Cover Story
Austen power
by Jane Clifton
Almost 200 years after Jane Austen first wrote Pride and Prejudice, new versions still keep rolling off the presses. Its latest controversial TV incarnation, Lost in Austen, looks likely to be as popular as the original.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that were Jane Austen alive today, she would be in want of absolutely nothing.
She’d probably be richer than JK Rowling and Dan Brown combined.
Her book royalties alone could buy her a Pemberley on every continent, and with the film and television royalties to boot, her spinster status would be seriously under threat.
And think of the merchandising. Austen-mania – practised by Jane-ites, as many devotees like to be known – has grown over the past 20 years to something transcending the Trekkie movement, and it’s only through the lack of a live Jane to whom copyright might accrue that it hasn’t become a billion-dollar franchise. Lizzie Bennet dress-up dolls, Mr Darcy action figures, Lady Catherine de Bourgh Halloween costumes and Naughty Lydia pencil cases might all be rolling out of Weta Workshop right now.
Lack of copyright restriction has meant, of course, that those chasing the Jane-ite dollar can really go to town in their adaptations, and in the even more numerous spin-off sequels, prequels and riffs on her six completed books. The latest, most controversial liberty taken with Miss Austen’s repertoire, which screens on TV1 this week, is Lost in Austen. Its main premise is that if Jane can’t come to us, then we can go to her. And interfere.
The story of a modern young woman, Amanda Price, who, dissatisfied with her dreary job and her lummox of a boyfriend, finds constant solace in the novels of Austen, hardly sounds offensive. But her finding Miss Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom one morning, and discovering that her shower cubicle is a time-space portal to Longbourn, through which Amanda goes and takes Lizzie’s place, did discompose Austen purists.
Amanda spends quite a bit of the story wearing her modern London trousers, and even when decently decked out in Lizzie’s frocks, refuses to “dress” her hair – a sleek modern bob.
It’s this “eff-off” hair, together with those peculiar breeches and her constant blurting – Austen’s words “pert” and “forthright” just won’t cover this – that makes Amanda unpalatable to most of the characters most of the time. But as she is the absent Lizzie’s friend, vouchsafed to them by Lizzie for their hospitality, Austenian manners dictate they must politely overlook her atrocities and continue to host her.
Naturally, her disturbing presence throws the whole story out of kilter. Meaning well, and trying increasingly desperately to implement the story as originally written, Amanda makes things steadily worse as the programme continues. Some of the wrong characters become engaged, and the personalities and backstories of other characters warp and morph. To give a taste of just how shocking a turn things take, Mrs Bennet graduates from histrionics to hissing near-violence; Mr Bennet gives up the ghost and lies about sulking; Mr Bingley takes to the drink. Much more I mustn’t say, for fear of spoiling viewers’ fun. But I can’t resist adding that Lizzie is meanwhile having a most agreeable time in modern-day London, has had an urchin cut and become a nanny, and declines to come back and sort things out.
And it’s not at all giving the plot away to say that in a most unwonted – but to a Jane-ite audience utterly mandatory – development, Mr Darcy falls in love with Amanda. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
Lost in Austen is as much a romp as a homage to Pride and Prejudice, and will doubtless chew up the ratings figures here.
Overseas, the Jane-ites seem to have warmed to Lost in Austen, which most reviewers found charming. Even the purists now seem to recognise the appetite for Austen must be fed – and not just because there’s a buck in it.
Like Amanda in this story, many women get tremendous emotional support from Austen’s spry wisdom and sly satire, as well as from the Mills & Boonish happily ever after.
The Austen craze – if that’s quite the word for something so enduring – has engendered cynicism. The best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club – a sort of How to Make an American Quilt, only about Jane Austen readers – hit the tipping point of tolerance for Jane-mania in some quarters. In its online review of the movie made of the novel, the Daily Mirror said: “Heavily marinated in oestrogen, this is aimed at middle-aged females, the more unhappily married the better, with the cardiganed cast spending much of the running time drinking tea on the veranda and moaning about men over their knitting.”
The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Robey said the Jane Austen Book Club was “a distinctive vision of hell … a plane of being where there are only six novels that matter, and … there’s no relationship crisis that Jane can’t solve”.
Which goes to show that, by and large, men are a little less likely to “get” Austen than women, and that, logically speaking, Austen fever is more likely to hit women, particularly Women of a Certain Age, than men.
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