This year has brought with it any number of celebrations of Pride and Prejudice from plays and festivals to conferences and all sorts of fan fiction and games and “stuff” one cannot live without, but the best way to celebrate the book in my mind is to just find a quiet corner somewhere and re-read it, perhaps for the umpteenth time, but read it again nonetheless. One of Jane Austen’s greatest strengths and why we still read her year after year over the past 200 years, is her creation of believable characters who live and breathe on and off the page – and the need for our imaginations to bring whatever we will to the reading… Andrew Davies famously says he had to “sex her up” to make the films work for a modern audience, and while I like to see Colin Firth in a wet shirt and Matthew Macfadyen bare-chested at dawn as much as the next swooning female, I do take issue with the need to edit the text to the point of it seeming more like a modern romance than an early nineteenth-century novel. Much has been made of the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and the need to make the feelings of the hero more apparent to the viewer, the complaint being that Jane Austen really doesn’t give us much to go on regarding her Heroes and their inner life.
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