names are given in the book. I can't think why. I'm sure most of the author's readers would work it out on their own.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Has anyone noticed that one of Jane Austen's heroines played baseball?

[Aravar]

Has anyone noticed that one of Jane Austen's heroines played baseball?

It is a game for girls, after all.

[Primula Baggins]

Not only played baseball; she preferred it to music.

The novel never states whether she was a southpaw.

[vison]

She was almost pretty, remember.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, eventually, anyway.

[truehobbit]

"A Mr_________", the man from the Foreign Office continues. "Lives in the west wing now. Once a very wealthy man but lost a packet when the negroes created all that trouble in Jamaica back in thirty-four. Before that happened he married beneath him, that is to say his wife came from a family who were almost poor, she being one of five sisters. It was a marriage of the heart, which means of course that they soon tired of each other. It has been said he beat her [ ] She now lives in Bath with her sister, the widow of Colonel________ who, you may recall, made a fortune in India....

Charlie turns back to the window. Mr _______ is indeed behaving very oddly. He is divesting himself of all his clothes. When he is quite naked he dives into the lake and comes up with his head festooned in fleshy lily-pads and their succulent stalks. His dogs bark at him. This is not, Charlie decides, the behaviour of a real gentleman, however unfortunate or touched.