This Week in Literary History: The Most Beloved Pride and Prejudice Adaptation Premieres on the BBC

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The most beloved Pride and Prejudice adaptation premieres on the BBC.

On September 24, 1995, the six-part, $9.5 million, now-iconic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—one of the greatest literary TV adaptations ever made, if you ask us—premiered on the BBC.

Though many Pride and Prejudices (Prides and Prejudice?) have followed it—including the ones you know, and also the ones you might not, like a P&P on Fire Island, a deeply confusing dating show, and whatever this John Mulaney thing is—the BBC’s version, which stars Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth’s wet shirt, is arguably still the most beloved, even 26 years later. (Just recall how everyone geeked out when Ehle (who also starred in Contagion) read from Pride and Prejudice on her Instagram during (the first) quarantine.) Part of this is certainly down to the novel itself, which is (also arguably) Austen’s most famous, and inarguably a masterpiece. These days, Nazi sympathizers are sentenced to read it by judges, we obsess over the portraits of people who might have been immortalized within it, but most importantly, we all still read it.

As Jane Austen superfan Martin Amis observed, when the BBC’s series first aired, it “empt[ied] the streets of England every Sunday night,” and immediately captured the hearts of even the non-reading public. “As the new serial got into its stride, distressed viewers rang up the BBC in tears, pleading for the assurance that fate would smile on the star-crossed pair and that all would yet be well. I was not among these callers, but I sympathized,” he writes. “And I quite understood why the Pride and Prejudice video, released midway through the run, sold out in two hours. When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of 15, I read 20 pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything.”

“Pride and Prejudice suckers you,” Amis concludes. “Amazingly—and, I believe, uniquely—it goes on suckering you.”

Very true. But why is the adaptation so good? Firstly, it is faithful—if not entirely (no adaptation can be) than at least enough to (mostly) satisfy. “Andrew Davies, who adapted the novel for television, was shrewd enough to regard his function as largely obstetrical—to get the thing out of the page and onto the screen in as undamaged a state as possible,” Amis writes, before nitpicking a number of his choices and comparing himself, like “every Janeite” to “the Princess tormented by the Pea—we are so tender, so delicate.” As for the performances, they are, Amis writes, “a testimony to great strength in depth and to the accuracy and inconspicuousness of Simon Langton’s direction. Ehle is “not quite the perfect Elizabeth, for such a creature could not exist,” but Firth—despite Davies’ initial hesitation on account of his “gingerish hair”—is “an insidiously persuasive Darcy, as he makes his journey from probity to democratic right feeling.” And most importantly, perhaps, it is totally sexy. (Though we may all disagree forever about which Mr. Darcy is best, no amount of research will ever be able to convince us that he isn’t hot.) Amis doesn’t have much to say about that, but he does admit that “the sensualism imported by Davies and Langton brings one unarguable gain: all those creamy, dreamy scenes in the bedroom shared by Elizabeth and Jane, with the candles lit and the hair down, make us feel the crucial heaviness of their sisterly love. We are reminded that the emotional argument of the book is intimately bound up with this relationship; and we feel its weight without realizing why it weighs so much.”

So why not binge Pride and Prejudice this week? You could even follow it up with this soothing virtual tour of Jane Austen’s house or enjoy it alongside your own Austen-themed feast, which you can cook while listening to all of Jane Austen’s favorite songs. Just don’t fall prey to any manufactured controversies—after everything she’s given us, Jane deserves to rest in peace. 

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Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen

TWO OPINIONS

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle class

Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

Whatever ‘Bloomsbury’ may think of Jane Austen, she is not by any means one of my favourites. I’d give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontës wrote—if my reason did not compel me to see that she is a magnificent artist. What I shall proceed to find out, from her letters, when I’ve time, is why she failed to be much better than she was. Something to do with sex, I expect; the letters are full of hints already that she suppressed half of her in her novels.

In other (old)

news this week

The always inspiring Lord Byron writes to Thomas Moore, telling him he has completed the first Canto of Don Juan (September 19, 1818) • The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists meets at the Sorbonne in Paris featuring speakers Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon (September 19, 1956) • The Washington Post and The New York Times publish the Unabomber’s manifesto (September 19, 1995) • Honoré de Balzac travels to Poland to meet his once-anonymous longtime critic Eveline Hańska, whom he will marry shortly before his death the following year (September 20, 1849) • Jean-Paul Sartre is conscripted into the French Army as a meteorologist (September 20, 1939) • J.R.R. Tolkien’s dearly beloved novel The Hobbit is published (September 21, 1937) • Shirley Jackson’s also dearly beloved novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle is published (September 21, 1962) • Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which some people also like, is published (September 21, 1964) • Edgar Allan Poe marries his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm (September 22, 1835) • Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (one of many iconic essays) is published in the Saturday Evening Post (September 23, 1967) • The funeral of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda becomes a focus for protests against the new government of Augusto Pinochet (September 25, 1973)

THE OBSCURE EDITIONS OF JANE AUSTEN NOVELS THAT MADE HER INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN

JANE AUSTEN’S PRACTICAL CONCERNS ABOUT MARRIAGE ARE STILL RELEVANT

HOW I BECAME A JANE AUSTEN SUPERFAN

“Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.”

–WILLIAM GOLDING

Born this week in 1885

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”

–BELL HOOKS

Born this week in 1952

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