That there is to be a sixth British television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice doesn’t feel like news. That this new ship bobbing on the veritable seas of Austen remakes and rehashes across TV, film and publishing, is promised to be “darker” and “less bonnet-y” doesn’t make it seem any fresher. Every reboot these days seems to be geared towards grittiness, to suit our troubled age. But don’t viewers deserve something truly fresh exploring these themes? Rather than mushing a 200-year-old book into a shape that resembles what we know today, like a particularly miserable papier-mache.
A great adaptation can give an audience insight into a particular era, or shed new light on an original text for modern sensibilities. The queer Victorian vaudeville of the BBC’s Tipping the Velvet has stayed with me for years. Broadway musical Hamilton, using hip-hop to tell the story of a founding father has been a wild success, and with the recent TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, shows that audiences need not be familiar with the original versions in order to love them.
But as much as there is to admire in Austen’s writing, I’m utterly bored by the adaptations, however slickly shot or cleverly written. Many are insufferably twee, with bonnets aplenty but little of Austen’s wry insight into personal and social quandaries.
Austen will not suffer; her fans are legion and whether they came to her from books or TV, there is no doubt she’s comfortably settled as a favourite on the nation’s shelves. (I once even spotted a birdbath for sale that boasted the selling point of being “suitable for a Austen tableau”.) It’s wonderful to see the lasting cultural legacy of any writer, especially one who wrote during a time when her own name was occasionally left off book covers, lest her femaleness deter readers.
Considering what a successful adaptation can do for a classic novel – War and Peace made the UK’s bestseller lists for the first time after the BBC’s 2016 take – what might a TV show do for the sales of lesser-known or even contemporary authors? TV commissioning can be shamefully risk-averse, and historical dramas continue to perform well. In my former publishing job, it was unsurprising but still dismaying to hear TV researchers at a pitching session admit that they were only looking for well-known, historical fiction.
TV needs a bolder approach to deciding which books land in prime time. For any bigwigs reading this, here are the risk-taking books I’d like to see adapted, difficult as they may be: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, because after I read it I couldn’t stop mentally casting it, peering at people’s faces walking down the street; David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives, which seethingly documents the injustices of the AIDS crisis of 1970s New York City; and Out by Natsuo Kirino, centred on four women working in a bento box factory, could be an engrossing probe into the dark entanglement of female friendship. I’d also love to see the claustrophobic tension of a father-and-sons road trip on screen if One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel was adapted, and the paranoia of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. If any of these proved as compulsively watchable as they were readable, a producer would be on to a winner.
Books about displacement and migration would make for timely adaptation, such as Stefan Zweig’s heartrending, home-seeking 1920s/30s novellas, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, weaving different immigrant experiences together. Immediately intriguing as a premise, these would go some way to diversifying historical drama from the white and rich inhabitants of stately homes, as well as containing a clear link to contemporary discussions about immigration and our understanding of the part it has played in our country’s economic and cultural life.
Or perhaps they could take a line out of Austen’s book – Northanger Abbey, to be precise. That gothic satire took its own inspiration from the delicious gloominess of books from earlier generations, transforming those dark tales into something fresh and funny. Austen banished cobwebs with a lightness of style and wit to reach a contemporary audience – rather than the other way around. And we should do the same. No dark Austen, please – and while we’re at it, let’s put down the bonnets and find something new to put on.
