Pride & Prejudice

The one thing everyone knows about Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is the bit where Mr Darcy, played by Colin Firth, emerges from the river in his wet linen shirt. But in fact, not only is there no such scene in the book, it is not actually in Andrew Davies’ 1995 television adaptation either: we see the stunt performer dive in, Firth swimming in a pool, and later walking about a dry shirt. And it’s ahistorical—as Firth himself pointed out, if a gentleman took it in to his head to go swimming, he would do it naked. No point ruining a good set of clothes, even if you are as rich as Mr Darcy.

Of course adaptation is always tricky. The adapter here wants there to be an understandable reason for Elizabeth to be flustered, without having to pause to tell us it is because of the impropriety of her party having wandered in to his private estate, which is a difficult to explain because a modern viewer would not have expected they would have been able to just wander in in the first place. But is this missing the point of the scene?

About the novel

Pride and Prejudice is the most famous of Jane Austen’s novels, set in either the 1790s (when there were military camps in Brighton in real life) or 1811/12 (just prior to publication). Like many of the science-fiction books I read these days, it is set in an implausibly weird social order whose bizarre mores are only revealed gradually as the story unfolds. The protagonist Lizzie (or Elizabeth) is born in to a social class whose defining characteristic is having enough capital that one does not need to work for a living, which means she cannot work without forfeiting her social rank. Having failed to be born male, she cannot inherit her father’s estate; to avoid destitution she must marry. But who? Mr Collins, her father’s heir? Mr Wickham, devastatingly attractive but without a bean to his name? Surely not Mr Darcy, the tall, proud man who slighted her at the Netherfield Ball!

What is Austen telling us about marriage, the educated woman’s best preservative against want? Mr Bennet, who originally married for love, now mocks his wife when he isn’t avoiding her, and the Hursts and the Collinses are no better. Lower-ranked couples (like Mr and Mrs Gardiner) seem to be better partners. Is the book about class? The Bennet family and the Bingleys are on different sides of the border between gentry and the merely gentleman-like: the Bennets at risk of being demoted out of the gentry (largely through Mr Bennet’s indolence), the Bingley sisters aspiring to being promoted in to it (largely through their brother’s energy). Austen contrasts the well-bred, middle-class Gardiners and the ill-bred, upper-class Lady Catherine de Bourge. But her class consciousness does not extend as far as the servant and labouring people who make the world work for these people.

Experiencing the novel

I never read Pride and Prejudice before lockdown. We didn’t do it at school. While I watched the BBC series in 1995, but I never really got why the people in it did what they did.

What changed was that from 2020 I stopped listening to podcasts, because they were all about the pandemic in some way or another; instead I started listening to classic adaptations from the BBC Sounds archives (the audio equivalent of iPlayer, the BBC’s on-demand and catch-up service). Thus I stumbled upon Pride and Prejudice (read by Clare Corbett).

One difference the audiobook made for me was Clare Corbett’s performance as Jane Austen. My own internal reading voice might be a bit a too literal for Austen, whereas the BBC audiobook makes it sound like Austen is relating her story to an intimate, with all the irony and elliptical allusions natural to two friends sharing gossip. A lot of the opinions voiced by the book, including the famous opening line ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’, are ironic, which makes sense if you think of it as someone telling you a story, rather than an omniscient narrator relating facts.

Explaining the novel

The other thing that helped me understand Pride and Prejudice was YouTube videos by Dr Octavia Cox. These are very much English Literature lectures, based on close reading of the text or of contemporary sources, and I enjoy her format where the text being dissected floats next to her as she digs in to questions like Did Lydia always fancy Mr Wickham? Who betrayed Lizzie to Lady Catherine de Bourge? How does Wickham manipulate Lizzie?

Another source of explainers is Ellie Dashwood’s channel. At first it seems odd to have such a perky American talking so perkily about Regency class structures and young lovers going to Scotland and the like, but her channel is a good source for lore, since she covers history as well as the novel itself.

There are blogs and the like with more Austen dissection and discussion, such as this useful article on ‘Could Mr Bennet have Saved Enough for Decent Fortunes on his Income?’ or a discussion on how ‘No one should try to adapt Pride and Prejudice to the modern day’. The former is from a blog Always Austen by Jane Austen fan fic writers, so you can read it either as entertaining background for better understanding the original novels or as a resource for producing your own Regency-set novella.

Spinoffery

Jane Austen’s characters are like Sherlock Holmes in that there are so many fan stories that several have been professionally published. I feel a bit reluctant to like sequels like Death Comes to Pemberly (P. D. James), because they generally start by killing off Mr Bennet so as to create a more complicated living arrangement for the remnants of the family. Longbourne (Jo Baker) is from the perspective of the servants, which is potentially an interesting take, but, like the movie and TV adaptations, she omits a lot of the Longourne staff, either to avoid making up their names, or to stop us from getting too confused about whether the Bennets are rich or poor.

There’s a new adaptation being filmed this year for Netflix. I wonder if they will include the cross-dressing scene.