Nobody made a fuss when Andrew Davies adapted Pride and Prejudice in 1995. With hindsight his sexing up of Jane Austen may look questionable, even pervy; but you could hardly complain about a version that put women at its centre – compare its nuanced Elizabeth and its, er, unforgettable Mrs Bennet with its colourless Darcy and Mr B – and did wonders for the Austen brand: after it (and the superb Emma update Clueless, in the same year) came Bridget Jones, biopics, Hollywood stars doing Regency English and a general freeing up of how the novels were read and reworked.
Reaction is bound to be more mixed to the news that Davies will be rejigging Jane again with a TV version of the unfinished Sanditon. Twenty-three years on, “appropriation” is taboo for many, and assigning female authors (the Brontës, Du Maurier, non-Poirot Christie) to female screenwriters is pretty much de rigueur; where it was radical and fresh in 1995 to have a man departing from the ladylike style of previous telly Austen, it’s a woman’s take on a male-written, male-led novel series (Debbie Horsfield’s Poldark) that’s the trendsetting costume drama in 2018.
Hardly helping his cause, Davies (who turns 82 in September) licked his lips in the press release at getting his hands on a novel – whose heroine, Charlotte, is the guest of the founder of a Sussex resort – featuring such attractions as “quite a bit of nude bathing” (the latter conceivably by the novel’s visiting group of schoolgirls).
And an Austen fragment seems a peculiar departure anyway for the ace adapter, whose recent projects – War and Peace, Les Misérables, A Suitable Boy, John Updike’s Rabbit saga – have all been male whoppers.
The case for the defence? If there is one, it’s that Davies was ahead of the game in putting fiction by women on screen – not just Austen, but George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Winifred Holtby and Sarah Waters – and the ITV/PBS Sanditon represents an autumnal circling back to this 90s/00s period after his “big books by blokes” phase. Either that, or he just likes novels where young women predominate, preferably in revealing Regency frocks.
