Mansfield Park movie adaptation

Have been meaning to post something about the final Austen adaptation screened a week or so ago on ABC TV - the 2007 version of Mansfield Park starring a somewhat miscast Billie Piper as Fanny Price.

Not very satisfactory - Billie's Fanny P. is nowhere near mousey enough, engages in far too much exuberant running around and other lively, un-Fanny like behaviour, and about three quarters of the novel's plot appears to be missing. (Hacking off great chunks of plot is of course standard procedure in movie adaptations, but at least in the less woeful ones, they dispense with only about 50% of it.) Mary and Henry Crawford however, weren't bad, having a somewhat Jamesian Turn of the Screw feel about them, although this of course vastly oversimplifies the complexity of the characters in the actual novel.

Towards the end of the movie, I was somewhat amazed by Lady Bertam suddenly arousing herself from her unceasing torpor to notice what is going on between Fanny and Edward, and becoming very assertive with her husband about not interfering. Did anything of the sort ever happen in the actual novel? I don't recall it.

More Austen movie adaptations

Good old Aunty ABC is continuing to screen a whole series of British Jane Austen movie adaptations, some old and some new, although sometimes one is reminded of the advice, which I think was in an article somewhere on the Republic of Pemberley (or perhaps it was JASNA?) - when trying to do an Austen adaptation, there is one main rule - DON'T!!

And so a couple of weeks ago, we saw Persuasion, which on the whole wasn't bad, although Rupert Penry-Jones was much too fair of complexion to be playing a weather-beaten navy Captain, and the whole thing was all a tad Gothic in tone. Anne Elliot's nervy, hypochondriac sister was an absolute delight, however.

Last week, we saw the latest (2007) version of Northanger Abbey, which to my taste was nowhere near Gothic enough, or at least not as Gothic as the 1986 BBC production. However, the actor who played John Thorpe was suitably villainous.

If only we could extract bits of one adaptation and merge them with bits of another, perhaps we might get an adaptation that approaches satisfactory. The BBC's TV series of Pride and Prejudice still seems to be the benchmark for Austen adaptations (that is to say, the "straight" ones that follow the novels more or less faithfully).

Emma

Let's start off this blog with some musings about Emma, stimulated by the recent run on ABC television of the Emmy-winning 1996 adaptation starring Kate Beckinsale.

The novel, I must abjectly confess to my sister Janeites, I have been attempting to read for the past 30 years, without actually ever managing to make it to the end. However, this time we have great hopes that we will actually get there. But don't you just hate Mr Woodhouse? I want to slap some sense into the man, and every time he appears on the page, I am tempted to throw the book across the room (I must confess to feeling slightly guilty about this).

However, recently, I've been reading a splendid book of Austen criticism by Darryl Jones, Professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin. The book is Critical Issues: Jane Austen, Palgrave, 2004.

This is what he has to say about Mr Woodhouse - "Decades of reading, studying, teaching and writing about Jane Austen have only served to strengthen my sense that, far from a cherishably comic character, Mr Woodhouse is a pampered, whingeing, cretinous leech - a one-man justification for the class war and literature's best advert for compulsory euthanasia. In fact I'd happily kill him myself, given the chance."

Hear, hear Dr Jones, hear hear!