At 12 years old, I plucked Pride and Prejudice at random from my grandmotherâs bookshelf. A recklessly expeditious gobbler-up of doorstoppers, I had skimmed through many a dull descriptive paragraph in my time. But I didnât want to miss a single word of Pride and Prejudice. Austen had mastered the storytellerâs art of providing ever so slightly less detail than I craved. Like many other readers before and since, I was hooked.
Though Austenâs famous free indirect narration is all but impossible to transfer to the screen, Pride and Prejudiceâs dialogue adapts like a dream, and so we keep bloody well doing it. Within the last week three more adaptations were announced. Netflix is developing two of them: one based on Pride, a YA novel by Ibi Zoboi which resets the story in Brooklyn, the other a direct adaptation scripted by Dolly Alderton. Meanwhile, the BBC has commissioned a spin-off drama about Lizzy Bennetâs bookish sister Mary.
Since 1938 there have been 11 more-or-less faithful film and TV adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, including in Italian, Spanish and Dutch. The BBCâs 1995 TV series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth remains the generally accepted fan favourite, but Joe Wrightâs 2005 film starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen has its adherents. There have been further dozens of looser adaptations, most famously Bridget Jonesâs Diary (2001), which â like any modernisation â was fated to eventually seem of its time.
The premises of all three of the newly announced TV shows look promising. The Deadline announcement for Pride â backed by Barack and Michelle Obamaâs production company Higher Ground â describes a story of an Afro-Latina teen fighting gentrification. Austen belongs to everyone and itâs invigorating to see her retellings reflect that. I trust a writer of Aldertonâs emotional acuity not to commit the carnage that Netflix visited two years ago on Persuasion; its assigning to Anne Elliotâs sacred mouth the words âNow weâre worse than exes: weâre friendsâ will forever haunt my dreams. Iâve always felt Mary Bennet got an unjustly bad rap â as an autistic person, I cannot reasonably hate a character whoâs full of facts and blissfully ignorant of social cues â so letâs hope her spin-off proves a watershed moment for know-it-all rights.
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How to explain the enduring appeal of Pride and Prejudice? Some of it is down to Austenâs brilliant writing, of course, but wish fulfilment comes into it, too. We would all like to be as scathing as Lizzy and to marry rich. It is fundamentally Lizzyâs wit that lands her Darcy, making the story more acceptable to 21st-century sensibilities than if sheâd enthralled him through saccharine virtue or conventional beauty. Lizzy, to use modern parlance, has game.
I use the words âwish fulfilmentâ with a degree of trepidation, as the term is often used to suggest that indulging readersâ fantasies somehow compromises oneâs literary heft. This is lazy and snobbish. Obviously popularity doesnât mean a book is good, but it doesnât make it automatically bad, either. Please explain why offering simpler pleasures necessarily detracts from fine-tuned prose! Thereâs a gendered element to these criticisms, too: nobody refers to the extravagantly unrealistic sex that men have in thrillers as âwish fulfilmentâ.
What Austen understood is that you can be a serious writer who still knows how to have fun. You can mix high art with being conventionally engaging. And if you succeed, youâll be loved for centuries.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Penguin Books Ltd, £7.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.