A Scene from "The Jane Austen Book Club"

The first time I saw this was when it came out in cinemas and our public library service very considerately put on a screening for library members. The Jane Austen Book Club was funny then, and is just as funny on a second viewing, now that it has finally hit the video shops.

A small detail that especially appeals is that each book club member usually reads a different edition of every one of Jane Austen's novels, reflecting how many times they have been reprinted and how enduringly popular they are. Although Grigg's monster compendium edition is just ever so slightly déclassé and looked down on by the female members of the book club - another amusing touch. But onto one of my favourite scenes from the movie, when the group is discussing Mansfield Park:

Sylvia: [whose husband has recently left her] Okay, look. I love Fanny. She works hard. She puts her family's needs above her own.
Allegra: Mom, it's OK.
Sylvia: And she never, ever stops loving Edmund, ever. [emphatically] Even when he's stupid enough to do something like take up with Mary Crawford. [clatters dishes loudly in kitchen]
Allegra: (whistles)
Bernadette: Oh dear. I thought Mansfield Park would be safe, didn't you?
Allegra: I don't think we're gonna get through all six books.
Jocelyn: Reading Jane Austen is a freaking minefield.

Priceless. Oops, that was an unintentional pun.

Voluptuous Trees & Sexy Shrubbery

As Martin Amis has pointed out (see quote near the header of this blog), the Freudians can have, and have had, a field day with Jane Austen's fiction. Darryl Jones, who himself may or may not subscribe to the Freudian school of thought, has had a great deal of fun with Catherine Morland's exploration of the cabinet and its "cavity of importance" and "place in the middle" alone in her room at night in Northanger Abbey.

But this is not all - what do we make of all the carry-on in Mansfield Park (Chapter 10) concerning gardens and locked gates and Miss Bertram escaping with Henry Crawford into the wilderness beyond, with its oak-covered knoll? Or this deliciously suggestive passage in Chapter 46, where Fanny's

"...eye fell everywhere on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state, where farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination."

Or indeed, is there anything remotely Freudian in Emma in Mr Knightley's encounter with Emma Woodhouse in the garden? "He had followed her into the shrubbery with no idea of trying it."

Or is this blogger just imagining it?

Reference:
Daryl Jones Critical Issues: Jane Austen Palgrave Macmillan 2004

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.