Madeline Grant has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article about Jane Austen must begin with a mangled, platitudinous variation on her most famous line. Irritating though this is, it’s rather a good metaphor for the state of the wider treatment of Austen – and her near contemporaries – by popular culture. When it comes to adaptations of novels from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods, and even longer ago, we find ourselves in a deep trough. If you want mangled, platitudinous variations, you now need look no further than today’s costume dramas. And this year being the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, we should brace ourselves for a barrage of them.
Many of those behind the upcoming slough of modern takes on Austen et al hardly inspire confidence. Jane Tranter, the producer of a new adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister – a Pride and Prejudice spin-off – complained the other day that ‘the other thing with period costumes is, you start speaking posh and not everybody spoke posh in those days… So sometimes it’s about a loosening around the fetishisation of a period.’ This only ever works one way, of course. There aren’t many characters in EastEnders who sound like the Duke of Kent. Yet, if everyone ‘speaking posh’ is as Ms Tranter says, then it has merely been replaced by other fetish-isations, ones even less rooted in historical reality or even creative believability.
Perhaps the most egregious example of contemporary obsessions overtaking historical dramas is the recent Disney+ adaptation of the late C.J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series of Tudor mysteries. This otherwise not bad adaptation contains irritating anachronisms which suggest little or no interest in the credibility of the script. One character quotes Tennyson. ‘Better to have loved and lost, as they say.’ Not for another 300 years, they didn’t.
Then there is the inevitable colourblind casting. Though set in a Sussex monastery during the Dissolution, the abbey has roughly the ethnic diversity of 21st-century Lewisham. This is doubly egregious because Sansom already wrote in a character who would have appeared ‘black’ to early modern eyes, the Moorish apothecary Guy Malton, whose skin colour and outsider status are major plot points and a source of solidarity between him and the hunchbacked Shardlake. Advocates of the ‘colourblind’ approach will cling to the idea that ‘it’s all artifice anyway’, but clunky year-zero casting can undermine the meaning of the original work, especially when ethnicity has already been written in by subtler means.
Much blame must be laid at the broken-in back door of Bridgerton. The Netflix series is so far from historicity that it might as well be set on Pluto – though in its defence, it never purports to be anything else. Yet its roaring success in basic-bitchdom has given other producers ideas, almost all of them bad. The cinematic war-crime known as Netflix’s Persuasion takes Austen’s beautiful line: ‘Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement,’ and renders it: ‘Now we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.’ The recent ITV adaptation of Sanditon takes a different kind of liberty. Austen never lived to complete the manuscript, but I’d wager that a furtive handjob didn’t figure in her plans.
Set in a Sussex monastery during the Dissolution, the abbey has the ethnic diversity of 21st-century Lewisham
It wasn’t always like this. One of the marks of the great adaptations is a close attention to detail. I challenge you to re-watch the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation but with one eye constantly on the boorish Mr Hurst, the brother-in-law of Mr Bingley. Rupert Vansittart’s masterful performance mostly occurs in the background, clattering through dances or sleeping on sofas in the rear of established scenes, yet itis as crafted as any of those involving the main characters. Similarly, in the 1982 BBC adaptation of Trollope’s Barchester Towers, the puritan Mr Slope wears a Cambridge MA hood while the more bombastic Dr Grantly’s academic dress is from Oxford. More recent adaptations not only miss the significance and power of such details, but they eschew them altogether in favour of fourth wall breaks and anachronistic ‘yoof’ speak.
This trend predates the rise of woke. Americans may be to blame. Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice film starring Keira Knightley cannot resist portraying the family as being considerably poorer than they are in the novel. In Wright’s adaptation, the Bennet residence is more a dilapidated farmhouse than a genteel family home. Mrs Bennet digs up her own vegetables. An escaped pig runs around the house. Meanwhile Mr Darcy’s Pemberley is unfeasibly flashy, even for a man worth £10,000 a year.
All this is presumably part of a concerted effort to lean into the ‘rags to riches’ element of the story. But the film necessarily overwrites Austen’s acute sense of class consciousness: what was a comedy with social subtleties becomes an American Dream schtick. There is already a moment in the novel where Mr Collins ham-fistedly praises a meal, wondering ‘to which of his fair cousins the excellence of its cooking was owed’. An outraged Mrs Bennet immediately slaps him down, assuring him ‘that they were very well able to keep a cook’. Her offence would make little sense were she already doing menial jobs around the house.
Many of those in charge of modern costume dramas demonstrate little interest in that rich, lost world on its own terms, only in its use as a cipher for the preoccupations of our own day. It’s a sort of chronological myopia which implies that these characters can only ever be interesting if they, under the bodices and bonnets, think and act exactly like people of today. That, ironically, is what kills the costume drama’s charm, which is surely to remind us that the folly and fierceness of the human heart transcend time, costume and attitudes.
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