The YouTube compilations, comically compacting the stock elements we all respond to so readily in the films, provide an amusing catalogue of them too: the hero turns his horse and rides off energetically, the hero enters a room and pierces the occupants with a look, the hero stares fixedly at the heroine across a crowded ballroom, the hero gallops through the rain, walks powerfully through the rain, dives into a lake, submerges his head under the bathwater, has a duel in the rain, chases after the heroine in the rain. Neither of them is wearing a hat. They search each other’s eyes (‘He looked the question’, as Austen says so suggestively at the erotic crux in Emma). It is a truth universally acknowledged that this does it for the girls. Cue the kiss, the climax of every Jane Austen film. It is usually made as passionate as possible, but there is only ever the one. More than one kiss, or the sight of subsequent hero–heroine canoodling (which the 1999 Mansfield Park and the 2007 Persuasion attempted), would be, in these circumstances, like demanding a second communion wafer.
* * *
Austen very obviously inspired the boom in ‘chick-lit’ books and romantic comedy films of the 1990s. Both emerged from and fed a new class of consumers, young unmarried women whose delayed search for a permanent mate had made the whole process seem urgent, even desperate. The hugely successful Bridget Jones books by the journalist Helen Fielding (which began as a newspaper column early in 1995) didn’t just give this demographic a name, ‘singletons’, but freely used Austen as a model. ‘Jane Austen’s plots are very good and have been market researched over a number of centuries,’ Helen Fielding said in an interview, ‘so I decided simply to steal one of them. I thought she wouldn’t mind and anyway she’s dead.’18 Fielding made the link explicit by naming Bridget’s dream man Mark Darcy, and, when the BBC dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice was broadcast later in the same year, incorporated Bridget’s thoughts on the production into the column. When the resulting book was going to be filmed, the author ‘was emphatic’ that Colin Firth should play her Mr Darcy too. The scriptwriting team was the author, Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis: Bridget Jones, Jane Austen and Four Weddings and a Funeral all rolled together in one ball.
The association of Austen with highly successful books and films like the Bridget Jones series, or Sex and the City, described by Dana Stevens in the New York Times as ‘a continual interrogation of Austen’s “universal truth”’,19 has led to her novels being read as guides to Finding Mr Right – read so literally that they spawn books such as The Regency Rules (following the retrograde 90s bestseller on how to behave in ways men find attractive, The Rules) and Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating, both ‘immense, incredible’ applications. One of the horrible ironies of Austen’s currency in contemporary popular culture is that she is referenced so freely and confidently in discussions of ‘empowerment’, ‘girl-power’ and all the other travesties of womanly self-fashioning that stand in for feminism in the present day.
The success of ‘chick-lit’ moved one British publisher, Hodder Headline, to cash in on the association in 2006 by rebranding Austen’s novels in pastel-coloured covers with swirly writing and butterflies, flowers and bird emblems. The press release said: ‘Who is the fairy godmother of women’s fiction? And who is still packaged like a dry, academic author, reaching only a tiny fraction of her potential audience? The answer, of course, is Jane Austen!’20 Wordsworth Editions were also sensitive to the off-putting plainness of Austen’s ‘packaging’ and in 2005 commissioned a new picture of the author for their reprint of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir. It was based on an engraving that first appeared in 1873 in an American publication, an ingenious riff on Lizars/Andrews’s version of Cassandra’s drawing, which is sometimes called ‘The Wedding-Ring Portrait’, as the artist has added a ring to the subject’s left hand. The hand doesn’t appear in the Technicolor ‘Wordsworth Makeover’ of 2005; there, Austen’s face is rouged, her eyes enlivened and her cap replaced by a strange plaited wig, in a shade of grey-blue. Helen Trayler, the managing director of Wordsworth Editions, justified the move thus: ‘The poor old thing didn’t have anything going for her in the way of looks. Her original portrait is very, very dowdy. It wouldn’t be appealing to readers, so I took it upon myself to commission a new picture of her. We’ve given her a bit of a makeover, with make-up and some hair extensions and removed her nightcap. Now she looks great – as if she’s just walked out of a salon.’
Even with hair extensions and Botox, no image of Jane Austen is likely to become valued for its beauty alone, as is the uncharacteristically romantic photograph of Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford which is the National Portrait Gallery’s all-time bestselling postcard. ‘She’s not a goddess. She has no copyright,’ the chairman of the Jane Austen Society told an interviewer; ‘It’s just what happens when someone is so popular, and if it brings her to a different readership then that’s good news.’ The literary agent Patrick Janson-Smith was equally philosophical about the ‘sexed-up’ picture, pointing out that modern author photos ‘are airbrushed the whole time, especially American lady authors of a certain age. It’s a shock to meet a writer when the reality falls a little short. We live in a shallow world where authors are increasingly sold on their appearance.’
* * *
The most remarkable turn in Austen’s global fame has been the popularity of film and television versions of her works in the past fifteen years, beginning with the BBC’s 1995 mini-series, Pride and Prejudice. There had been five previous TV adaptations of Austen’s most famous novel, one as early as 1938, when the technology was in its infancy and the transmitter at Alexandra Palace had a guaranteed range of only twenty-five miles. The subject was always going to be popular with audiences, even with only thirty lines of resolution on a handkerchief-sized screen. In fact, its familiarity made Sue Birtwistle, the producer of the 1995 series, anxious that her project would not get the green light, so she pitched it to the financial executives without at first mentioning the title, relating the story as if it had just been written: ‘“Well, there’s five girls aged 15 to 22 years old and their mother is desperate to get them married to rich men because, though some are beautiful, they are poor.”’ An executive was immediately excited by this and asked if the rights were available.21
When it was screened in the autumn of 1995, Birtwistle’s Pride and Prejudice did not just get massive viewing figures but instantly assumed a sort of authority; it took up a lot of time (five and a half hours – not much less time than it would take to read the book), the production was lavish and at pains to look authentic, and it was filmed on film rather than video (which gave the whole thing a classy, ‘movie’ look). The beloved story, reproduced in more detail than ever before in a witty and intelligent script by Andrew Davies, sprang to life with remarkable freshness: 40 per cent of the UK’s total viewing audience tuned in to witness its happy ending.
During the screening of the series, the actor playing Darcy, Colin Firth, became the nation’s number one heartthrob, a position he – or rather, he-as-the-character – retains virtually unchallenged to this day. The chemistry between him and the actress playing Lizzie Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) was enhanced by a real-life, off-camera fling, but the scene that made him famous was the one, invented by Andrew Davies, in which Darcy is shown brooding by the lake at Pemberley, then stripping off his outer garments, diving into the water and emerging with his clothes damp. Davies later said that the wet shirt hadn’t been deliberate, and that in fact he had expected Firth to take his shirt off, but the actor’s qualms led to a compromise. ‘I never thought a wet-shirt scene would be such a turn-on,’ Davies told the Sunday Times in 2007 of the sequence which is now considered one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history.22 But the matrons of England went mad. ‘There was a period, which went on for a long time, when you would go to parties and whenever you went into the kitchen there would be a picture of Mr Darcy and his wet shirt, tacked up over the dishwasher,’ Davies recalled. ‘I’m very proud of tha
t.’
The man himself was cagey about the whole business. ‘It honestly doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Firth told a reporter from the Independent in 2000; ‘I don’t have anything to do with anything I did six years ago. I don’t know if you remember how you spent your summer of ’94, but that’s how I spent my summer of ’94, and that’s about it.’23 Or, as Jane Austen herself would say, ‘seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind’.24
The series won several awards and sold immediately all round the world. When the video was released in the last week of transmission, the entire first run of 12,000 copies sold out within two hours. Fifty-eight thousand more sold by the end of the week, astonishing the BBC merchandising department: ‘it is unheard of for a video to sell even half as well, especially when viewers are able to tape the episodes at home for free’, a spokesman said.
If Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is now regularly given away free with newspapers, voted the nation’s favourite book and a literary treasure that ‘we can’t do without’, it is in great part because it is the book of the film. The superior popularity of the films has heartened some, who reasonably claim that it opens up the audience for all classic literature, but there are purists in odd places too. The ex-editor of the lad’s mag Nuts, Phil Hilton, has objected strongly to the vulgarisation of Austen’s texts: ‘She is about more than romance, that’s just the engine that drives the plot along,’ he told an interviewer from the BBC. ‘Unfortunately when adapted for film and TV the good stuff often ends up on the cutting room floor in favour of a handsome actor walking out of a lake.’25
All previous surges of interest in Austen had been focused on publications – the Memoir, the Letters, Love and Freindship – but in the mid-90s, without any newly discovered documents or pictures, without an anniversary even (which passed quietly in 1975), suddenly Jane Austen was everywhere. The eighteen months following Pride and Prejudice saw the release of Ang Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility, a Miramax Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, a BBC production, released as an art-house film, of Persuasion and the wittily parodic Clueless by Amy Heckerling, which set Emma in a modern-day Beverly Hills high school and mall. The Wall Street Journal spoke of ‘Austen-mania’ and Entertainment Weekly was moved to write up the phenomenon thus:
She doesn’t go to the see-and-be-seen parties. She’s reticent with the press. There are nasty rumors that she engaged in an incestuous relationship with her sister, for God’s sake. And frankly, she could use a makeover. But in this year alone, four of her novels have been adapted for the big and small screens. And with numerous World Wide Web sites devoted to her glory, she even holds her own with Internet pinup Brad Pitt. Not bad for a British broad who’s been dead for 178 years.
The article was accompanied by a photo of Jane Austen poolside, complete with cell phone and movie scripts. The phone must have been ringing constantly, for in the subsequent years there were further big-screen versions of Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, its vibrant Bollywood cousin, Bride and Prejudice, in which Austen’s novel was transposed into contemporary Sikh culture, and Kandukondain Kandukondain, a Bollywood adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. 2007 saw an elaborate packaging of television adaptations, old and new, into a ‘Jane Austen season’ on ITV, like a collected edition of books. It contained an excellent new Northanger Abbey (the least filmed of the titles) and Sense and Sensibility, both scripted by Andrew Davies, a new Mansfield Park and Persuasion, and an Emma from 1997, starring Kate Beckinsale. No one felt inclined to touch Pride and Prejudice, its previous small-screen version having attained an iconic status of its own, and when PBS screened the season as ‘The Complete Jane Austen’ in the States in the spring of 2007, they replayed the 1995 series in the empty slot, even though it was three times longer than any of the other films.
Douglas McGrath, a former scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live, and writer and director of the 1996 Emma, was candid about the appeal of Austen to film-makers:
I thought Jane Austen would be a good collaborator … because she writes, you know, superb dialogue, she creates memorable characters, she has an extremely clever skill for plotting – and she’s dead.26
Apart from being dead, and dead cheap (there are no copyright fees, of course, for any use of her texts), Austen was a great provider of compact storylines and crisp dialogue. ‘’90s sarcasm’s got nothing on Austen’s perfection of mean-it-with-a-sneer, say-it-with-a-smile dialogue,’ Entertainment Weekly concluded. ‘Yes, they’re formulaic – the aging, clever, not too beautiful girl always gets the guy, eventually – but that only suits Hollywood all the more.’
Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in 1996, scripted by and starring Emma Thompson, linked arms with several other successful films of the time in ways that helped propel the idea of a ‘Jane Austen film’ out of the ‘classic’ ghetto and into the mainstream. Thompson, as Elinor Dashwood, was in some ways reprising her Oscar-winning performance as Margaret Schlegel in the 1992 Merchant Ivory production of Howard’s End, another role in which the elder sister, ostensibly less ‘feeling’ and spontaneous than her vivacious sibling, has resources which are shown to be deeper, more tender, private and, ultimately, more attractive. Thompson had herself in mind for the role when she wrote the screenplay (which also won her an Oscar for Best Adaptation), adding the completely un-Austenian (but utterly Forsterish) ‘dearest’ to many of Elinor’s speeches. It makes her first few appearances in the film sound as if Emma/Elinor has just walked off one set and on to the other.
The film also starred Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars, acting the character as the same tongue-tied, minimal-eye-contact toff as his wildly successful role in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was taking the British box-office by storm just as Sense and Sensibility went into production. The casting followed the writer’s wishes, for Thompson had had Grant in mind for Edward all along.27 The production team was delighted at his acceptance of the role on grounds of crowd-pulling power, but there was another level of connection that was important structurally. Referencing Four Weddings so heavily, the audience could rest assured that Edward in Sense and Sensibility will, despite his ‘shyness’ and preexisting engagement to Lucy Steele, end up married to the heroine.
Both Colin Firth and Hugh Grant later starred in Bridget Jones and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, backing up the feeble claims of those films to Austen-likeness, and all the latest Jane Austen adaptations have drawn from the same small pool of familiar British actors: Victoria Hamilton, Sophie Thompson, Greg Hicks, Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Williams, Greta Scacchi and Kate Beckinsale have all been double-cast in Austen adaptations. As Julian Barnes observed caustically in a review of the 1983 Mansfield Park on the BBC, such casting strategies are part of a winning formula: ‘lots of raked gravel, background music, mob-capped actors vaguely familiar from previous classic serials, and a deceptive deference to the surface of the text’ are all part of ‘the National Trust approach to literature’.28
As Barnes implied, the concept of overkill hardly applies in this arena. Twenty-five years on, you can switch on the television in Britain midway through any Sunday evening and almost certainly see a carriage jingling up or down a driveway, or a costumed dance, or a candle-lit dinner party. Thackeray, Austen, Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Austen, Austen, Gaskell: the author is really the least important factor. They are popular products because they are seamlessly reliable and predictable. The Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey commissioned by ITV for their 2007 ‘Jane Austen season’ had almost identical ‘time passing’ sequences in the titles, showing the heroine as a child laughing and playing ball games with her siblings/cousins, melting into the adult character doing the same thing a few years later. But the visual cliché hardly mattered; its repetition on two consecutive Sundays in March might indeed have been welcome to much of the audience. These were ‘Jane Austen films’, and here was the latest dose.
For decades, Robert Z. Leonard’s Pride
and Prejudice was not only the only film adaptation of that novel, but of any Austen novel, and seemed totally sufficient. But there is a new tolerance for multiplication of treatments in the media that shows a degree of seepage from critical theory through to mass culture. No number of versions of a book, adaptations of a subject or retellings of a popular story are too many to watch or sell, it seems, and few subjects get to the point of needing ‘revival’ any more, they are so constantly kept before our eyes. Sue Birtwistle felt it wise to conceal her desire to remake Pride and Prejudice in the 1980s, but she’d have no trouble pitching another Austen series, especially not the same one, again today. The technological advances that allow people to see films over and over again on their TVs and computers have fostered a totally different way of watching, to do with micro-knowledge, ‘special features’ and a sort of super-familiarity (rather than over-familiarity) with the material. Thus, you can buy a favourite movie almost as soon as it has left the theatres, only to find that you are just about ready for the next version. The back catalogue can never get too crowded, as the author of Confessions of an Austen Addict has put it: ‘If there were 50 adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, I’d see them all. I’d buy them all. I’d play them all till they started skipping and I had to buy a new one.’29
Jane's Fame Page 27
