As Katherine Voyles’ insightful essay on the discourse around Persuasion (2022) demonstrates, historical inaccuracy has been pegged as one of Carrie Cracknell’s unforgivable misdeeds, especially related to the use of contemporary language and even the protagonist’s bangs. Yet when I finally watched the film, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Cracknell draws on the visual and literary culture of Austen’s era in the choice to associate Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) with animals. When Anne first introduces her family, she is carrying a pet rabbit who will be by her bed, on her lap, and in her arms, when she breaks the fourth wall. In her first conversation with Lady Russell (Nikki…
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“Do You See What I See?”: Christmas Scenes in Douglas McGrath’s and Autumn de Wilde’s Emma
The integration of the holiday season and all things Jane Austen might appear the doing of popular retellings. But many of Jane Austen’s contemporaries were probably reading Emma on Christmas and the days following the holiday given the novel’s publication on December 23rd, 1815. Although the overlap of the holiday and the novel’s publication is accidental, Christmas is mentioned eleven times throughout the narrative and key plot turns occur during and immediately after the Christmas party at Randalls. In fact, while we often turn to the novel’s opening to recite the famous first line which lists everything that Emma is—“handsome, clever, and rich” —and has—”a comfortable home,” a “happy disposition,”…
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Episodes Five and Six
It remains to be seen if Andrew Davies’ Sanditon (2019) will prove popular enough in the USA to justify a second season, but the extreme reactions to the series do not bode well for a continuation. On one end is the #sanditonsisterhood’s plea for a second season, whose hype for the series is indexed under #sanditonseason2, #SaveSanditon, and the compound proper noun, #Sidlotte, after the series protagonists Sidney Parker (Theo James) and Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams). A second season depends entirely on how it fares with American viewers, according to Davies and ITV, since its popularity in Britain was not enough to warrant a second season (Hallemann). On the other,…
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Rational Creatures: The inclusive Austen inspired series we need
In this transition from 2019 to 2020, Janeites have been regaled with a TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s last and incomplete novel, Sanditon (1817), directed by Andrew Davies and produced by PBS Masterpiece, and a glamorous new version of Emma (1815), directed by Autumn de Wilde and produced by Focus Films. Both are backed by major production companies, whose prowess is evinced in the quality of the production, the casts, and the costume design. Both have generated a frenzy of Tweets and a proliferation of online essays. Unlike Sanditon, which will almost certainly not see a second season, Emma has fans and critics—especially those with a penchant for period minutia—drooling, albeit not enough to…
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Nostalgia, Merriment, and Hallmark Prejudice
In our very first marathon, we’re taking the season at its word and focusing on movies that entwine Austen’s novels and Christmas. We are curious about the increasing number of holiday movies touting Austen novel titles—and also a bit suspicious. For instance, Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen (Hallmark, 2019), which we decided against reviewing due to a paywall (and today we have one more reason not to pay a dime), seemed like a stretch even to the casual reviewer. To be sure, the connection between Jane Austen’s novels and Christmas is as old as the novels. The opening chapters of Emma, which was published just in time for the holidays, on…
