Amanda Vickery’s The Many Lovers of Jane Austen: oh the jolly-ness of it all

Amanda Vickery sauntering in the meadow where once the Steventon parsonage stood — minus the talk, the music, and movement we can see her looking gravely about to show us nothing is there of what once was

Dear friends and readers,

I was left wondering why one must have such hype in popular movies; if it had not been for the repeated yukking it up on our time, the super-luxurious surroundings, and large trains of over-speak (the language of strong superlatives to the point one wants to turn — over the top happiness, genius, world-wide importance of whatever is under consideration &c&c), it would not have been a bad lecture. What Vickery literally said was intelligent.

And there were some genuine insights you might not come across in the written literature. This was not simply a kind of TV version of Harman’s Jane’s Fame. Such as Vickery’s comment that the 1979 BBC Fay Weldon P&P changed the tone of the Austen movies ever after to take the books seriously. Such as the Austen films are significant because they have changed the popular perception of Austen — and the way she’s studied in school and thus read and understood.

Elizabeth Garvey as Elizabeth Bennet writes to Mrs Gardiner to ask how Darcy came to be at Lydia’s wedding (an over-voice was used, something commercial cinema still eschews

That Austen spent her adult life in genteel poverty once she and her parents gave Steventon to the oldest brother, and especially after her father died — all the more did the rich surroundings seem incongruous and if it be said the films do this, well, they have stopped to some extent (from the 1995 BBC Persuasion (by Nick Dear) to the 2007 BBC MP (Wadey the writer), Persuasion (Burke) and 2008 S&S) or are all reverential: not the 2009 Australian TV mini-series Lost in Austen (Guy Andrews the writer) or a number of the analogous films and the commentary type ones which change central aspects of the books).

A old 1940s photo of Dean House, where the Harwoods lived, not that far from the Austens. This is something of what Mansfield Park house is in the book, not the fabulously splendid museum house, Chatsworth

That she was forgotten or ignored except by a very few readers until her nephew produced that semi-fake sentimental portrait which still has not gone away. So why did we have to listen to what Earl Spencer thought? that was a puzzle. Because he’s a lord, an aristocrat, rich? Vickery did have a few critics, but only Janet Todd was not eager to say what would please the average viewer to think about Austen, and she seemed drowned out. It was revealing to see what a huge price the tiny manuscript pages of The Watsons sold forb, but the emphasis was again on impressing us with large sums of money, materialistic.

If it is true that many readers go to the Austen books because they’ve invented in their minds some better happier easier world that she offers and this is (that’s what Vickery implied) not so, then the decor of the mind directly contradicted this insight.

The worst moment of the film was the interview with Andrew Davies with him trotting out the worst of his typical pop comments about sex, money, and unworthy males — I’ll concede he did say he meant to develop Darcy and show P&P from Darcy’s point of view.

Dr Cheryl who ran the recent AGM in Texas may be an intelligent woman but she did not say anything about her views of Austen or the AGM that showed it. The film from the AGM too was skewed. At least the Portland AGM had many people not in costume. The way this Texas AGM was filmed, the chosen clips, all seemed to suggest everyone at the AGM is dressed in regency clothes. They are not.

A typical group of women from the Portland AGM: all smiles of course — and selling paraphernalia

Anyway amid the hype and projected absurd tone, there were little nuggets. Maybe not enough because I’ve read Vickery’s books and she could have used the time much better than sauntering around in the grass where the parsonage once was. That was indicative of the whole. Yes the past is gone and it’s not here and it was nothing ideal at that parsonage. But the film accompanied these moments with super-bright color and hyped music in the back with Vickery never standing still so if that thought came to mind it was not something felt by the film’s tone. We saw people reading Austen but we were not made to feel what they might be feeling.

The tone of a film is important. What made the 1941 film a travesty of Austen is its fatuous tone. What made the 1979 film genuinely reflective is its grave comic one. This one was jolly. Austen is many things, including satiric, comic, saturnine, hiliarious, but not jolly, not even in her letters.

This latest entry into pop Jane Austen criticism as film could be been so much better: how a film is filmed, the production values belied the authoress. For strongly favorable reviews and summaries of Amanda Vickery’s two excellent books, Behind Closed Doors and The Genteman’s Daughter, click here.

Ellen Moody