One can’t help but suspect that it’s the countryside, as much the country houses, that draws contemporary viewers. On the few occasions that she does dwell on the physical world, it is always to illuminate a character rather than a place, as when Elizabeth visits Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice and discovers, in its handsome home and elegant grounds, her own budding affection for its owner. Films, likewise, are constructed out of images while Austen’s novels are notoriously short on visual detail. Her novels are conspicuously short on guns, stunts, sex, and male camaraderie, the cornerstones of high-concept moviemaking.
It’s odd, in a way, that Hollywood has had such an enduring love affair with Austen. Will the budding young authoress choose love or literature? The choice, of course, is a false but cinematic one. “Few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” This didn’t stop the creators of Becoming Jane (2007) who made Austen (played by Anne Hathaway) the heroine of her own love story, losing her heart to a handsome Irish rogue, Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy). “Of events her life was singularly barren,” her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote. Filmmakers have even resorted to looting Austen’s life for material, which itself suggests the desperation for anything Austenian. There have been theatrical releases, TV movies, TV series, multiple modernizations - Metropolitan (1990) and Ruby in Paradise (1993) being but two - and a Bollywood musical, Bride and Prejudice (2004), in which Elizabeth (Aishwarya Rai) and Darcy (Martin Henderson) ride off together on an elephant. The first screen adaptation of her work was released in 1938, and they haven’t stopped since. Meanwhile Garai’s character Gwendolen struggles to find happiness after becoming involved with a cruel, wealthy older man, aptly named Mr Grandcourt, in order to be financially secure.HOLLYWOOD ADORES Jane Austen. Controversial at the time, the Victorian era plot sees Dancy immersed in the Jewish community, meeting Zionist thinkers, who Eliot appears to be sympathetic towards. Talented duo Andrew Davies and Tom Hooper turned their attention to adapting George Eliot’s final novel Daniel Deronda in the early 2000s, with Hugh Dancy in the titular role and Romola Garai as his love interest. Breathtaking and soul-destroying, it’s a masterpiece.
Set in the 1960s, it sees Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan starring as a shy, newly-married couple, unable to communicate on their wedding night due to a secret she is keeping from him. As with all of Ian McEwan’s novels, On Chesil Beach explores the devastating and life-long impact of a moment of misunderstanding.
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