Restoring the Sex and Rage to Jane Austen
Demand for Jane Austen far exceeds supply. When the novelist died in 1817 at the age of 41, she left only six full-length novels, plus three unpublished works and a collection of juvenilia. Yet in the two centuries since, Austen has become, as the British writer Alexander McCall Smith once put it, “a movement, a mood, a lifestyle, an attitude, and perhaps most tellingly of all, a fridge magnet.”
She got her first screen adaptation in 1940, with Laurence Olivier playing Fitzwilliam Darcy and the Bennet sisters dressed in American-antebellum corsets and huge frilly skirts. This Pride and Prejudice set the template for what an Austen adaptation was supposed to look and sound like: primly romantic, with both clothes and characters firmly buttoned up.
The 1990s were a boom time for that approach. Think Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma peeking out from under a bonnetor Kate Winslet daintily suffering a chill in . The BBC’s 1997 adaptation of stuck closely to its source material, and ended with a single, chaste postnuptial kiss between Elizabeth Bennet and features the couple on the steps of Pemberley, joking about how keen Elizabeth is to be called “Mrs. Darcy.” The next fashion was to transplant Austen’s stories to new locations: Bollywood for 2004’s , Pakistan for 2017’s .
