In 2002 the BBC produced a low-budget biographical film about Austen, called The Real Jane Austen, that interspersed actors in costume with a documentary narration, but this was a lone attempt to dramatise the author’s life until the 2007 bio-pic, Becoming Jane. Based (very loosely) on Jon Spence’s 2003 biography, Becoming Jane Austen, the film was a somewhat deranged mixture of actual facts about Austen’s life, complete fictions about Austen’s life, and references to Austen’s novels, letters and juvenilia that presented Austen’s known flirtation with Tom Lefroy in 1796–7 as a life-changing event, not only the direct model for the plots of several of her novels (specifically Pride and Prejudice), but the trigger to ‘finding her voice’.
No casual viewer of Becoming Jane would have the slightest idea how ‘true to facts’ it is (although if enormous liberties were taken with, say, costumes or props, almost everyone would recognise that something was awry), and even viewers who know the main details of Austen’s life would have no reason to suspect any particular part of the film of inaccuracy. Writers make poor subjects for bio-pics, as they lead, on the whole, pretty dull lives. And, of course, the whole concept of a truthful bio-pic is very questionable in the first place. The audience of a bio-pic has little choice but to treat everything they see with equal credibility, and that, in time, affects how they visualise the subject, think of the life in question, and think of the books. One can imagine the student essays of the future that cite Austen’s bête noire Lady Gresham (an invented character in Becoming Jane) as a model for Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
An entertaining shift of this kind was perceptible a couple of years ago in the long-running BBC radio soap The Archers, in which Nigel Pargetter (aristocratic owner of Lower Loxley Hall) tried to think up a romantic gesture with which to impress his parvenu wife Elizabeth on their wedding anniversary, choosing to give her a specially bound copy of Pride and Prejudice and ‘do a Mr Darcy’ by jumping into his own stately lake. Another character in the programme, discussing the difficulties of the plan, says, ‘That’s the trouble with books,’ implying that Austen, and not scriptwriter Andrew Davies, wrote the lake scene depicted in the 1995 film. On the programme’s message board, a thread called ‘Mr Darcy know all alert’ soon put members right on that score, prompting the following discussion:
Does not knowing P+P backwards mean you are are [sic] Philistine? I did the tiresome thing for GCE about a thousand years ago. Although I passed, I have expunged the thing from my memory as far as possible – IIRC
There were posh women in bonnets trying to force posh men to marry them, in order to buy more bonnets and ribbons. Is that about right? (czechmate67)
Well, leaving aside the subtle observation of human affairs, the incisive examination of social mores and habits, the delicate portrait of British society which still resonates in many ways, the insight into the small details and domestic arrangements of a society of a period more usually studied against the grander and dramatic background of the Napoleonic wars, the perfectly-judged delineation of petty human misunderstandings, embarrassments, happinesses and unhappiness, and finally the very cleverly resolved love affairs which wind throughout to allow true emotion finally in the face of withering snobbery, judgement, bigotry and social constraints, I’d say yes, pretty much just bonnets and ribbons, czechmate.:-) (Bella Milbanke)
I’ve read P&P a couple of times, but it never occurred to me the lake scene wasn’t in the book. Guess it just goes to show how a great movie scene (or a lot of hype) can leave an indelible impression on the mind, and change the perception of reality (or fiction). (Mile High Scotty)
To which another poster, ‘carrickbend’, answered, ‘it was a Zeitgeist thing’.30
Some academics professionally interested in keeping abreast of the Zeitgeist read the film versions of Austen books as texts themselves, applying the same sort of language and analysis to Andrew Davies’s witty interpolations as they do to the novels he has adapted. Thus Cheryl L. Nixon has written about Darcy’s dive as a revelation of his emotional capabilities and expression of a Romantic bond with nature. On his own (he thinks) at Pemberley, Darcy can ‘“strip down” to his essential self, a cleansing of social prejudices from his mind’. The dive enacts a rebaptism, ‘a rebirth of his love for Elizabeth’.31 In the same book, the editors Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield claim that ‘the image carves a new facet into the text’,32 an unfortunate metaphor, perhaps, suggesting reduction, whittling away and even defacement.
The line between one kind of fiction (Austen’s texts) and another (things that have been designed to illustrate or evoke them) is, in cases like this, entirely erased. Like the 1890s vogue for Hugh Thomson’s illustrations to Pride and Prejudice, it seems to place the centre of attention in the wrong place. Deidre Lynch, a prolific writer on Austen, has complained that the Austen movies in the last decade ‘have almost overshadowed the books: Austenians touring country houses turned film sets that Jane Austen never saw inspect exhibits of costumes made for the movies, clothing that nineteenth-century people never wore … In the construction of that imagined territory “Jane Austen’s world”, the balance between our authoring and her authoring may have gone off-kilter.’33
Valérie Cossy, a student of literary translations of Austen, has likened the recent proliferation of film versions of Austen novels to the rough early translations in French in their relationships to the original texts: the film scripts ‘seem to take each novel as some raw material on the basis of which one can create a new artefact, better suited to the expectations of one’s audience’.34 This is certainly true of the modernisation of manners and language in the films, the high gloss of all the costumes and locations – even the supposedly squalid locations – and the transmission of a sufficiently impressive erotic charge. Some films have taken the licence to translate much further, however. Patricia Rozema’s 1999 version of Mansfield Park is, as Rachel Brownstein has pointed out,35 a product of scholarship in some ways, alert to recent discourses about the book and to the increasing familiarity of readers with material such as Austen’s letters and juvenilia. Rozema (who wrote the script of the film as well as directing it) entirely abandoned the author’s characterisation of Fanny Price and makes her into a fantasy version of the young Austen herself, a spirited, would-be writer. So spirited, in fact, that, played by the beautiful Frances O’Connor, she often appears angry and passionate, displays an energetically heaving bosom and does a lot of galloping about – in the rain, naturally.
The 2007 ITV production of the same book for television followed this wholescale substitution of Austen’s Fanny Price with a ‘feisty’ contemporary girl, boldly and bizarrely casting TV favourite of that year, Billie Piper, as the supposedly tongue-tied and mousy heroine. Co-producer Suzan Harrison explained the disparity between the character in the book and the character in their film with wonderful circularity, ‘once you’ve cast Billie, you could never pretend she’s anything less than startling-looking, so we had to find other ways to emphasise her difference’. Fanny Price’s piety disappeared altogether, being ‘something people understand less well now’; similarly, Edmund was made ‘more playful, he’s sillier, he drinks more … All of us were keen not to be corseted by the decorum of the time.’36 Actual corsets of the time were, however, pivotal to the production, and Billie Piper’s substantial embonpoint forever filling the shot was enough to distract any viewer from the peculiarities of the screenplay.
The fact is that people are no longer very particular about how or where they get their Austen, or what Austen it is they get. Even the most faithful or sympathetic rendition on film of one of Austen’s novels is charming in an entirely different way from the book’s charm, and even the most authentic treatment can be appropriated inauthentically. The biographical drama made for television in 2007, Miss Austen Regrets, resembled every other ‘Austenmania’ film in terms of its production values (an absolute necessity for the core audience) and quality cast from the ‘period drama pool’, but worked from a high
ly intelligent and thoughtful script. The writer, Gwyneth Hughes, made better use of the available material (especially Austen’s Letters) than any biographer to date and subtly suggested a reading of Austen’s mature character that included waspishness and frustration. By closely following the letters of 1815 in which Austen observes the flirtation between her niece Fanny Knight and Charles Haden, the doctor tending to Henry in London, Hughes came up with a revelatory scene that suggested the author’s mixed, strong and possibly slightly drunken feelings on this occasion. For once, a film version of ‘things Austen’ made a contribution to interpretation, rather than simply wallowing in attractive costumes and props.
But the ‘Zeitgeist thing’ has a tendency to make everything relax into a universally digestible form; not dumbing down so much as out. Gwyneth Hughes’s script and Olivia Williams’s intelligent impersonation of Jane Austen may have marked a high point in plausible drama about the author, but that isn’t how the film has been represented subsequently. Posed photos of Williams in costume, 1) looking attractive, and 2) writing, are now on sale at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, without acknowledgment that these are publicity shots connected to a film, or that the subject is an actor, but as if they are pictures of ‘the real Jane’.
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The first spin-off publication from the Austen ‘brand’ was Sybil G. Brinton’s novel of 1913, Old Friends and New Fancies, a frenziedly overpopulated book in which most of the major characters from all six novels by Jane Austen mill about, interact and intermarry (Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park to Colonel Fitzwilliam from Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana Darcy from the latter to William Price from the former, etc.). Sequels and continuations of Austen appeared all through the last century, the most intelligent and successful being those by the novelist Emma Tennant, Pemberley (1993), An Unequal Marriage (1994), Elinor and Marianne (1996) and Emma in Love (1997). Latterly, Stephanie Barron has written a whole series of ‘Jane Austen Mysteries’, in which the novelist, yes, solves crimes; other recent spin-offs show an obsession with time-travel and parallel universes, including Amanda Elyot’s By a Lady, in which a contemporary American woman time-travels to Austen’s England and meets the author, and The Man Who Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O’Rourke, in which a Victorian gentleman does the same, with romantic consequences. Confessions of an Austen Addict and Lost in Austen also feature contemporary women time-travelling to Austen’s day. The latter won out over obviously stiff competition when it was selected for a highly publicised TV adaptation in 2008.
The quote on the cover of The Man Who Loved Jane Austen says, ‘To be read with an expectation of pleasure’, which surely goes for all books that include the words ‘Jane Austen’ in their titles. The name generates a warm glow as readily as it generates cash. The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler, both fictionalises the public appetite for Austen (the book is about six contemporary American suburbanites who explore ‘their own private Austens’ by reading ‘all-Jane Austen-all-the-time’) and, of course, feeds it at the same time. People truly can’t get enough of Austen, and talk of their cravings in terms of bingeing and unlicensed self-gratification. Deb Werksman, of publisher Sourcebooks, explained the public hunger for Austen this way: ‘I think Jane Austen simply didn’t leave a big enough body of work…. you read them again and again. But after reading them fifteen times, you just begin to want more. Anything that will evoke the work of Jane Austen becomes very appealing.’37
Once people are ‘getting their Austen’ from secondary or tertiary sources, there are no limits to what can become of it. Her name turns up almost randomly in contemporary media: Mary Ann O’Farrell has noted the TV programme Survivor described as ‘Jane Austen with monitor lizards’, and Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon called ‘Sense and Sensibility with swords’.38 An episode of Footballers’ Wives has a Pride and Prejudice-themed wedding (in which the groom gets stuck in his Darcy costume and is exposed as a bigamist), while the financier Michael Bloomberg is identified as ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune’.39 In February 2000, the Fox network transmitted a two-hour reality show, called ‘Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?’ which was inspired, apparently, by Pride and Prejudice. In the show, fifty women competed for the attention of a super-rich bachelor called Rick Rockwell (appearing to them only in silhouette form), whom the winner then had to marry on the spot. In an interview later with Larry King, the groom expressed his feelings about the match: ‘If it works, imagine. I mean, this would be a storybook romance,’ but within days, he was exposed as a virtually penniless fraud, with a history of violence towards his previous girlfriend, and the marriage was quickly annulled. It makes one wonder which part of Pride and Prejudice the producers had been thinking of – the Darcy–Elizabeth plot or Wickham and Lydia’s.
Arielle Eckstut’s Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (Edinburgh, 2003) catered jokily to a modern audience’s expectations of passion between the heroine and hero (or, in the case of Emma, on her own). Catherine Morland discovers Henry Tilney’s stash of fetish equipment; Jane Bennet is surprised by Miss Bingley and Mrs Hirst getting into her bed at Netherfield. The book could be said to be more for the bibliophile audience than the soft porn Janeite, however; its best joke is the letter purportedly from the publisher Crosby, rejecting ‘The Watsons’ on grounds of obscenity, and admitting to having destroyed all but the first fifty pages of the manuscript. Austen know-alls must have been more pleased with this than the general ‘Austen-lover’, several of whom in the Amazon comments columns showed remarkable ignorance of what was being sent up.
Austen’s name can never have been so bizarrely evoked as during a conference at Durham University in March 2007, in a debate about proposed legislation to outlaw possession of extreme pornography. The images which the new law intended to target were ones of explicit bestiality, necrophilia and ‘acts that appear to be life-threatening or are likely to result in serious, disabling injury’. ‘Opposition among politicians to the new law is likely to be muted,’ Andrew Norfolk wrote in The Times, reporting the conference and the debate; ‘Brave or foolish would be the MP prepared to defend publicly the material shown on a website such as Necrobabes or Asphyxia … What sane person could defend the rights of someone who gains arousal from the sight of women being humiliated, degraded and – apparently – murdered?’40 Jane Austen, it seems, for the remark from Chapter 9 of Emma, by the heroine, that ‘one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’, was cited in the debate in support of non-criminalisation. ‘The argument went something like this,’ Norfolk continued. ‘I may not understand your sexuality, indeed I may find the images you like to view grotesque and repugnant, but is that sufficient reason to criminalise the act of viewing? All parties agreed that possessing internet footage of, for example, a genuine strangulation should be unlawful.’41 So, presumably, Jane Austen was on her own over that one.
The report was commented on by somebody called John Brownlee on the blog Wired, who thought ‘Emma’s words were a minty fresh breath of common sense from the putrid air of ignorance that prevailed’ at the proceedings. He quoted one delegate (described on another site as ‘a hysterical feminist’) who had said, ‘Anyone turned on by the glorification of extreme violence is sick. It sends a message to abhorrent individuals that it is acceptable …. I will not get lost in a debate about human rights on this. There are some things that are just wrong.’ ‘The statement of an intelligent person giving themselves up to reactionary ignorance,’ Brownlee concluded, ‘Why can’t more British women be like Emma?’42
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The anonymous reviewer in Blackwoods Magazine who in 1818 predicted a time when the ‘familiar cabinet pictures’ painted by Jane Austen would outstrip in interest ‘even … the great historical pieces of our more eminent modern masters’43 seems to have understood that Austen would achieve far wider admiration in the future than she did in her own day. The way she was read by her contemporaries was oft
en surprising: it strikes us as odd that the Augustan Review complained of a ‘remarkable sameness in the productions of this author’ (we want Austen to be consistent, in fact long for more of ‘the same’), that Maria Edgeworth thought there was a lack of narrative drive in Emma and that Mary Russell Mitford found an ‘entire want of taste’ in the pertness of Elizabeth Bennet.44 Sometimes it seems as if they were reading quite different texts from ours: one early reviewer of Emma took John and Isabella Knightley at face value, and described them as the moral focus of the story, representing ‘unpretending goodness’,45 a bizarre construction in the opinion of most modern readers. Austen herself seems to have anticipated being misinterpreted in this and many other ways: ‘I am going to take a heroine whom nobody but myself will much like,’ she said, setting out on the creation of Miss Woodhouse. She seems to have been resigned to being somewhat out of step with her time and its tastes.
The circumstances under which Jane Austen produced her books – almost twenty years of being an unpublished author, followed by six years of intense but localised recognition – meant she had time, almost her whole adult lifetime, to develop her characters, live with them and fantasise about them. Clearly she made a game of this with her intimates, as when she looked out for portraits of Mrs Bingley and Mrs Darcy at the 1813 watercolour exhibition, or indulged her nephews’ and nieces’ curiosity by telling them ‘many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people’, as James Edward recalled: ‘She took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished the last chapter.’46 While the novels remained unpublished, this kind of authorial ‘super-knowledge’ kept them alive for her, and once the stories were public property it allowed her to retain a sense of control, an ultimate, print-defying capacity to keep creating and re-creating, in trivial but highly possessive ways.
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