Jane Austen seemed an unlikely author to become the darling of Hollywood in the 1990s. One would have thought that Dickens, with his memorable villains and fascinating portraits of London’s underworld, might have looked more attractive to screen adaptors, or the Brontë sisters’ reputation for dark obsessive romance would have drawn some attention. Even her closer contemporary Henry Fielding’s cheerfully bonk-filled Tom Jones would have been more likely – it could have made a decent road movie. By comparison, Austen’s novels appear quiet and underplayed: material for a worthy and gentle TV production, perhaps, with a small but appreciative audience outside the school children who’ll watch it as a better option than actually reading the set text.
When the BBC adapted Pride and Prejudice for television in 1995, however, it was a huge success, and reached far beyond the ordinary audiences for adaptation from “classic” novels. The notorious “wet shirt” scene, in which Colin Firth cooled off from a long ride by diving into a lake in the grounds of Pemberley, became iconic of Austen’s new popular appeal as a classy older sister of the rom-com crowd. As people started to realise, Empire-line dresses weren’t exactly the most modest of garments, and there were distinct screen possibilities in dashing rogues like Willoughby and Wickham, or brooding strong and silent types like Darcy and Brandon.
A BBC TV version of Emma appeared, and Hollywood followed with their own version in 1996, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and boasting the tagline “This year, Cupid is armed and dangerous.” Of course, Emma had been the basis for Clueless the year before, a high school comedy which provided far more staying power than most of the rest of its genre.
Around the same time, Sense and Sensibility was released. Ang Lee’s beautiful direction of Emma Thompson’s superb screenwriting and acting made Sense and Sensibility an arrestingly poetic movie. A young Kate Winslet was Marianne, and Hugh Grant continued the role of stuttering Englishman he had begun in Four Wedding and A Funeral. In contrast, the film of Pride and Prejudice madeten years later, though just as richly shot, lacked something of Lee’s vision. It felt like a costume drama where Sense and Sensibility was satisfying on its own terms.
Austen kept film-makers busy even when it wasn’t her works being filmed. The hugely successful novel Bridget Jones’ Diary, based partly on Pride and Prejudice, found its way onto the screen for a film version, as did its sequel The Edge of Reason. An attempt to find the story behind the stories produced Being Jane in 2007. The more unusual adaptations of Austen’s work for film include the 2003 Pride and Prejudice set in a Mormon college in America, and Bride and Prejudice, which loosely translates the work into a knowing modern Bollywood-style musical film.
Translating an author as well-loved as Austen onto the screen is always going to provoke howls of dismay from purists who feel that their favourite works are being violated – for example, one Jane Austen society wrote to Ang Lee when he had announced the cast for Sense and Sensbility to complain that Hugh Grant was far too attractive to play Edward Ferrars. However, their complaints seem to have been swamped in the worldwide enthusiasm for versions, however inaccurate or wacky, of a refined novelist from a couple of centuries ago.
Jem Bloomfield - Jem Bloomfield was educated at the universities of Oxford and Exeter, and is currently working on a PhD on Webster's revenge tragedy "The ...
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