‘Sunday 15 October 9st (better), alcohol units 5 (but special occasion), cigarettes 16, calories 2456, minutes spent thinking about Mr. Darcy 245.
8.55 p.m. Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. … Love the nation being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth.’
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary
Explaining to new acquaintances that I am writing a thesis on Jane Austen almost invariably brings forth confessions of Austen affection. Rare is the social gathering at which no-one is prepared to launch forth on the particular merits of Persuasion or to gush about Colin Firth’s Darcy. Austen is widely loved, but her
novels are inevitably loved differently at different moments in time, by each successive wave of readers. My own late-marrying, thirty-something generation is identified with a particular pattern or pathology of appreciation made plain by Helen Fielding’s 1996 rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary. It would seem that we revel in screen adaptations of Austen novels, and (often only subsequently) the novels themselves, because we are seduced by the promise of the love story genre: the guarantee that ‘perfect matches’ can, and will, be made. Like Bridget, we are gladdened by the certainty that all will end in the ambivalent realm of ‘Smug Married’ rather than the (equally ambivalent) world of the ‘Singleton’.
Early 20th-century critics like Mary Lascelles read Austen novels for their ‘artistry’, for their finely structured sentences. In the mid-century, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling elucidated the complex moral balances weighed by each work. But when blockbuster crowds head for cinema multiplexes throughout the Western world, looking forward to the next Austen rom-com period drama, we can be sure they are not drawn by the prospect of elegant sentences or elegant ethics. What holds us at an Austen adaptation is the tension generated when Gwyneth Paltrow shifts her attention from Ewan McGregor
to Jeremy Northam, or the satisfaction of seeing Emma Thompson finally united with Hugh Grant. The element of Austen’s novels that the adaptations grasp is plot, and the aspect or interpretation of the plots they reinforce—indeed that they advertise—is the love story.
The love story, or ‘romance’, or ‘romantic comedy’, is not a genre of literature or film that garners great intellectual respect. Other populist and predictable forms of narrative fare far better: the western, the