The schedule for the Jane Austen book club is available here. We begin with Pride and Prejudice, 16th February 19.00 UK time. (Shakespeare details here.)
The first thing you must do if you want to read Jane Austen is to put all adaptations out of your mind. Do not watch them. They are not complementary to your reading. They will not help you understand the novels. They are entirely inadequate substitutes.
I am personally quite relaxed about the quality of adaptations. After all, once you go to the screen, fidelity isn’t really possible. But how many of the people who thought the Netflix Persuasion was egregious were outraged about Darcy’s wet shirt or Margaret saying “You always say it will never rain and it always does”? Indeed, how many of them will admit that it is outrageous to include wedding scenes in Austen adaptations?
No, once you cross the line to television, you are simply doing something very different, and it is pointless, hopeless, and a little bit pathetic to pretend otherwise. If you want to take Jane Austen seriously, read the novels unencumbered by anything audio-visual.
One reason for my stricture is that television flattens everything to story. Austen is the great genius who invented the modern English novel, whose innovative narrative techniques have been justly compared to the inventions of Flaubert and the modernists, and whose prose is a globally recognised gold standard of English usage. Almost all of this is lost in adaptation, with the exception of dialogue in the very long BBC Pride and Prejudice.
Television struggles to convey irony. There simply isn’t any way of converting a paragraph like this into a scene for the small screen.
On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving her brother and his wife, who came, as usual, to spend the Christmas at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well-bred and agreeable. Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger than Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Philips, was an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favourite with her Longbourn nieces. Between the two eldest and herself especially, there subsisted a very particular regard. They had frequently been staying with her in town.
The first part of Mrs. Gardiner’s business, on her arrival, was to distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions. When this was done, she had a less active part to play. It became her turn to listen. Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of. They had all been very ill-used since she last saw her sister. Two of her girls had been on the point of marriage, and after all there was nothing in it.
Notice the phrase “and within view of his own warehouses”. It is part of the narrative, but it is clearly the speech of the Netherfield ladies. Austen is satirising them by silently borrowing their phrase. The camera has no ability to ventriloquise with irony like this. Convert it into dialogue and all subtlety is lost, all malice gone. The same is true of the descriptions of Mrs. Gardiner and Mrs. Bennet. The detached brevity of the narrative provides a wit that direct representation would struggle to master. Again, having Mrs. Bennet speak the phrase “They had all been very ill-used” could work, just not in the same way. Don’t you enjoy the sharpness of the sentence, “It became her turn to listen.” Austen is bringing out the unspoken dynamic. Mrs. Bennet is funny, but also domineering; she is to be gently mocked, but also a little scorned. Austen’s prose walks a delicate line.
When I was young, I disliked Austen. I thought it was all fluff. I was challenged on this by the grand-daughters of some friends of ours, and so I read Pride and Prejudice. So compulsive did I find this novel, which I had been fairly indifferent to at fifteen, that I read it in a great haste during my commute. I had always enjoyed Sense and Sensibility. But I sent Emma hurling away in frustration many times. For the first hundred pages or so, I was charmed into submission by the writing, but Emma herself was always too much for me. Persuasion was beyond me. I read Austen’s letters out loud to my wife when she was pregnant, which was often highly enjoyable (too much about hats and hems though).
I kept trying. And I kept hating Emma. Then I decided to research the life of Elizabeth Jenkins, who had written the first proper biography of Austen in 1938.
No previous book had fully detailed the life and treated the novels seriously. It remains a splendid achievement. So I was forced to take Austen seriously. And indeed, it was a problem for me: how could I take myself seriously as a reader if I was going to constantly dismiss Austen? As an undergraduate, I had taken poetry much more seriously than fiction; if I was going to have a full understanding of English literature, though, that had to change.
After reading Sense and Sensibility, my reliable favourite, I turned to Mansfield Park, which I had neglected after all my other failures. Whoosh! Austen came alive for me in an entirely new way. My goodness that book is full of Austen’s powers, all her abilities come into focus. The theatre scenes! The dialogue! The genius of Austen is to write familiar characters with the clear freshness of a new day’s light: I knew these people, I worked with them, and I found it al garishly compelling. Much disliked, Mansfield Park swiftly became one of my favourites. Fanny Price is virtuous and vindicated. When I told my children the plot as I read, they gasped and hissed at Mary Crawford. (Quite right too.)
And then I read Persuasion. If you can only once sit quietly and allow a book to teach you how to read it, then you will be able to see what is splendid about it, rather than looking for signs which you have pre-approved of greatness. As soon as I did that, I was overwhelmed by Persuasion. I immediately re-read it. I thought about it all the time. I couldn’t stop marvelling at the narrative techniques, at how much Austen did in so few pages. I was becoming a Janeite.
Part of this seeing was enabled by Jenkins, whose biography of Austen is a true marvel. Jenkins had a genius for understanding history. The Austen biography is a swift immersion into another world: a time free of commercial colour, widespread advertising, and the trailed litter of “chocolate paper, cigarette ends and film cartons.” I have also been helped greatly by the critics Marilyn Butler, Jenny Davidson, John Mullan, Michael Suk-Young Chwe, and Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris, among others.
The more I read, the more I loved Austen, and the less I ever wanted to see an adaptation again. Once the you have seen the real magic of mages being practised, why would you go to the theatre to see a conjuror pull cards out of a hat? I watched the Netflix Persuasion to see if it was as bad as everyone said. I thought it was fine. Like I said, take one, take them all. I wrote in the Critic,
Compared to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters or, worst of all, those versions of the Austen novels where a lot of romance-novel sex-scenes are written in, the new Netflix Persuasion is really quite good. It understands the novel and makes an honest attempt to render it. No, it’s not an ornament for all time. But so what. Austen is. You still have her.
So when you read Jane Austen this year, do not be tempted to catch up with an adaptation, or to take the excuse to re-watch the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility, no matter how good it is. It will distract you from the many many splendours on the page, from all the little hints Austen leaves throughout her work. Don’t just read it for the story: let her teach you how to see her novels. Be transported to her world.
Reading Austen is like having a layer of skin removed, she is so sharp and perceptive in her irony, it flays.
Spot on. The stories are perfectly pleasant on film, but her genius is brightest at the level of the sentence and must be experienced that way.