Austen Chat: Episode 18

December 5, 2024

Adapting Austen: A Visit with Andrew Davies

In this episode we chat with the man who gave us the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice—for many, the definitive Austen adaptation. A prolific author and screenwriter, Andrew Davies is also responsible for the 1996 ITV adaptation of Emma, Northanger Abbey (2007), Sense and Sensibility (2008), and the recent dramatization of Sanditon—not to mention adaptations of a host of other classic novels. Join us as we discuss Andrew's thoughts on adapting Austen's novels to film and, of course, Mr. Darcy in a wet shirt.

• A video of this episode is also available on JASNA's YouTube Channel.

Andrew Davies, prominent author and screenwriter, began his career writing radio plays and eventually moved into writing for television, film, and theater. He is also the author of several novels and children’s books. In addition to the screen adaptations of Austen's novels mentioned above, he has dramatized television series such as Bleak House, House of Cards (ITV), Mr. Selfridge, Little Dorrit, To Serve Them All My Days, Vanity Fair, and War & Peace, in addition to films such as Bridget Jones's Diary, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Andrew's work has garnered dozens of nominations and awards, and in 2002, he received the highest honor bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a BAFTA Fellowship, in recognition of his “outstanding achievement in the art forms of the moving image.” 

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Andrew for being a guest on Austen Chat! 

Learn more about his life and career accomplishments on his IMDb page.

Listen to Austen Chat here, on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms), or on our YouTube Channel.

Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published December 5, 2024. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Photo: Jane Austen Society of North America. Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood, from the Georgia Region of JASNA. Listeners, it would be difficult to overstate the influence my guest today has had on the international Jane Austen community. He's the man who gave us the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice—for many, the definitive Austen adaptation. A prolific author and screenwriter, Andrew Davies is also responsible for the 1996 Emma, 2007 Northanger Abbey, 2008 Sense and Sensibility, and PBS's recent dramatization of Sanditon—not to mention adaptations of a host of other classic novels. Andrew's screenplays have garnered dozens of nominations and awards, including two Peabody Awards, two Primetime Emmys, and three BAFTA Awards. In 2002, he received the highest honor bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a BAFTA fellowship, in recognition of his "outstanding achievement in the art forms of the moving image." Most importantly, though, he gave us Mr. Darcy in a wet shirt, and no award can ever repay him for that gift. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Davies: Thank you.

Breckyn; It's such an honor to have you here today. In 2011, you were a plenary speaker at the Annual General Meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, and people at JASNA are still talking about your presentation there. I know that our listeners are going to be thrilled to hear from you again.

Let's get into it. Let's get started. You, of course, have spoken a lot about Pride and Prejudice in the past, and we certainly will talk about it today. But I want to give ample time to your other Austen adaptations as well, so let's start broad. You have adapted so many great authors: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo. How is adapting Austen different from those other authors?

Andrew: I think in some ways I found it easier because her plots are so well-crafted. A lot of those other guys, Dickens and Tolstoy, write these great baggy monsters, and there's lots of extraneous material that you've got to cut out, whereas there's virtually nothing superfluous in a Jane Austen novel. So really, it's a matter of crystallizing it, because you can't have every bit of it. Well, the short answer is I just copy out the best bits. Another thing about her is that she writes scenes with dialogue that just plays very well as drama. So, it's just a question of tailoring it and fileting it and making sure you've got the absolute best lines.

Breckyn: Yeah. And well, one of the things that I really like about your Northanger Abbey adaptation is that it's that rare occurrence of Austen the narrator. You have included just Austen, the narrator, speaking in the beginning, and then at the very end, the very last line of the novel, you included that, and those are some of the best parts.

Andrew: Yeah. It's, of course, a temptation to use her narrative voice throughout. But in a sense, especially when it's past tense, that gives a sort of "all wrapped-up feeling," like it happened a long time ago, and the author knows how it's going to end. Whereas with the dramatization, you want the audience to feel it's actually happening now. And so, in the relatively rare example, I suppose, of people who have no idea what the story is, to actually think, "Oh, no. Now what's going to happen? Don't go there. Don't do that," et cetera.

Breckyn: You want to keep people on the edge of their seats. Yeah.

Andrew: I want to keep it all present tense.

Breckyn: Well, so, I recently interviewed two women who have translated Jane Austen into their native languages, Portuguese and Japanese. We did that episode just recently. And in some ways, adaptation is a translation. Artistic choices have to be made, and some things will always be left out. So, what are some of the choices that have been most challenging for you in adapting Austen for the screen? And what have been some of the most enjoyable ones?

Andrew: Challenges. I think there weren't that many challenges in Pride and Prejudice, except that I just wanted to show Darcy's point of view. But I could see how I could do that. Sense and Sensibility is full of challenges. But the main one is that the two guys who actually get the girls—and the ones we should be rooting for—are not really very easy to make attractive.

Breckyn: I would love to hear your thoughts on that, because when I was a teenage girl, when I first watched the Emma Thompson version, and Marianne ends up with Colonel Brandon, I was shocked. I was like, "What? He's like an old man!"

Andrew: Yes, that's right. So, I decided to soft pedal on the rheumatism and the—

Breckyn: The flannels.

Andrew: And the wooly waistcoats, yes, and go hard on the military valor and so on. And also reading—There's often a lot of backstory in a Jane Austen that you can bring forward in an adaptation. And I found that I could do Colonel Brandon a lot of good in that. There's a little bit in the novel where Elinor says—after Colonel Brandon's told the shocking story of his niece's/ward's seduction, she said, "Did you never see Willoughby again?" He says, "One meeting there had to be: he to defend his conduct, and I to punish it." And I said, "Oh, good. Let's have it on the screen." And you could put Colonel Brandon really demolishing Willoughby and then deciding to let him off in the end rather than run him through with his sword. 

Breckyn: That's a great scene.

Andrew: Yeah. And I wanted to go hard on Willoughby because he's such an awful fellow. And I wanted to foreground that poor schoolgirl that he seduces and then just leaves behind and forgets all about. He just rides off into the distance.

Breckyn: That's a wonderful beginning, the way that your Sense and Sensibility opens with firelight and seduction. He even talks about, "Oh, your caretaker, she thinks you're a child, but you're not, are you?" That's creepy and gross! But sensual. It's such a good way to start the show, because that happens before the main action of the story. And if you know that, then that immediately makes you suspicious of Willoughby.

Andrew: Yeah, except that I don't actually say—you know, we don't know it's Willoughby.

Breckyn: It's true. You don't see his face.

Andrew: And in fact, we had such interesting conversations about that, because there was a script editor who was very keen that we should actually see Willoughby in that scene, which would be when we see him again, and Marianne's obviously falling for him. All the girls will say, "Oh, no, don't go there! Don't do it!" So, it's a toss-up, because you either get the revelation to the audience there or later. And it's probably stronger to have it where it is—where it comes later. But it's such an interesting thing. But I really thought, and I suppose that's a rare instance of my disagreeing with Jane Austen, that I think she lets Willoughby off too lightly.

Breckyn: I agree. I think that you do it when he shows up to talk to Elinor when Marianne is sick. That scene in the book—she feels too much for him. She feels sad for him, and I thought you did a good job of not making us feel very sympathetic to him.

Andrew: She should give him a really hard time and make him feel thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Breckyn: Yes. Yeah. No, I really like that. And that's actually a scene that isn't in the 1996 version, the Emma Thompson version—when Willoughby gets to show up and defend himself, but it is in the novel. And so, when I saw your version—

Andrew: Well, of course, Emma Thompson was married to Willoughby, wasn't she?

Breckyn: She was, yeah. Or after, yeah, around that time.

Andrew: She probably had a soft spot for him as well.

Breckyn: That's a good point.

Andrew: I don't know.

Breckyn: But I really like that you included that scene. The longer—The fact that you got to do a miniseries meant you could include some more scenes than just like a two-hour. 

Andrew: And also seeing Colonel Brandon with the girl who has the baby.

Breckyn: That was really sweet.

Andrew: And she says, "Do you think if he saw his baby, he'd change his mind?" And Colonel Brandon says, "No, I'm afraid not. He's getting married to this rich heiress. Forget him."

Breckyn: Yeah. Well, and—sorry, I just want to go back to the duel real quick, because that's something that I think can be lost on a reader. Like you said, it's one line, and they don't say “duel,” they don't say “swords.” I mean, as a teenage reader, I had no idea that they had had a duel until later people were talking about it. I was like, "What duel are you talking about? When does she ever mention that?" And so, that's something that you get to do as an adapter; you get to do this really close reading and then pull out those subtle bits and expand on them.

Andrew: Yes.

Breckyn: Yeah. Do you have other examples of times when you've enjoyed doing that in Austen? Where it's just maybe a throwaway line and you get to—

Andrew: Yeah, there's an instance in Northanger Abbey, where Jane Austen doesn't exactly say this, but Isabella Thorpe, Catherine's friend, has great hopes of Captain Frederick Tilney, and Eleanor says—well, his own sister says, "That's not going to happen. I mean, if he's paying attention to her, it won't be for any good motive." And I thought it's possible that he did seduce her.

Breckyn: Yeah, I thought that was a bold choice. That's an interesting—

Andrew: She says, "Are we engaged now?" He says, "What are you talking about? Get dressed and go and join your friends."

Breckyn: You managed to make Isabella Thorpe, who is terrible, a little bit sympathetic in that moment.

Andrew: Well, she's just a silly girl, isn't she? She's not really malicious or anything like that. I don't think she is.

Breckyn: She's incredibly dishonest and manipulative, and then manages to be manipulated by a bigger predator, right? She's dishonest and manipulative, but then she is manipulated by someone who's even more dishonest than she is.

Andrew: Yeah.

Breckyn: Yeah. So that's a good—I'm glad that you mentioned that scene, because I had that in the back of my mind, of you adding your own interpretation like, this is possible. And so, you put it in there—like maybe they fully did—he did seduce her. So, when adapting Austen, how do you strike a balance between her ideas and intent and your own creative input? Do you have some priorities in deciding what to leave in and what to leave out and what to change?

Andrew: I don't have any general principles. It just comes out of reading the book and just a feeling from reading it. That thing about, oh, Willoughby's getting away with it. And with Emma, for example, I think Knightley is just such an important character. And in a way, he, rather than Emma, is the moral and emotional center of this book.

Breckyn: Absolutely.

Andrew: When I was preparing to adapt it, I read this really interesting thing in a book of criticism that said that one of the reasons that we didn't have a revolution in England, as they did in France, is that the aristocracy tended to live in the country and look after their tenants, and that there were enough people like Mr. Knightley so that the peasants weren't revolting.

Breckyn: Or Mr. Darcy, who we are told is a good landlord as well.

Andrew: Mr. Darcy is a good landlord, yes. And so . . . I thought, let's celebrate this a bit, and that worked out in that harvest supper scene where he's invited everybody, and the peasants and whatnot are mingling with the grand folk, and Mr. Knightley says, "Don't be worried that I'm going to live at the Woodhouses'. There will be continuity. I will still be here to look after you all." So, he's a big unifying figure for the community, because, of course—I mean, Emma is just a complete loose cannon, isn't she? She thinks she's everything, and she thinks she's so intelligent, but her imagination runs away with her. She's really like a little girl playing with people.

Breckyn: Make-believe, yeah.

Andrew: With toys. And she's rescued from most of her—all of her bad decisions.

Breckyn: From the consequences of her actions.

Andrew: Although, yeah, she does come to recognize that she's gone over the top. But in the end, you feel like forgiving her. And you think, well, if Knightley loves her, she must be all right.

Breckyn: There must be some redeeming quality about her.

Andrew: I remember conversations at the beginning of this—Sue Birtwistle and I, we always worked very closely on both Emma and Pride and Prejudice. And she was saying the only reason she can get away with being like this is she's really very young, Emma, and it was good to cast her young. And in fact, Kate was, yeah, very young. It was only about the second thing she'd done, I think. I mean, it's such a thrill for me to see people who are almost having their first big parts in something like that. And then they go on to do lots of wonderful things.

Breckyn: So many—Oh, go ahead.

Andrew: I'm just saying, no doubt they forget all about me. But they're like kids I've taught in school or something like that.

Breckyn: Well, I know there are so many British actors who owe their start to Pride and—not Pride and Prejudice, to Jane Austen—because the BBC and others are always making adaptations because we can't get enough. And so, I think a lot of them look really fondly on their time in those period dramas.

Andrew: I think that's right. One of the really good things about the BBC is that they've always been prepared to cast unknowns in these leading parts, because, of course, Jane Austen's heroines are so young.

Breckyn: They are, yeah.

Andrew: They're rarely over 20.

Breckyn: Except Anne Elliot, yeah. She's the exception.

Andrew: She's the exception. And if it was anybody else—if it was one of the streamers or Netflix or whatever—they'd want to put somebody who was already a star to make the whole thing easier to set up and finance.

Breckyn: Right. It was Kate Beckinsale, right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Breckyn: Who played Emma. And then she later went on to play Lady Susan in Love and Friendship.

Andrew: That's right.

Breckyn: Which is fun. So, then she got to play two of Austen's major heroines and one of Austen's most interesting villains—a really complicated character, Lady Susan.

Andrew: Yeah, completely. I would love to have written that. I thought it was brilliantly written.

Breckyn: Whit Stillman did a really good job.

Andrew: Yeah.

Breckyn: Yeah. So, you've mentioned in other interviews that it's important to introduce the male perspective when adapting Austen because her novels famously don't feature scenes with men alone or in groups without women. What other areas of Austen's novels do you think are ripe for speculation or expansion on the screen?

Andrew: She doesn't have anything to say about girl-on-girl relationships. And I'm contemplating—oh, this is thrilling news. You heard it here first!

Breckyn: Tell us.

Andrew: Doing something with The Watsons. And the leading character, who rather amusingly is called Emma Watson—she won't be playing the part—she comes back into this very typical Jane Austen society, like they're the poorest of the gentry, and in the county of Surrey. But she's an instant success. And the local rake, Tom Musgrave, is very interested, and so is the local lord, Lord Osborne, but she's not very interested in either of them. And she spends most of the evening dancing with an eleven-year-old boy. And I thought that maybe there's an echelon higher up than even Lord Osborne—some absolutely—some grand young widow, duchess, and that Emma might finish up with her. It would be a bit of a sensation, Jane Austen's first lesbian heroine. I think it might be time for that.

Breckyn: Well, that leads perfectly into a different question I wanted to ask, which is that all adaptations, either consciously or unconsciously, have something to say about their era and their intended audience, as well as about the original work. So, do you work with your audience in mind? That was going to be my question. How has your audience changed from 1995 to now? I think you pointed out one way: that it would be a lot more accepting of a relationship like that. Do you have to make different artistic choices since the world has changed so much, or do you get to make different artistic choices because the world has changed?

Andrew: Yeah, I don't think I do it very consciously. I mean, this Watsons thing must be partly because I've been talking about it with a young producer who happens to be herself a lesbian, and I just thought it would be fun to explore that with her. But mostly—it's actually because we are partly written by the times that we live in, and we can't help it. I'm not particularly conscious of—I think it's a timely and rather saucy and cheeky idea to introduce a lesbian heroine into Emma [Watson]. But it's only because we're in 2024, really, that I got this idea. I think it's an original idea, but in a way, it's not.

Breckyn: Yeah, but 1995 was not ready for it. 2024, there have been many Jane Austen fan fictions or Jane Austen retellings with LGBTQ characters, so it wouldn't be the first time. And so, like you're saying, it might be the era for it.

Andrew: Yeah. First time in a TV adaptation.

Breckyn: Right. So, you've said in the past that you wanted your version of Mr. Darcy—let's get onto him, because everybody loves him—to be more than just a brain in an uptight suit, which I loved that. You wanted to convey his humanness, his physicality and sexuality. And so, you included those scenes like him in the bath or him diving into the pond at Pemberley. I want to know, did you want the same for Edward Ferrars? In your 2008 Sense and Sensibility? Because the scene where he's chopping wood in the rain—that feels like an echo of Darcy in his wet shirt.

Andrew: Yeah, it's a bit shameless, really.

Breckyn: Oh, I love it. I think we all love it.

Andrew: Because he needed to—or the character needed to man up a bit. I thought, what can he do instead of mooning around, feeling guilty, and thinking, "Oh, God, I’ve got myself into such a bad spot." And "I know," I thought, "he can chop wood." One of my favorite films of all time is the Western Shane. Do you know that film?

Breckyn: No, I'm not familiar with it. 

Andrew: It's a 1950s film with Alan Ladd. Anyway, there's a lot of manly wood chopping goes on in that. When the guys get overwrought, they do tend to go out and hack at a log with their mighty muscles and take their jackets off. And I thought, yes, he can have his wet shirt scene in the rain, but it was a bit of a . . .

Breckyn: It felt like a nod or an Easter egg for fans.

Andrew: It was.

Breckyn: Good. Well, and there's that similar scene in Pride and Prejudice when Darcy is doing his fencing, right? And he's working off all of these feelings and frustration and his lust, I think, for Elizabeth.

Andrew: That's right. Yes, I wanted him to be very much all man, and like the kind of man that Jane Austen would want him to be. I mean, she wouldn't want to go into all the details of him getting sweaty in a gym and so on.

Breckyn: But you get to do that.

Andrew: I can go there. And certainly, at the time I was writing—I don't know if you remember what the '90s were like, but people kept talking about the New Man, who was very emotionally sensitive and all that kind of thing. And I thought, no, Darcy is not like that. He's got a big beating heart inside, but he's not going to show it, except right at the end. He's going to be a very old-fashioned sort of man—very decisive, very sure of himself.

Breckyn: And that's a large part of his appeal, definitely.

Andrew: It is.

Breckyn: Well, so I want to go back to Edward Ferrars a little bit because you've talked about how Colonel Brandon—how you brought him to the foreground—and I think you did a great job of showing many different sides of him. Edward Ferrars is so interesting because in the novel, he's offstage most of the time. It's strange. And so how did you deal with that, and what are some other ways that you tried to foreground him?

Andrew: Well, I felt in a way, it's a very modern situation if you're seeing it from the girl's point of view. I mean, these girls are just waiting by the phone, really, aren't they? Metaphorically. Like, is he going to ring? And Willoughby is a great disappearer as well. Mind you, he's got good reasons for disappearing. But yes, there is that. And we certainly explored that because the producer of that show, who's a great friend called Anne Pivcevic—she made me write lots of scenes with Edward and Lucy Steele.

Breckyn: Yeah. I would like to see more of that—of him having to suffer through her general flightiness and ignorance.

Andrew: She's not a contemptible character. I mean, Edward was her hope of getting out of that situation and marrying a posh bloke who was also a very nice bloke and also quite manly. No, I had to make him manly. He wasn't very manly in the book.

Breckyn: It's true. In the novel, he really isn't.

Andrew: But anyway, yes, there was that. And one does feel sympathetic, you know, with her terribly embarrassing sister.

Breckyn: I love Anne Steele. Yours is one of the only adaptations that has her in it.

Andrew: We had a great actress. It was just so funny.

Breckyn: I love that character.

Andrew: They were both very Bristol as well. They had quite big accents, yes.

Breckyn: I want to touch a little bit on Sanditon because Jane Austen only left you 11 chapters to work with. How do you even begin to start filling in the blanks there?

Andrew: Well, I just thought they were such promising chapters. I thought one of the things that immediately appealed to it was that there seemed to be a different sort of man in this. Tom is an entrepreneur. He's not a country gentleman. He doesn't want to preserve England the way it was. He wants to change it. He wants to turn a pretty, old-fashioned, backward little fishing village into an all-bells-and-whistles, modern seaside resort. I just thought that's just so exciting.

And Sidney, of course, his brother, is a bit of a wild card. We don't really know an awful lot about it, but I thought if he's a bit of a mystery man, that's interesting enough. The other thing I thought was really unusual was that Jane Austen introduces a Black character into it. And she must have intended to do something with Miss Lambe. She didn't introduce that many characters in, and I thought, well, let's see what we do with Miss Lambe.

Breckyn: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew: And from the start, we were trying to write something that could go further than one series. So that was again a departure, because all the other things I've done were closed stories.

Breckyn: Closed book, yeah.

Andrew: It's the end with the happy ending, but we were always aiming to have an open ending. But in fact, because of—I suppose, the audience numbers, the people that liked Sanditon liked it very much.

Breckyn: Definitely.

Andrew: But there weren't quite enough of them for ITV to immediately put on a second series. So, we hadn't been able to pin down Theo for a second series. And of course, all the girls were crazy about him. And he said he wouldn't do one because he thought his career would be better served by doing other things. I said, "Well, he's got to die of something rather unpleasant." So, we had him die of yellow fever. Of course, he'd gone, so we couldn't show him suffering.

Breckyn: I wanted to ask you about the scripts changing. So, once you've sold a script, do you continue to provide creative input or direction? I guess definitely with Sanditon, because it was an ongoing project and you had an actor leave and suddenly you had to write new things. But do you get to change scenes?

Andrew: And we had other writers as well. So, I was reading and giving notes on other writers' scripts. What I like to do is get the script right before it's cast and hope not to have to change much at all. With an ongoing thing, there is the opportunity to—once you know who's in it and everything—to write for the strengths of particular actors, which one does do. But I can't give you any specific examples of things that we did.

Breckyn: Sure. It's just an adaptation is a collaborative effort, right? And so, it's just—especially with the 1995 Pride and Prejudice—it's like everything came together perfectly. The script—it sparkles—and you have all of these wonderful actors who just work together as an ensemble so well. And so that's just really enjoyable when all those pieces come together.

Andrew: Actually, that's an example of something that we never changed a word. The script was exactly as it was at the first read-through. But I have thought of an example of Sanditon that—in the second series, the one that's all about the soldiers. I've forgotten their name, but the sisters—are they sisters or are they cousins? Anyway, they're the wards. There's the girl who dresses up as a boy and her older—is it cousin or sister?

Breckyn: Relation.

Andrew: They were both quite young, and that older girl was just so promising. We thought, yes, she could have an affair with Jack Fox. Because she's good enough, and she's maturing quickly enough for that.

Breckyn: And you wanted to give her something to do in the show?

Andrew: Yeah, that's right.

Breckyn: I wanted to end—I don't want to take up too much more of your time—I wanted to end on the two Austen works that you haven't adapted … yet, Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Would you like to? If so, how would you approach them? Do you have any thoughts on what you'd like to do with them if you could?

Andrew: I think one of them, Persuasion, is just such a good novel. And, also, that 1995 adaptation was very good. I can't imagine I'd want to do anything very different from that. I'd love to see it with different casting because there's something so interesting about that rather cruel notion of someone who is a beauty, and—she's only about 27 or something, isn't she?

Breckyn: Yeah, that's how old Anne Elliot is. Her bloom has faded.

Andrew: Her bloom has faded. And you could think of so many actresses who would be very interesting playing Anne. And I think, yeah, with a very different sort of Frederick. But I really wouldn't change much of the construction. And Mansfield Park is just an absolutely fiendishly difficult thing to get across.

Breckyn: It's so hard, and it has Jane Austen's least likable heroine, or I think she's the most difficult to make appealing to a modern audience.

Andrew: She's such a droopy little thing, isn't she?

Breckyn: Oh, poor Fanny.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you do feel sorry for her, but you can’t—it's hard to identify her, really, except in a self-pitying way. And Edward. Is he called Edward?

Breckyn: Edmund.

Andrew: Edmund, that's right. Similarly, very dull. She obviously set herself the challenge of writing a novel in which the interesting people were the baddies.

Breckyn: Well, that would be your challenge, right? What would you do with it? Would you make the Crawfords even more appealing? Would you make the audience like them? Or would you try and make Fanny and Edmund sympathetic?

Andrew: Of course, you would have to try and make—that's the challenge, to try and make them sympathetic. And I thought that American movie, that was really interesting, I thought.

Breckyn: Is it the one where they basically make Fanny “Jane Austen,”—where she's a writer up in her attic? Is that the one?

Andrew: It's the one where—actually, I would have liked—they had a wonderful little girl playing Fanny as a child. I would like to see that kid continue. So, play it with an underage heroine because she had such a wonderful, fierce little face. In fact, I think—yeah, they had the wrong casting for that. But what I thought was interesting about it was that it really took the slavery stuff on board.

Breckyn: Yes.

Andrew: You know, what was going on in Antigua and all that.

Breckyn: Well, and that's when—I think it's interesting when adaptations are responsive to the Jane Austen scholarship that's going on, because that has come to the foreground a lot more: people talking about slavery and people of color, and especially in Mansfield Park. You mentioned that you had read some criticism that influenced some of your writing. Do you engage much in Austen scholarship when you're doing an adaptation?

Andrew: A little bit. I like to see if anything new has emerged. Because I used to teach at the university long ago, and all that post-structuralism stuff, at one time, I found very exciting—in which you could take any classic novel and ask yourself, consider what is—how did they put it? Consider what is foregrounded and what is absent. What is foregrounded in a novel is probably not what the novel is about at all. It's really about what's absent. And you're driven to the conclusion that all 19th-century novels are really about incest and slavery.

Breckyn: That's certainly one lens to use.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, you could think of probably lots of other things that they avoid mentioning but are the true subjects. But it's interesting to think that kind of thing.

Breckyn: And that's something—that's sort of room for you to add your creative input as a writer of adaptations—is what isn't being said or what isn't mentioned and what can we put on the screen? And I think those moments are really fascinating.

Andrew: Yeah. And of course, I think Jane Austen's great as she is in the book. Read the book and all that. I love it. But, you know, if you go too far with one of those things, it becomes a different animal entirely, almost a counter-text. But they can be good as well.

Breckyn: I think there's room for all of it. And that's why we keep—There are the haters out there whenever a new Jane Austen adaptation is coming out who are like, "Do we really need another one?" And the answer is, "Yes! Always." 

Andrew: Yes, we probably do. I belatedly watched the Anya Taylor-Joy Emma.

Breckyn: Oh, yeah? What did you think?

Andrew: On television. Well, I really enjoyed it.

Breckyn: I did, too.

Andrew: There were things I thought, "Ooh, mine was better." But you get carried along with the story, you identify with the characters, and—

Breckyn: Absolutely.

Andrew: You think, "Ooh, got that bit right."

Breckyn: Yeah. And they did really interesting things with the music, and the costuming is gorgeous. So, there's always room for different angles, or like you said, different lenses. Some people are more interested in—

Andrew: Nosebleed, that's interesting.

Breckyn: Yeah, that was a little odd. But yeah, I think there's so many different kinds of Jane Austen fans and so many different things that appeal to us. And so that's why the different adaptations work, because some work for some and some work for others.

Andrew: I agree.

Breckyn: And I think yours works for everybody. I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that the 1995 Pride and Prejudice is one of the greatest Austen adaptations. So, thank you for that gift, Andrew.

Andrew: Thank you for having me.

Breckyn: Well, thank you for joining me today. It's really been a pleasure talking to you.

Breckyn: Hello, dear listeners. I just wanted to ask you a favor. If you've enjoyed listening to Austen Chat, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and leave a comment saying what you like about the show. The more positive reviews we get, the more people will see and hear about the podcast, and the more Austen fans we'll find to join our community. Though Emma Woodhouse may have disagreed, I side with Mr. Weston. One cannot have too large a party or too many Janeites.

As a final reminder, JASNA is now on YouTube! So be sure to follow us there, as well as on Instagram and Facebook, for updates about the podcast and new episodes. And if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us a line at our email address, podcast@jasna.org. 

[Theme music]