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Mud? Such a subject is barely mentioned in Jane Austen’s novels, with rare exceptions such as Elizabeth Bennet’s walk in dirty weather to visit her ailing sister at Netherfield. But mud, sweat and tears are currently everywhere in popular culture, whether in reality shows or in films on even the most traditionally decorous of subjects. Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen, for instance, spends more time with the monarch of England slogging through a stream to examine the undercarriage of her stalled Landrover than with her posing for a royal portrait. It’s little wonder, then, that the 2005 Pride & Prejudice, as directed by Joe Wright, offers viewers such an overwhelming profusion of mud, pigs, and chickens that many Janeites have cried foul. Like films in general, adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels respond to both trends in popular culture and industry practices of the time of production. The 1940 Pride and Prejudice, for example, made within the Hollywood studio system, follows the then-prevailing practice of teaming classic novels with studio stars and of privileging entertainment value over fidelity to the source text. Studio-era filmmakers felt free not only to add scenes, such as a rollicking carriage race at the beginning, but also to eschew decorum in pursuit of a broad comedy consistent with the era’s popular screwball comedies (Parrill 49). Such comedies highlighted the physical in a way quite divergent from Austen’s propriety: we see Kitty stumbling drunk and a flustered Mrs. Bennet insisting Lydia must wipe the perspiration off her face. Given the tendency in popular culture and in film since the 1960s to be ever more frank about “dirt”—whether the term is applied to bodily functions, shameful secrets, or material that arouses disgust—one might expect the Jane Austen adaptations that have proliferated since 1995 to be filled with references to many unsavory details of Regency life that Austen herself omitted or only glanced at. And, in some films, such has been the case. Writer Andrew Davies began the 1996 televised version of Emma with a scene of a theft from a chicken coop, and showed the Woodhouse carriage passing squalid cottages. As directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, this Emma also demonstrated that servants actually labored for a living rather than hovering decoratively in the background. Roger Michell’s Persuasion (1995) took this attention to the working class even further by providing close-ups of dissatisfied-looking servants. Moreover, Persuasion distressed more than one reviewer by its presentation of “an unappealing Anne Elliot, a pockmarked Captain Wentworth, a greasy necked Benwick, and a slovenly looking Lady Russell” (Allen 15). Even more gritty was Patricia Rozema’s postcolonial reinterpretation of Mansfield Park (1999), which featured fairly explicit sexuality, suggestions of homoeroticism and incest, and, most strikingly, appalling images of abuse of slaves. During the same years, however, other Austen adaptations took a markedly more decorous approach. The 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice made the demands of the body palpable with its famous “wet T-shirt Darcy,” but did so discreetly. Colin Firth became a sex symbol on the basis of his Darcy’s longing glances and simmering sexual frustrations that were dramatically translated into overheated fencing matches and his fully clothed dive into a pond—evidently, the period’s equivalent of the cold shower. The bigger-budget films of Sense and Sensibility (1995) and an Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow (1996), with their glamorized stars and impressive landscapes, portrayed a far more attractive version of Austen’s England than did Persuasion or the Lawrence/Davies Emma. These later films fit neatly into the category of “heritage cinema.” What are heritage films? This critical term describes a cycle of English costume dramas of the 1980s and 1990s (by English I mean not just films made in England—indeed most films today have international financing and often casts—but those depicting Englishness). Although like most genre definitions this one is subject to debate,1 Andrew Higson explains some of its elements this way: These are films set in the past, telling stories of the manners and proprieties, but also the often transgressive romantic entanglements of the upper- and upper-middle-class English, in carefully detailed and visually splendid period reconstructions. The luxurious country-house settings, the picturesque rolling green landscapes of southern England, the pleasures of period costume, and the canonical literary reference points are among the more frequently noted attractions of such films. (1) Films often categorized in the heritage genre include Chariots of Fire (1981), Heat and Dust (1982), The Remains of the Day (1993), and almost every adaptation since 1980 of a novel by E.M. Forster (many from Merchant-Ivory) or by Henry James, as well as other Merchant-Ivory productions. At first glance, Pride & Prejudice (2005), an adaptation that features as many farm animals as it does china teacups, appears to align more nearly with Mansfield Park and Persuasion than with unabashed heritage productions like Sense and Sensibility and the Emma built around Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow. The 2005 feature film extends the concentration on sexuality of the 1995 miniseries and additionally embraces the realities of an agricultural economy and of an era that lacked, for instance, hairdryers. I will argue, however, that Pride & Prejudice is a hybrid that embraces both an irreverent realism to which younger audiences are accustomed (and which reflects the director’s realist aesthetic) and the classic heritage film’s reverence for country houses, attractive landscapes, and authentic period detail. The film’s title, which features an ampersand rather than Austen’s “and,” says it all: Pride & Prejudice is somewhere between an adaptation for Janeites and a teen reworking such as Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern 1996 rendition of Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers, which signaled its bolder adaptation strategies through its title: Romeo + Juliet. Even though some critics believe the heritage cycle proper ended in the mid-nineties, nonetheless the prevalence of heritage films among film adaptations of classic English literature over the last quarter century has generated some unwritten expectations that each such film must answer if it is to avoid the excoriation that many viewers heaped on Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999). So any costume drama based on Pride and Prejudice (as opposed to looser adaptations like the Mormon update of 2003 or the Bollywood Bride & Prejudice) must conform to some heritage-driven expectations if it is to generate an audience that includes the art-house filmgoers that act as a core audience for costume dramas. Filmmakers are well aware of the conventions that have evolved for such historical films and often honor them even if they find them constraining. Literary costume dramas are most financially successful, however, when they are able to cross over to a wider (younger, more mainstream) audience as did, for instance, Sense and Sensibility, The English Patient (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). 2 Claire Monk points out that “the marketing, promotion and indeed textual strategies of recent [late nineties] British period films—discernible even in the relatively conservative Howards End or Sense and Sensibility and more emphatically in Elizabeth or The Wings of the Dove (1998) . . . —have worked hard . . . to project the films as ‘not heritage films’” (“Debate” 193). Like these films, the 2005 Pride & Prejudice was clearly produced and marketed to have crossover appeal—even at the risk of losing some of the traditional heritage audience. The film’s advertising campaign referenced the popular Bridget Jones’s Diary (“from the producers of . . .”) before it referenced Jane Austen, and featured slogans such as “Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can’t be without.” The previous theatrical period film of Austen’s most popular novel, some sixty-five years earlier, had starred Greer Garson and a fortyish Laurence Olivier as Elizabeth and Darcy. The 2005 filmmakers, by casting age-appropriate actors (Keira Knightley at twenty was the same age as the book’s Elizabeth) and stressing the central love story, might hope to expand beyond the art-house core to a wider and younger audience. That the central actors were either relatively unknown, or in the case of Keira Knightley associated with action-oriented roles in Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) rather than with literary adaptations, helped avoid the “effect of foregrounding the film’s artifice” that Claire Monk identifies as a result of the earlier heritage practice of “casting the same actors across several films” (“Critics” 119). In short, they avoided the Helena Bonham-Carter effect. The attempt to reach a wider and more youthful audience was no doubt one reason for selecting Joe Wright as director. In his early thirties, Wright had never before made a feature film, never read Jane Austen’s novel, never even seen an Austen adaptation made since 1940, and could declare himself decidedly uninterested in “the Jane Austen Franchise” (Fetters). Wright’s sensibility is more working class than Oxbridge (Hoggard); is tinged with a lingering frat boy humor (evident in Mr. Collins’ pulpit pun on “intercourse,” a line vehemently disowned by screenwriter Deborah Moggach [Brosnan]); and is irreverent enough to inspire him to convince Dame Judi Dench to join the cast by writing her a letter saying, “I love it when you play a bitch. Please come and be a bitch for me” (Brevet). Wright’s cinematic heroes are not heritage stalwarts Merchant/Ivory or Andrew Davies, but rather social-realist filmmakers like Alan Clarke (Hoggard), whose bleak films focused on the working class and contemporary social problems such as heroin addiction. Wright had tackled historical drama in Charles II: The Power and the Passion, but his 2001 breakthrough had been a “raw TV drama about a boy’s quest to find his father, in the mould of Clarke or Ken Loach” (Hoggard). His gritty social-realist aesthetic is evident in Wright’s statements in his DVD commentary and several interviews that the period detail he was most disappointed to be unable to include in Pride & Prejudice had to do with the shortage of toilet facilities at balls and the preventative use of diuretics. And realism is all over this film. When Wright read Austen’s novel after reading the script, he appreciated its “social realism” (Fetters). In making the film, he explains, I wanted to treat it as a piece of British realism rather than going with the picturesque tradition, which tends to depict an idealized version of English heritage as some kind of heaven on earth. I wanted to make it real and gritty and be as honest as possible. (“Pride & Prejudice Companion Book”) The film’s realism is, accordingly, more of the kitchen-sink kind than of the nostalgic recreation of period details that characterizes the typical heritage film. Wright came to the heritage genre with skepticism about its characteristic style and motifs, as this interview comment suggests: We . . . questioned why it is that in period dramas you always see carriages pull up beside big houses, you’d have the wide shots of the houses and big wide shots of the rooms simply because you’re in a nice location. You wouldn’t do that if you were filming in some semi-detached house in Bromley. (Foley) Nonetheless, in Pride & Prejudice the filmmakers ultimately adopted many of the conventions of the period drama. In spite of Wright’s complaints in his DVD commentary about the tedium of shooting characters getting in and out of carriages, he also recognized that in “a period film you feel like you have to have carriages all the time,” and several carriage shots were included in the film. Wright’s statement of his goals in making the film—to concentrate on character and “ignore the fact that it was a period drama, and yet at the same time look at the detail of the period as much as possible” (Foley)—reveals in its contradictions the difficulty of balancing the tenets of realism with the imperatives of the heritage genre. The very setting of the film, 1797, indicates this balancing act. Wright found the volatile 1790s to be “a more interesting period socially” than the Regency period in which Austen’s novel was published; moreover, he feared that the Empire fashion of the early years of the nineteenth century could look “quite unflattering” (Foley). Yet heritage conventions dictate a scrupulous authenticity that would not allow for the freedom of the studio era to change costumes at will, as the makers of the 1940 Pride and Prejudice had in selecting the Victorian-era hoop skirts and big bonnets that recalled the fashions of the previous year’s hit Gone With the Wind. Setting Pride & Prejudice in 1797, the year Austen completed First Impressions, allowed for Wright’s preference but also met the heritage convention of authenticity, a criterion much honored in the film’s promotional practices. The Opening Sequence A look at Pride & Prejudice’s opening sequence will demonstrate both the dirty details characteristic of British realism and the film’s adherence to heritage conventions. The opening shot of a green English landscape immediately establishes that we are in the rural locale of heritage England, not in city or town. But this landscape differs from the manicured landscapes more typical of the heritage genre: we see the sun rising behind trees bordering a plain green field, without a stately house in the distance or even a picturesque cluster of sheep. The typical heritage evocation of the literary and the classic is almost immediately accomplished through Elizabeth’s reading of a book curiously yellowed with age. Although she is reading, an activity usually conducted indoors, she is simultaneously walking outdoors. Julianne Pidduck has identified the country walk as a recurrent motif of Austen films, a motif that suggests the possibility of women overcoming the limitations on “mobility and aspiration” placed on them in Austen’s age, limits symbolized by interior spaces (390). The use of the country walk motif in Pride & Prejudice is consistent with a general tendency in the Austen films, and heritage films in general, to update gender ideology to appeal to modern audiences. The relocation in Pride & Prejudice of many scenes from interiors to the countryside both suggests expanded agency for Elizabeth and provides opportunities for presentation of spectacular landscapes in the heritage manner: Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth not in the cramped parsonage but under a striking stone temple above a lake. Such attractive heritage views, however, are not routine for this film. Our first view of the Bennets’ house, Longbourn, is not of an imposing front as might be expected in a heritage film, but from the back, where we quickly see that it is a working farm. Austen’s novel mentions that Mr. Bennet operates a farm only in the context of Jane’s need to ride to Netherfield because the carriage horses are needed in the fields; neither Austen’s reader nor the viewer of the average Austen film ever confronts the mucky reality of farm life. In contrast, this film is full of mud and livestock. In this opening scene, we see a line of cows filing out in the background as Elizabeth crosses a bridge into the yard. Poultry scatter about as Elizabeth circles the house. In later scenes, a pig is seen in the passage, and Darcy awaits his fiancée amidst the chickens. Nor is it just the Bennets’ home that is a barnyard—though its roaming chickens do help distinguish the Bennets’ class status from the Bingleys’. The agricultural realities of 1790s England are equally evident in the enclosed yard with barn and hay where Lizzie twirls barefoot over the mud on a rope swing, and from the pigs and poultry running about the streets of Meryton or hanging on hooks outside its shops. Indeed this film uses animals, live or dead, in countless scenes. When Mr. Collins proposes to Lizzie in the dining room, for instance, a large ham is placed in front of the reluctant bride as a commentary (according to the director) on marriage as meat market.
The film prominently features workers as well. In this scene alone, we see not just white sheets on lines, but women servants toiling over the washtub in the yard. A man scatters feed to the poultry. In other scenes, a maid moves through the house humming, suggesting an interior life. In the dining scenes at Longbourn, Netherfield, and especially Rosings, servers are everywhere apparent—a distinct contrast to the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma, in which a silver tea set seems to appear on the lawn without human intervention.
If the livestock, obtrusive servants, and rear view diminish the nostalgia value of Longbourn as country house from the very first scene, Pride & Prejudice will later deliver the full heritage treatment of Pemberley as Great House. Higson identifies the heritage film as having a “pictorialist museum aesthetic,” providing “the ideal showcase for the visual splendour and period richness of the carefully selected interiors and locations” (39). Oftentimes locations are sought out for their authenticity as well as grandeur, as is the case with this film’s use of Chatsworth—often claimed as Austen’s model for Pemberley—to represent Darcy’s imposing estate. The film dramatizes Elizabeth’s first view of Pemberley as so riveting that she and the Gardiners must freeze to look at it properly, thus motivating a lingering tableau of the magnificent building framed picturesquely amidst the trees. This pictorial presentation of Pemberley contrasts with the opening sequence’s anti-pictorial introduction of Longbourn, as first seen from the back and then glimpsed piecemeal. The movement of the camera—which arrives at Longbourn along with Elizabeth as she returns from her walk, then tracks her in a lengthy steadicam shot as she passes through sheets drying on the line, circles the house, and enters—at first reflects Wright’s stated intention to adopt Elizabeth’s subjective view (DVD commentary). When she pauses on a porch to watch her parents through a window as they argue, the camera peers through the window too. Intriguingly, this shot reverses one that Pidduck has identified as characteristic of the mid-1990s Austen films, in which the camera “rests undoubtedly inside with the female protagonist looking out” (383). Although Wright’s film does include a shot of a woman looking out a window (as Elizabeth surveys the grounds of Pemberley, perhaps with the acquisitive gaze that Pidduck assigns to men), it more characteristically portrays the heroine, and the camera, as looking inward. Elizabeth’s difficult journey of self-discovery is rendered visual by her study of herself in the mirror when in need of enlightenment, such as when she considers Darcy’s letter. Wright’s probing camera, which repeatedly peers (through windows, or under bedclothes) into interior spaces, registers not a longing for the promises and pleasures of the external world but rather an investigation into the secret life of women. And Longbourn, with its six female family members and a sweet-tempered, flower-growing father who displays little of the sarcasm of Austen’s Mr. Bennet, is very much a domain of women. A particularly striking glimpse into this world will come in a later long take, just before Lady Catherine’s midnight visit, as the outside camera peers one-by-one into the upstairs windows of Longbourn, discovering Kitty and Mary in their bedroom, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet moving fondly toward each other in their bed, Elizabeth and Jane rejoicing over the return of their lovers, and a maid dreaming of her beau as she goes humming about her work. This female world is evident too in Longbourn’s cluttered interior, first seen in the opening sequence. As Lizzie circles the house, the restless camera anticipates her entrance, enters a side door, and sets off alone on its journey into the heart of the house, moving through a series of windows and passageways that block much of the audience’s view. Suddenly divorced from character point-of-view, the camera now seems to take on the function of anthropologist. In a heritage film, Higson explains, “the gaze is organized around props and settings—the look of the observer at the tableau image—as much as it is around character point of view” (39). Wright maintains this visual fascination with props and settings, as well as the preference for deep focus shots that Higson identifies as typical of the heritage genre (38), but turns it to his purpose by transforming props and setting into unprepossessing realism rather than nostalgic spectacle. The camera looks at things, but it looks at different things than might be expected in a heritage film. It does not linger over the Bennets’ finer furniture or pictures, but rather over the mess, the scattered bonnets and dropped sewing that signal a house full of women at their ease. When the camera discovers the women who inhabit the house, they are also marginally unkempt, with limp hair and a tendency to put their feet on the furniture. Only after the busy interior and workplaces of the house have been examined in unglamorized detail, redirecting our emotions away from nostalgia, do we get the standard frontal shot of a prosperous English home amidst the green—but a home from which the giggling voices of girls echo out through a window. Later, the film continues to emphasize mess. The same dining table is seen in a later breakfast scene without table cloth, surrounded by hung-over Bennets recovering from the Netherfield ball; the board full of dirty dishes, not a picturesque landscape or even a fine painting, forms the backdrop for Mr.Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s hair is periodically askew. Girls are seen with their hair wrapped in rag curlers, and the entire Bennet family appears in nightclothes for Lady Catherine’s strangely timed midnight visit. Mrs. Bennet is not only tipsy at the Netherfield ball, but has habits of casualness that extend to stocking feet and balancing a plate on her stomach. Throughout the film, the mundane and even sordid details of life are almost everywhere evident—save, of course, at Pemberley, the ultimate heritage landscape and nostalgic icon of old England. There is nothing sordid, however, about the treatment of the film’s love story. One of Pride & Prejudice’s most erotic scenes takes place at Pemberley, but in that most heritage locale, it borrows its technique from an earlier heritage film, Passage to India (1984). In David Lean’s adaptation of the E. M. Forster novel, Adela Quested’s silent visit to a temple full of erotic statues is used to reveal her sexual awakening in India. According to Wright’s DVD commentary, the sculpture gallery scene at Pemberley was unplanned, and he makes no reference to Passage to India as he does to Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), which inspired the extreme high-angle shot of Lizzie’s entrance into Pemberley across a black and white tile floor. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s lingering fingers stroking the white marble of Pemberley’s statues before she discovers the sculpture of Darcy convey a very similar erotic charge to Adela’s encounter with the temple statues, and her cream-colored costume provides a visual parallel between the human woman and the white marble nudes that surround her. If it participates in the decorous eroticism of the heritage film in this scene, Pride & Prejudice also adopts the tropes of romance from both the historical and the teen genres. Wright’s commentary cites the influence of John Hughes and Grease in the assembly ball sequence, for instance; he designed the bleacher-like seating so as to suggest a dance in the gym. Together with the kinetic camerawork, the fast pacing, and the youthful actors, such an approach increased the film’s potential appeal to a youth audience. At the same time, the film also used the iconography of the (literary) historical romance, to the point that some reviewers charged that “Jane Austen has been Brontëfied” (Lane). In Pride & Prejudice Darcy proposes under a stone temple in driving rain; during her excursion to the Peaks Elizabeth is photographed “silent upon a peak, her dress and tresses stirring in the wind” so as to “drop the hint that Mr. Darcy is . . . a britches-busting Heathcliff in the making” (Lane); and Elizabeth and Darcy’s first encounter after Lady Catherine’s visit begins with a lengthy take of Darcy in a long cloak striding out of the mists of dawn toward the camera to tell Elizabeth, “You have bewitched me body and soul.” Although Wright’s realist sensibilities seem to have recoiled from such scenes, which he describes as “a bit over the top and a bit over-romantic and a bit slushy” (DVD commentary), the film’s marketers saw them as audience bait: in preference to a heritage tableau of Pemberley or a more realist image of Elizabeth amidst the chickens, the DVD cover features Darcy emerging romantically from the mist behind a close-up of Elizabeth, and the menu screen depicts a wind-blown Elizabeth gazing out over an enormous Romantic landscape. An uncertainty about whether to err on the side of teen romance or heritage tastefulness is evident in the film’s much-discussed ending. British viewers, assumed to prefer the tasteful restraint of the heritage film, were left to end with Mr. Bennet calling for more suitors. American viewers were given an additional scene, an uncomfortable combination of physicality (Elizabeth’s stroking of Darcy’s bare calf), dramatic landscape (the torchlit grounds of Pemberley), and youthful chatter sealed with a profusion of kisses. Such indecisive endings may come to vex more period adaptations in the future as the heritage film becomes ever more of a hybrid, the direction several critics have identified. Pamela Church Gibson, seeing a “fissuring and fracturing in the monolith of heritage” (116), remarks on the addition of pastiche to the heritage film in the late nineties. Higson, while maintaining that the heritage film has retained its fundamental generic traits, finds it to have been “modernized” beginning in the late nineties, with Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, and other heritage films being “tailored increasingly for a wider, more youthful audience” (143); he concedes the view of other critics that heritage has shifted somewhat away “from reverential authenticity” and towards “irreverence and playfulness” (260). Drawing on Monk’s observation that heritage films can be regarded as varieties of the woman’s film, Antje Ascheid, citing such films as The Governess (1998), Mansfield Park (1998), Kate and Leopold (2001), and Possession (2002), argues for the recent melding of heritage film and contemporary chick flicks into the sub-genre “woman’s heritage film,” which “simultaneously accommodate[s] feminist critique and romantic abandon.” Monk herself insisted from the first on the “essentially hybrid” nature of heritage film texts, hybrid both in their “mixture of conservatism and progressiveness” and in their generic features, which Monk has found so elastic that she resists calling heritage a genre at all (“Critics” 122). Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, in its mixture of the generic traits and attitudes of eighties heritage cinema, British realism, and teen romance, is compelling evidence that the heritage film has not died—as Higson momentarily considered after the box-office failure of both The Golden Bowl and The House of Mirth in 2000 (144)—but rather been transformed into a more flexible genre. The critical and financial success of Pride & Prejudice has only made it more likely that future adaptations of Austen will feature, if not necessarily mud, then at least youthful and market-tested performers (most immediately, Anne Hathaway as Austen herself in Becoming Jane) and youth-oriented filmmaking techniques balanced with the visual pleasures of the heritage film. NOTES 1. The political stance of the heritage film
has been a subject of particular dispute. Many of the original critics of
the heritage genre, including Higson, saw heritage film as connected to a
conservative, nostalgic reimagining of England in the Thatcher era.
Writing slightly later, critics such as Claire Monk have argued that heritage
films can be read as progressive as easily as they can as conservative, and
that often the films’ visual elements are in tension with their narratives. 2. Critics explain that, for British films,
crossover success depends on success in the U.S. market. Higson, for
example, sees heritage films as always poised to achieve such crossover in
being driven “by both the commercialism and the market imperative of the
mainstream studio film and the cultural imperative and artistic values of the
specialized film” and in being positioned to play both the art-house circuit
and the multiplex circuit (91). Works
Cited Allen, Brooke. “Jane Austen for the Nineties.” The New Criterion Sept. 1995: 15-22. Ascheid, Antje. “Safe Rebellions: Romantic Emancipation in the ‘Woman’s Heritage Film.’” Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies 4 (Feb. 2006). 30 Apr. 2007 http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=4&all=true. Brevet, Brad. “An Interview with Joe Wright: Pride & Prejudice.” 21 Oct. 2005. 12 Feb. 2007 http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/features/2005/joewright/index.php. Brosnan, Edel. “From Hampstead to Hollywood.” Interview with Deborah Moggach. 28 Feb. 2007 http://www.writersguild.org.uk/public/008_Featurearticl/023_DeborahMoggac.html. Fetters, Sara Michelle. “It’s Austen All Over Again.” Interview with Joe Wright. 12 Feb. 2007 http://www.moviefreak.com/features/inteviews/joewright.htm. Foley, Jack. “Pride and Prejudice—Joe Wright Interview.” 12 Feb. 2007 http://www.indielondon.co.uk/film/pride_prejudice_wright.html. Gibson, Pamela Church. “Fewer Weddings and More Funerals: Changes in the Heritage Film.” British Cinema of the 90s. Ed. Robert Murphy. London: BFI, 2000. 115-24. Higson, Andrew. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Hoggard, Liz. “Meet the Puppet Master.” The Guardian 11 Sept. 2005. 30 Apr. 2007 http://film.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5282613-101730,00.html Lane, Anthony. “The Current Cinema: Parent Traps.” The New Yorker 14 Nov. 2005. 30 Apr. 2007 http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/051114crci_cinema. Langton, Simon, dir. Pride and Prejudice. Writ. Andrew Davies. Perf. Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. BBC/A&E, 1995. Leonard, Robert Z., dir. Pride and Prejudice. Writ. Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin. Perf. Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. MGM, 1940. Monk, Claire. “The British ‘Heritage Film’ and Its Critics.” Critical Survey 7.2 (1995): 116-24. _____. “The British Heritage-film Debate Revisited.” British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film. Ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant. New York: Routledge, 2002. 176-98. Parrill, Sue. Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Pidduck, Julianne. “Of Windows and Country Walks: Frames of Space and Movement in 1990s Austen Adaptations.” Screen 39 (1998): 381-400. “Pride & Prejudice Companion Book.” Online version. 2005. 30 Apr. 2007 www.workingtitlefilms.com/media/prideBooklet/index.htm. Wright, Joe, dir. Pride & Prejudice. DVD. Focus Features, 2005.
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