More than two centuries after readers first met them, Elizabeth and Darcy have yet to grow old. Their story has inspired erotic spinoffs, murder mysteries and a retelling from the servants’ point of view. The much-loved and mostly faithful 1995 Andrew Davies screen adaptation, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, helped birth Bridget Jones’s Diary. Then came the “Hollywood-meets-Bollywood” movie Bride and Prejudice and even a genre mashup with zombie hordes menacing Pemberley.
This last was more apt than it sounds, and not only because Andrea Leadsom briefly resurrected Jane Austen last month, the bicentenary of her death, describing her as one of “our greatest living authors”. Pride and Prejudice is the novel that simply will not die. Twenty million copies on, Mr Darcy has become so synonymous with the romantic hero that when researchers found a pheromone in male mouse urine irresistible to female mice, they named it “darcin”.
Even that indignity has not diminished his allure. So the announcement this month of yet another TV adaptation was entirely predictable. So too was the accompanying reassurance that the novel is “less bonnet-y” than people imagine. One oddity is that those rejecting accusations of “smallness” and gentility keep picking Austen’s best-loved book over harsher works such as Mansfield Park or Persuasion. Another is their fixation on clothes-as-shorthand, promising us mud on the petticoats and Mr Darcy in a wet shirt – though the author wrote a great deal more about money than muslin.
It does not take an especially careful reader to discern the underlying message: distaste for the very people they are commissioned to attract. Much as Austen’s heroes save her heroines from poverty or reliance on grim relations, so respectable admirers must rescue the author from the Janeites. This strain has strengthened in reaction to “Austen-inspired scented candles” and paint-by-numbers novels like The Jane Austen Book Club. But it is evident much further back, in the grudging praise of Henry James, whose condescension is so much more deadly than Mark Twain’s desire to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.
No one imagines that Shakespearmints or the Gnomeo and Juliet movie tell us anything useful about the Bard. There is more than a tinge of sexism and snobbery in the idea that Austen’s enduring popularity is evidence of something wrong rather than something right – it is, to be blunt, the sense that she is read by too many women, or at least the wrong kind of women. It’s manifested, equally, in the implication that she must be OK because Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan turned to her in moments of darkness.
Austen herself deemed Pride and Prejudice “rather too light and bright and sparkling”; to read it alongside other works does her more justice. She is merciless in dissecting human folly, of course, but also in her honesty. Her heroines often face grim choices, only lightly concealed by the gallantry and their happy endings. She writes about the bleakness of ill-matched marriages, and the pain of living with the knowledge that you have made a terrible mistake. It is not a cosy environment, merely a contained one. Other writers, on a broader canvas, have shown us much less of the world than we see on what she termed her “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”. There is absolutely no need to apologise for Austen.
