Love Affair With Austen Is 'Complete'

By Bridget Byrne
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, January 12, 2008

Jane Austen's novels are about the balance between head and heart, but in screen adaptations of recent vintage, it's the heart that steals the show -- ideally beating within a fair bosom, tantalizingly revealed by the Empire-style dresses of the early 19th century.

The versions of Austen's half-dozen books chosen for PBS's "The Complete Jane Austen" season (premiering tomorrow at 9 with "Persuasion") have plenty of her comely heroines and heroes surviving dilemmas of doubt, misunderstanding and misperception before they find true love in the right place for the right reasons. It's just that they don't always do so with quite the decorum that her purist fans might expect.

No doubt Miss Austen would have been amused by the current tendency to sex up her work to appeal to the giddiest of young women's fantasies. If alive today, she might well have taken up her pen to create a parody of current fads, just as in her day she poked fun in "Northanger Abbey" (airing Jan. 20) at the taste for scary Gothic novels.

We will never know what pithy comment she might have penned about today's adaptations -- perhaps writing to her dear sister Cassandra, if she had watched the telly and seen one of the U.K.'s favorite celebrity actresses, Billie Piper, bouncing around in a low-cut gown and tousled 21st-century starlet hairdo, utterly miscast in the role of the morally strict but socially timid teenager Fanny Price in "Mansfield Park." (airing Jan. 27) But with her great sense of humor, Austen would probably have found enjoyment in the new series, and even much to be grateful for.

Austen, though, might have been less happy about us nosing around in her own love affairs. "The Complete Jane Austen" includes the original movie "Miss Austen Regrets" (Feb. 3), starring Olivia Williams as the author, who reflects on the life choices that have kept her unmarried.

All the adaptations of the novels coming to PBS have previously aired in England, where they attracted reviews ranging from ecstatic to rude, and generated endless copy -- much like this -- tut-tutting over the pluses and minuses of sexing-up the stories. Or, in the case of the more upmarket papers such as the Observer, questioning whether the "enduring popularity" of such costume dramas reflects "an unhealthy obsession with nostalgia."

Of course, like much in the wildly over-the-top British media, the promises of lots and lots of sexy stuff turned out to be exaggerated. Probably after watching all of the programs, most of the captivated female audience will still believe Mr. Darcy is the beau to swoon over -- as personified by Colin Firth, his decorum merely somewhat rumpled by a wet shirt, in "Pride and Prejudice" (airing Feb. 10, 17 and 24) .

The success in 1995 of this "Pride and Prejudice," adapted with verve, cheek but also sense and sensibility by Andrew Davies, is widely considered to have kicked off the Jane Austen on-screen phenomena. Davies -- who also adapted the 90-minute "Northanger Abbey" (produced last year), the 1997 version of "Emma" (airing March 23) and the new two-part miniseries "Sense and Sensibility" -- is not impeded by undue awe and reverence. But at the same time, Davies is freely admiring of Austen's dialogue and insight, and quick to pick up on any interesting subtext, especially if it helps to flesh out the heroes, who tend to appear rather wet emotionally.

Fans of Austen constantly argue over which of her books is best, as do fans of the screen adaptations. Purists will be picky -- arguments erupted recently about whether it was remotely feasible to ever see an Austen heroine dancing a waltz.

This PBS sextet of adaptations with restrained, elusive men in sleek britches, and hopeful, pretty girls in bonnets, does tend to meld in one's memory into a pleasant but interchangeable blur. But there are good things to look for in all -- well, maybe not "Mansfield Park" -- but the rest:

¿ In "Persuasion," directed by Adrian Shergold, Sally Hawkins does well enough as Anne, the almost-past-her-sell-by-date heroine and for many the most admirable of Austen's women.

¿ In "Northanger Abbey," Davies utilizes Catherine's Gothic novel-inspired daydreaming to inject a touch of enticing and not entirely out-of-place sex.

¿ "Pride and Prejudice" is still immensely satisfying and, as mentioned, will give you another look at Firth's Darcy.

¿ In "Emma," Kate Beckinsale captures the essence of the minxlike matchmaker.

¿ "Sense and Sensibility" (airing March 30 and April 6) stars Hattie Morahan as the well-reasoned Elinor and Charity Wakefield as the spontaneous Marianne. This is a full, thoughtful and essentially true rendering of the work of a novelist who didn't buy the "common cant" of deriding novel reading as a less than worthy activity. She wrote, only slightly tongue in cheek, that there were some novels in which "the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."

Much of the time Austen met that criteria, and at moments so do these visual manifestations of her talent.