At 12 years old, I plucked Pride and Prejudice at random from my grandmother’s bookshelf. A recklessly expeditious gobbler-up of doorstoppers, I had skimmed through many a dull descriptive paragraph in my time. But I didn’t want to miss a single word of Pride and Prejudice. Austen had mastered the storyteller’s art of providing ever so slightly less detail than I craved. Like many other readers before and since, I was hooked.
Though Austen’s famous free indirect narration is all but impossible to transfer to the screen, Pride and Prejudice’s 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 Bennet’s 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 BBC’s 1995 TV series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth remains the generally accepted fan favourite, but Joe Wright’s 2005 film starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen has its adherents. There have been further dozens of looser adaptations, most famously Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), which – like any modernisation – 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 – backed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground – describes a story of an Afro-Latina teen fighting gentrification. Austen belongs to everyone and it’s invigorating to see her retellings reflect that. I trust a writer of Alderton’s emotional acuity not to commit the carnage that Netflix visited two years ago on Persuasion; its assigning to Anne Elliot’s sacred mouth the words “Now we’re worse than exes: we’re friends” will forever haunt my dreams. I’ve always felt Mary Bennet got an unjustly bad rap – as an autistic person, I cannot reasonably hate a character who’s full of facts and blissfully ignorant of social cues – so let’s hope her spin-off proves a watershed moment for know-it-all rights.
How to explain the enduring appeal of Pride and Prejudice? Some of it is down to Austen’s 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 Lizzy’s wit that lands her Darcy, making the story more acceptable to 21st-century sensibilities than if she’d enthralled him through saccharine virtue or conventional beauty. Lizzy, to use modern parlance, has game.
I use the words “wish fulfilment” with a degree of trepidation, as the term is often used to suggest that indulging readers’ fantasies somehow compromises one’s literary heft. This is lazy and snobbish. Obviously popularity doesn’t mean a book is good, but it doesn’t make it automatically bad, either. Please explain why offering simpler pleasures necessarily detracts from fine-tuned prose! There’s a gendered element to these criticisms, too: nobody refers to the extravagantly unrealistic sex that men have in thrillers as “wish fulfilment”.
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, you’ll 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.
