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Pride and Prejudice

CritiqueQuotesText • At the movies

Pride and Prejudice 1894 cover1894 first Peacock edition
Publication details ▽ Publication details △

First publication
1813

Literature form
Novel

Genres
Literary, romance

Writing language
English

Author's country
England

Length
Approx. 121,000 words

Pride and Prejudice 1980 scene
Prideful couple (Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul) overcome first impressions in 1980 serial.

Pride without fall

Pride and Prejudice (1980): Television series, five episodes of 55 minutes each; director Cyril Coke; writer Fay Weldon; featuring Elizabeth Garvie, David Rintoul, Sabina Franklyn, Priscilla Morgan, Moray Watson, Peter Settelen, Judy Parfitt

Jane Austen's most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, has hit the large and small screens for at least a dozen times in several languages. The number is even higher if you count sequels and bizarre extensions that twist the story into—among other things—a murder mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley), a campy horror film (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), a modern romantic comedy (Bridget Jones's Diary), a Bollywood musical set in India (Bride and Prejudice), and a time-travelling, trading-places fantasy (Lost in Austen).

The majority of the more serious adaptations have been television miniseries, perhaps because it's felt the longer running times are needed to accommodate the novel's multifaceted plot

The first acclaimed version, however, was the glamorous 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. The Hollywood screenplay was penned by novelist Aldous Huxley, no less, with playwright Jane Murfin. Although not wildly popular, this film stood as the premier adaptation for decades.

That is, until three recent British productions captured the public imagination.

Austen's Pride

For Jane Austen purists (and I don't mean that sarcastically) the 1980 television serial comes closest to presenting Pride and Prejudice as Austen wrote it. By later standards, the production is stagy, too refined and too talkative but, for its time, the BBC's fifth crack at Pride and Prejudice is most successful at getting across Austen's points.

Its success begins with a respectful script by British writer Fay Weldon, produced not long before she published her most famous and radically different novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983).

A problem adapting any Austen work is that she tells the story in third person but approximating her female character's voice to present her internal thoughts and feelings. (This narrative style is known as free indirect speech.) In audiovisual media, this inner voice is missing and nuances of characters' motivation can be lost. Voice-overs can partly compensate for this, but their overuse can also make a film sound corny and melodramatic. In Pride and Prejudice Weldon uses voice-overs sparingly and places hints of the internal material in the spoken dialogue and behaviour, leaving it to the actors' skills to imply with theatrical skills.

Even the novel's famous opening line, in which Austen jokingly declares the "truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", is placed in the mouth of Elizabeth Bennet (Elizabeth Garvie) advising her older sister Jane (Sabina Franklyn).

The largely stage-based British cast handle their sharply defined roles with great delicacy and precision.

Garvie, known most for her work on the English stage, is particularly brilliant at this and lights up the screen even as she's delivering heavy loads of clever, complex dialogue without histrionics. She easily became my favourite Elizabeth Bennet.


Darcy's cold first proposal is rejected by sharp-tongued Elizabeth.

Scottish actor David Rintoul has a different set of difficulties, as his character is written very closely to the Darcy of the book. Weldon resists the temptation to make him more likable, as though his seeming arrogance is a mask for shyness or social honesty, as some adaptations would have it. His aristocratic Darcy is indeed overly proud, so cold it's hard for even a viewer who knows the story to spot any redeeming characteristics in him. 

The necessarily abbreviated length of this serial perhaps leaves too little time for the gradual warming between Darcy and Elizabeth. One doesn't have time for her quick change of mind about him and his sudden affability to soak in before the two are walking arm in arm.

But, you know, it's effective and affecting in just the ways Austen intended in her more drawn-out elaboration of plot and manners.

Also reduced in screen time are the parts of the story involving George Wickham (Peter Settelen) as he quickly transitions from the effortlessly charming friend to the wicked seducer of women to the accepted son-in-law. But again the main dramatic points are made satisfactorily. As can be said about several of the other curtailed subplots involving secondary characters.

More brightly paced and earthier productions are to come with more modern interpretations of the Pride and Prejudice story but this one endures as an older-fashioned attempt to get at the heart and mind of Austen's novel.

— Eric

 

CritiqueQuotesText • At the movies

1980, 1995, 2005

See also:

Castle Rackrent

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

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