When I was at university the form guide provided to students of the novel was produced by the Cambridge flat-earther, F.R. Leavis, who named the great novelists as George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and Jane Austen. Lawrence was probably an honest mistake and rehabilitating George Eliot after the Dickens/Thackeray boom was at least courteous but what Conrad was doing in the side no-one knew and selecting Henry James was obviously a cry for help.
It was some time before I returned to reading of any kind and it took decades before I could get near Jane Austen, approaching only at night, through biographies.
During the 1990s, however, many of Austen’s works were adapted for the screen and it was possible to actually respond to them rather than be told what the examiners would be looking for.
The novel I knew best was ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ (Discuss. 30 marks).
In the BBC adaptation it is observed that if the writer’s asides to the reader are removed from a novel, what is left is the plot. Beefing this up and pouring music through it can elevate it slightly but the writer has gone and in the nineteenth century, before the writer was the subject of the novel, the relationship between the writer and the reader is the key part of the arrangement.
In the TV version Elizabeth is beautiful and her mother is a neurotic shrike who insists that her daughters marry the richest men they can find. Elizabeth then marries the richest man she can find, a smouldering stallion she can’t stand until she sees the size of his huge house. In other words we are invited to view Mrs Bennet as a hysterical peabrain with the values of a provincial snob and to imagine somehow that Elizabeth undercuts these values by fulfilling them. This is not terribly ironical and diversionary tactics are employed by the BBC to distract us; extra scenes are added which are not in the novel, such as Darcy peeling off a few laps in his own personal lake and then wuthering off through a Constable landscape.
The main problem here is not the silliness of Cartlandising the story but a misreading of Elizabeth through the removal of the writer. Like Anne Elliot in the more faithful movie adaptation of ‘Persuasion’ beautifully written by Nick Dear, Elizabeth Bennet is not conventionally beautiful any more than Jane Austen was. She is wise and perceptive and she sees folly in idle foreplay, manipulation and dissembling.
In ‘Persuasion,’ the Elliots' house is being rented by an admiral and his wife, who talk to Anne about being at sea together. Jane Austen had two brothers who became admirals and most of the men in ‘Persuasion’ are in the navy, so she knows whereof she speaks. The wife of the admiral tells Anne what it’s like going all over the world together, making a life, charting a course, defining a relationship outside the conventions of English society. Anne listens with keen interest and is persuaded. Like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Anne is rather assured, so when she behaves badly or makes a mistake, she does it in spades. Hence the self-knowledge lesson, when it comes, is exemplary.
The movie ‘Clueless’ catches this better than the film version of ‘Emma’, the novel on which it is based, because it doesn’t mistake film for a visual medium and it concentrates on the language of the central character and narrator. So we hear the mockery, the fun, the difference between what is said and what we see. In the BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ there is no narrator, no irony, no Austen. And to save you the trouble of reading Leavis, it’s not the stories; it’s the way you tell them.