Everybody Loves Jane Austen

From The New Yorker:


Everybody Loves Jane

For the next four months, Jane Austen will smarten up your living room.


You remember Jane Austen—she was one of People’s “25 Most Intriguing People of 1995.” That honor, which is not handed out to every early-nineteenth-century writer—the magazine is not Regency People, after all—was, of course, an amusingly self-mocking acknowledgment of the absurdity of ranking Austen; anyone who is remotely connected to the world of letters or has ever wanted to be or has ever merely recited the alphabet would feel unqualified to rate Austen. Reading her makes us rate: just mentioning her, just saying her name, makes us feel more clever, more discerning, more observant, and more keenly fit to understand and endure life’s wounds, including the ones that we inflict ourselves. It’s a wonder that all parents don’t name their daughters Jane (or, hewing to the naming habits of our day, Austen), as a way of thrusting greatness by association upon them.

The 1995 honor was in recognition of the fact that Austen keeps coming back like a song; that year’s productions included a TV miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice,” starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and a film adaptation by Emma Thompson of “Sense and Sensibility,” starring Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman. Then there was the delightful and very successful movie “Clueless,” written and directed by Amy Heckerling, and starring Alicia Silverstone as a Valley Girl Emma, and the anticipation of two other “Emma”s—a movie with Gwyneth Paltrow and a TV version with Kate Beckinsale. For Jane Austen, it was a year to write home about.

The last couple of years have seen another surge in Austen mining and manufacturing: a “Pride and Prejudice” movie with Keira Knightley; a movie called “Becoming Jane,” which, taking off from letters that Austen wrote to her sister, imagines a bona-fide love affair between the young Jane (played by Anne Hathaway) and an Irishman of her acquaintance named Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy); a Bollywood musical called “Bride and Prejudice”; and the movie “The Jane Austen Book Club,” based on a 2004 novel about the lives of a group of otherwise disparate aficionados in a California university town. PBS has insured that 2008 will be a big year for Austen, too. On January 13th, it began a four-month Austenpalooza, in which it will present adaptations of the six Austen novels, and a new kinda-sorta biopic—another stab at Austen’s love life, also based on letters—called “Miss Austen Regrets.”

PBS’s Austen promotion is part of a rebranding campaign to raise the worn-down profile of “Masterpiece Theatre,” which is thirty-seven years old and no longer attracts corporate support. Lashing itself even more tightly to the word “masterpiece,” the network is now using the word alone as a rubric under which it will present “Masterpiece Classic” (what used to be called “Masterpiece Theatre” and, as of this season, is hosted by Gillian Anderson, late of “The X Files”), “Masterpiece Mystery!” (formerly known as “Mystery!”), and, to show that there is room at the PBS inn for programs that are set in the years since the telephone was invented, a new category called “Masterpiece Contemporary.” There’s something a little sad about the Austen hoopla, though; two of the six offerings—the Beckinsale “Emma” and the Ehle-Firth “Pride and Prejudice”—were on A&E more than a decade ago, and both have been available for sale or rent for many years. (They, and two of the four new adaptations, were by Andrew Davies.) Still, the Austen logjam has many pleasing aspects—as well as aspects that will vex Austen maniacs, but, as far as I can tell from the various Web sites devoted to the author, being vexed is part of the joy of being an Austen maniac.

The first show in the PBS series is “Persuasion,” a bold choice, since it’s a cold, damp afternoon of a story, whose happy ending comes less as a triumph than as a relief. Sally Hawkins is Anne Elliott, who, at the age of twenty-seven, is haunted by her rejection, eight years earlier, of a suitor she loved, having been persuaded that his fortunes were not bright. Instead of watching a heroine make mistakes, we’re watching one who has already made them and has become a tortured soul. In the midst of gatherings filled with selfish, garrulous extroverts, Anne is reticent and reserved, but Hawkins nevertheless broadcasts her misery as loudly as if she were trying to warn beachgoers that there was a shark in the water. It’s an importunate performance, begging a bit too much for the audience’s sympathy, with an assist from a musical score that overdoes the desolate, plinking piano. It may be that the ease of identifying with Anne’s regrets is the very thing that makes her hard to watch and to listen to; one is grateful for the comically grotesque characters that surround her, brought to life by an excellent supporting cast.

“Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” (known in some circles, I’m not saying which ones, as “the two that nobody reads”) follow. “Northanger Abbey” is Jane Austen having fun in the fiction lab—a comic gothic piece, about the romance of reading and the power of writing. It allows a filmmaker to have his fun, too, with special effects and the liberal use of cinematic clichés to stand in for literary ones, and to do so without too many critical eyes looking over his shoulder, as they would with Austen’s other novels. Your response to “Mansfield Park” will depend a lot on how you feel about the performance of Billie Piper as Fanny, a character that Austen’s own mother called “insipid.” Piper, now twenty-five, was a teen-age pop star and tabloid magnet and then became famous again as an actress in the British TV series “Doctor Who”; her face, with its huge brown eyes and lips that appear to have been stung by an entire press gang of bees, is fascinating without being truly engaging. All Austen heroines can be said to be more acted upon than acting—that’s their lot in life, and that’s Austen’s very subject—but, in the case of Fanny, the watchful, worried waiting that is the fate of nineteenth-century women in literature seems more like a character flaw.

“Sense and Sensibility” almost wears out its welcome in the first few seconds, when we find ourselves in a brief and confusing sex scene, which, needless to say, isn’t in the book. Adapters have to be free to mess with the text, but the startling scene seems like a piece of footage that wandered off from another film. This “S. and S.” is so gorgeous to look at that you forgive it, even though the gorgeousness comes at the story’s expense. It’s hard to feel too sorry for the Dashwood family when the house they are banished to is a lovely cottage in a spectacular seaside setting. There is also a deeply moving performance by David Morrissey—a near ringer for Liam Neeson—as Colonel Brandon, Marianne’s patient suitor. Demerits must be handed out to this film for the use of the kiss cam—that business of circling rapidly around lovers like an untrained puppy when they finally kiss for the first time, and then pulling up into a crane shot to show us the enviable mansion that they are about to move into.

Since “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” are old news, I will just say that they should not be missed. “P. and P.” is especially well done. It’s marked by good taste and exquisite restraint, and the result is very hot stuff—by the end, you’ll be ripping your own bodice. And now we come to “Miss Austen Regrets,” a ghastly misfire—one does enjoy finding a use for that phrase now and again—which presents Austen in the same reductive way that is often resorted to when an inadequate imagination sets about dramatizing an interesting woman’s life. Austen comes across as witty, disappointed, proud, smart, a symbol, a cautionary tale, a heroine, a loser—everything but a person. (It’s a Judy Davis role, played here by Olivia Williams.)

Jane Austen inspires girls for many reasons, one of which is that they sense that, as a Times piece about “Becoming Jane” put it last year, an Austen heroine is “not afraid to be the smartest person in the room.” Any girl who watches “Miss Austen Regrets” could only be very, very afraid of such a fate.