I wondered anew at this: why Mr Darcy? why not a woman representing Elizabeth Bennet? Is this a truth being universally acknowledged that a woman writes of man and therefore marriage? Being a more modern edition I think they could have revised that angle, as while it's a very fetching portrait – with fine eyes and an unsmiling but far from haughty expression - it has at times prevented one from following through on the impulse to read. Because isn't it Elizabeth that is the more interesting, the more captivating? Isn't it she at the heart of the story? Isn't it to her character we look to, even if she is at times headstrong and prejudiced towards one person over another? Isn't it her determination we admire? Elizabeth. Eliza. Lizzy.
Why not an illustration resembling Longbourn instead? As surely then questions such as this wouldn't arise. Why not a plain cover? The name Jane Austen, and indeed the very title, requires no other embellishment, not if it only serves to confuse and then distils the messages the text contains.
It seemed Mrs Woolf was still provoking in me all kinds of related and unrelated thoughts.
Not, I admit, all of them sensible, or just. But thoughts I find have such a random nature that often at times it's hard to keep up with them, or explain them, if you attempt it, in a language that others might understand.
Mr Darcy was then the problem: for being Elizabeth's focal point, he has become that too for the readers and of the novel itself. The women readers, I should hasten to add; and so we women have, in a sense, reduced the work of a woman author to a man.
We constantly make these errors in regards to our own sex.
It took a man - the excellent Andrew Davies – to adapt it for the BBC, with a woman's touch of course, but it became then, as it's remembered now, about Mr Darcy and that wet shirt scene, and the female blushes that followed, and still follow. Women are just as good (or just as bad) at reducing everything to sex, and why not, women say, men do.
What impressed upon me more (and I was fourteen, almost fifteen at the time, not far off Lydia's age) was how the characters were portrayed, because it's to them I now refer whenever I read the novel. I hear in my head the shrill tones of Alison Steadman playing Mrs Bennet; and see David Bamber, with his nervous sweat and gestures, as the tiresome Mr Collins.
The later film with Keira Knightly and other big names was, for me, a disappointment, for it did not epitomise anything that I had come to love. Its one saving grace was the superb soundtrack by Dario Marianelli. That was all. The film was probably truer to the maturity of the person playing the parts, and yet somehow it was less believable. I don't know why that should be so, but it was. Perhaps you're always tainted by what you see first? The BBC enhanced, the film diminished.
It's impossible to do any work, a work of fiction or of non-fiction, or an adaptation, any justice in 700 or so words, let alone put or answer all the questions that might have arisen, or parade the notes and thoughts that have run through one's mind like Lydia Bennet at a ball.
Picture credit: West Farms, the T.H. Faile Esq. Estate, David Johnson (source: WikiArt).
Written April 2020, in lock-down.
