Welcome back, dear readers! After a month of revisiting Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, we’ve finally come to the end of things! We’ve laughed and cried with Lizzy and Jane through every happy time and every hardship—we’ve danced and flirted with the Meryton officers with Lydia and Kitty—we’ve endured Mary’s exhibition of talents and Mrs. Bennet’s “poor nerves.” We’ve seen two proposals rejected and many more accepted, culminating first in the union of Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas, then Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley, and finally, best of all, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.
And they all lived happily ever after! (Well, mostly. In the ways that matter, at least.)
However, a novel like Pride and Prejudice simply refuses to remain within the confines of its original form. Adaptations and retellings abound in the twenty-first century, transporting Austen's characters from India to Pakistan to San Francisco and everywhere in between. If you enjoy titles like Bride and Prejudice or Bridget Jones's Diary, this one's for you!
Film and Television Adaptations
Of course, no Pride and Prejudice adaptation compilation would be complete without two of the most iconic page-to-screen adaptations ever. First, we have the spectacular 1995 BBC miniseries, which split the events of the novel across six episodes and first graced the world with its vision of Colin-Firth-as-Fitzwilliam-Darcy in a sopping wet shirt. Hello, Darcy-mania! Not to be outdone, however, is Joe Wright's dreamy film adaptation (2005) starring period drama darling Kiera Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet. This adaptation might be less faithful to the novel, but it is one of the most visually stunning films you'll ever encounter. The Janeite fandom at large seems to be conflicted on which is the superior adaptation; some claim that this debate is founded on generational preferences—with Baby Boomers preferring BBC's 1995 miniseries and Generation X-ers preferring the 2005 film. Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!
Next up are two twenty-first-century film retellings of Austen's original novel. Needless to say, the characters and plot receive several updates in order to reflect modern values, social conventions, and aesthetics—but you might be surprised at how well Pride and Prejudice's central conflicts retain their relevancy in modern-day contexts. Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice (2004) is a Bollywood-inspired musical movie about a young Indian woman named Lalita Bakshi, whose strong personality clashes with her parents' expectations of "traditional womanhood, and Will Darcy, a wealthy American with pride and prejudice to spare. Andrew Black's Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (2003), on the other hand, is a surprisingly hilarious Mormon-inspired retelling set in Provo, Utah, starring Kam Heskin as a twenty-six-year-old college student and aspiring novelist. Culminating in a physical altercation between Darcy and Wickham at a Scottish-themed Las Vegas wedding chapel, this is a film you won't want to miss.
Our next two Pride and Prejudice adaptations are a little less orthodox. Lost in Austen is a 2008 ITV miniseries revolving around modern Janeite Amanda Price, who accidentally trades places with Elizabeth Bennet in the fictional world of her favorite novel, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Having "buggered up" the whole plot, she must instigate damage control to ensure that the novel plays out correctly—even when her long-time fictional crush Mr. Darcy turns his attentions to Amanda instead of Lizzy, ruining "the greatest love story ever told!" Alternatively, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was an Emmy Award-winning YouTube "vlog-style" web series airing from 2012 to 2013, allowing viewers to engage with the characters in real time in the YouTube comments section and other social media accounts. The success of the series paved the way for two companion novels, The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet and The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet.
Novel Adaptations
Amanda Quain's Accomplished: A Georgie Darcy Novel and Sayantani DasGupta's Debating Darcy are two of my favorite young adult Austen adaptations. Accomplished is a modern-day boarding school-set retelling of Pride and Prejudice in which Georgie Darcy works to pick up the pieces of her life post-Wickham... while attempting to set her older brother up with an infuriating college classmate named Lizzie Bennet. In Debating Darcy, Leela Bose, teenage debate enthusiast, butts heads with Firoze Darcy, a snobbish prep-school competitor whose mother is the president of Pemberley, her dream college. (And if you liked these novels, you should also read Quain's Ghosted, inspired by Northanger Abbey, and DasGupta's Rosewood, inspired by Sense and Sensibility!).
*Note: Sayantani DasGupta is a long-time JASP collaborator. Watch a recording of her latest Jane Austen & Company livestream here!
Next are a couple of Pride and Prejudice novel adaptations for adult audiences. Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors is the first book in Sonali Dev's Rajes series, each installment following a member of the Raje family as they embark on a modern Austen-inspired love story. Dear readers, let me tell you: I ate this series up! After I finished PP&OF, I devoured Recipe for Persuasion, Incense and Sensibility, and The Emma Project in less than a week—they were just that good. If you're a fan of good fiction, good food, and good fun, you'll get a kick out of this gender-bent retelling of Pride and Prejudice, which proves once and for all that Jane Austen's writing transcends place, time, and culture to delight audiences around the globe. On the other hand, Alice McVeigh's DARCY is a canon-compliant epistolary look into Fitzwilliam Darcy's backstory and internal workings throughout Austen's original novel, also highlighting Mary Bennet's experience as the least-popular Bennet sister. I'm cheating a bit with this one since I technically haven't read DARCY yet, but I'm set to receive a copy very soon, and I simply can't wait!
*Note: Sonali Dev and Alice McVeigh are also JASP veterans! Re-watch Sonali's latest collaboration with Jane Austen & Company here, and read Alice's Janeite Spotlight feature on our blog.
Adaptations of Adaptations
Lastly, we have novel adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that performed well enough commercially to warrant film or television adaptations of themselves! If you read my Janeite Spotlight feature way back in January, you'll know the film version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was my gateway drug into Austen fandom, and I would still 100% endorse the movie to any Austen fan (or general historical romance fan) who's not afraid of a little gore. (That said, I'd urge you to skip Seth Grahame-Smith's novel upon which it was based, which—in my humble opinion—is not worth the read.) Next up is Bridget Jones's Diary, the first film in a trilogy starring two former Austen heartthrobs: Colin Firth (as Mark Darcy, no less!) and Hugh Grant. This is the PERFECT movie for girl's night, and Helen Fielding's original novel is a popular book club read, too. Finally, we have the critically acclaimed three-part PBS miniseries Death Comes to Pemberley, based on P. D. James's novel of the same name. Part murder mystery, part romance, and part Matthew Goode in Regency breeches (can I get an amen?), this is the perfect series for curling up on a rainy day—popcorn and cocoa heartily recommended.
Well, there you have it: this deep-dive into Pride and Prejudice adaptations concludes my read-along for the Austen vs. Brontë JASP reader series. Of course, don't be misled—there are many, many adaptations that I failed to mention in this article. A few of those still on my personal TBR include Nikki Payne's Pride and Protest, Uzma Jalaluddin's Ayesha at Last, Ibi Zoboi's Pride, Soniah Kamal's Unmarriageable, Melissa de la Cruz's Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe, Eden Appiah-Kubi's The Bennet Women, and Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. Think I'll ever be able to check them all off the list?
As we transition into our second series of Austen vs. Brontë here at JASP and JA&Co., keep thinking about how Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most famous novel, holds up against the Brontë sisters' similarly famous (though, perhaps not quite so much as Pride and Prejudice) Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Additionally, how might various adaptations, as well as the dynamics, plot points, and aesthetics they emphasize (or alternatively leave out—ahem, I'm looking at you, Mr. Rochester in old-lady-fortune-teller-drag), of these historical novels play into their reception among twenty-first century audiences? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!
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