If you like your period dramas butchered, then you are in for a real treat. The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth falls on 16 December, and we are promised a slew of adaptations, documentaries and lectures to mark it. Inevitably, some of these will try to put a ‘new spin’ on Austen, to make out that she was somehow in line with a particular cause or interest of modernity; Mansfield Park is about saving the whales, Colonel Brandon is actually trans, that sort of thing.
This year, Emma Thompson stars in a ‘racy’ new audio drama, Becoming Meg Dashwood, which will focus on the youngest Dashwood sister and her quest for ‘female friendship, sexuality, and liberation’. Oo-er. Meanwhile, Andrew Davies is working on no fewer than three new Austen projects, which he promises will feature ‘psychopaths’, ‘slavery’ and the famously hale and hearty Emma Woodhouse dying in childbirth. It’s a pity Davies couldn’t actually have gone back in time to give Austen some direct pointers on plotting and literary style.
Even the best adaptations will present her characters as more radical than they are in the books
What’s more interesting, and often omitted from modern adaptations, is Austen’s subtle but unmistakable small-c conservative worldview which favours country over town, duties over rights, order over chaos and possesses a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Even the best adaptations will sometimes make changes designed to present her characters as more radical than they are in the books. In her 1995 Sense and Sensibility script, Emma Thompson has Elinor Dashwood complaining about women’s rights in a conversation with her suitor Edward Ferrars. ‘You will inherit your fortune,’ complains Elinor. ‘We cannot even earn ours.’ It is a clanger in an otherwise brilliant screenplay; diplomatic, restrained Elinor would be the last person to utter these subversive words to a man she has only just met.
Adaptors often cannot resist imposing a ‘rags to riches’ story into Austen’s books, imagining modern audiences desire greater disruption to the social order than the texts imply. Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice portrays the Bennet family as semi-yokels. They live in a dilapidated farmhouse with pigs running amok and piles of manure adjoining the house. This is inaccurate – the Bennets’ income of £2,000 a year would have supported around 12 servants. It also undermines the point Austen was trying to make about duty and financial prudence. Had they wished to, the Bennets could easily have set aside funds for their daughters’ provision; the point isn’t that they are hard up, it’s that they are not. Meanwhile, Mr Darcy receives a significant financial upgrade; the Pemberley scenes were filmed at the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth, though Darcy is not titled, despite his aristocratic links. Tellingly, few aristocrats appear in Austen’s novels; and these mainly from the squirearchy not the peerage.
Elizabeth may be marrying money but, as she reminds Lady Catherine de Bourgh: ‘He is a gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter, so far we are equal.’ Austen’s characters rarely venture beyond the boundaries of their class without consequence; consider how Emma Woodhouse’s attempts to engineer Harriet Smith’s inter-class marriage are thwarted, how Lucy Steele’s mercenary ways are presented in Sense and Sensibility, or the fate of Fanny Price’s mother after ‘marrying down’ in Mansfield Park. The novels are less disruptive to the social order than the Austen Industrial Complex would have us believe.
When social mobility happens, it is usually when hereditary patricians neglect their duties to the poor and so forfeit their position, such as Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. Too vain and spendthrift to care for his tenants, he vacates his estate for the fopperies of Bath, paving the way for better, meritocratic landlords, Admiral and Mrs Croft. Emma Woodhouse, for all her flaws, is a diligent philanthropist, performing good works for the needy and keeping the Bateses well-supplied with gifts of meat from Hartfield. The implication is that Mr Knightley and Emma have earned the right to preside over their neighbourhood both through hereditary status and benevolence. The recent film adaptation starring Anya Taylor-Joy ignores this and so renders Emma even less likeable.
Austen’s delicate social critiques are subtler than her adapters will give her credit for – or perhaps they assume modern-day audiences need things spelled out with crayon. She indirectly references the slave trade in Emma, via the vulgar Mrs Elton, who we are told is the daughter of a merchant from Bristol – one of Britain’s three main slaving ports. Mrs Elton is always boasting about her brother–in-law’s seat, the pretentiously named ‘Maple Grove’. This sounds like a plantation house, but it could belong to any grandiose newbuild today – and, indeed, could feature in any modern-day satire on the eternal vulgarity of the British aspirant middle class, from Hyacinth Bucket to Fawlty Towers. The slavery subtext is just one of many reasons for Mrs Elton’s vulgarity. Austen is often criticised for retreating from worldly issues, but her strength is in sly social satire.
Austen’s moralism and Anglicanism are often downplayed. Tellingly, her gravestone in Winchester cathedral describes her not as a ‘writer’ but as ‘a Christian’. A sort of Cranmerian anthropology – the view of humans found in the Prayer Book – is threaded through her books. The human condition is often a source of humour, and yet redemption remains possible through self-sacrifice, generosity or forgiving others. Anglican piety seems a more central aspect of her craft than any projection of ‘girl boss’ principles, yet there is scarcely a whisper of it in many modern treatments. Much of this absence will be down to what C.S. Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’ – some of those adapting Austen will believe they are more enlightened than her by virtue of living in modern times. Consequently, crucial aspects of her work and life are shoved aside as irrelevances.
Perhaps more than any other novelist, Austen repays multiple reads – even when you thought there couldn’t possibly be anything further to glean. Revisiting Emma recently, I noticed that soon after Frank Churchill’s much-derided trip to London – ostensibly for a haircut – his fiancée Jane Fairfax receives the piano which provokes such speculation. Clearly, the haircut was just a pretext. No doubt this was immediately obvious to more observant readers, but it took me about 15 goes before I clocked it. Such is the genius of Austen, and the demands she makes on her readers. Far better to celebrate her hallowed anniversary by going back to her books.
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