Dolly Alderton
The email came the day before my 35th birthday. I was lying on an overcast beach in Devon with my girlfriends when my agent messaged to say that Netflix were making a new TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the first in 30 years, and would I be interested in writing and producing it? I was filled with equal amounts of excitement and terror – everyone who has read Pride and Prejudice has a vivid, singular imagining of what it should look like and how it should be. How could I make my version live up to all the versions that live in millions of people’s hearts?
After a few days of thrashing out all that could possibly go wrong, I decided to embrace the challenge of adapting everyone’s favourite book. My favourite Austen adaptation of all time (the 1995 Sense And Sensibility) was made by Emma Thompson when she was 35. And in my favourite portrait of Jane Austen she was 35.
When I returned home I reached for my hardback copy of Pride and Prejudice. With my highlighter pen in hand, I spent the next few days re-reading and falling back in love with it. The first thing that must be said about this novel, because it’s not said enough, is how fantastically adaptable it is. Its plotting and characterisation are flawless; its dialogue full of emotion and wit. All the script glitches you would normally get notes on from a TV commissioner or film studio have already been addressed by Austen. She did 99 per cent of the screenwriting for me back in the early 1800s.
Pride and Prejudice is the blueprint for romantic comedy: so many romcom rules originate from it. The romantic leads initially seem like opposites, and yet discover they are more alike than they thought. They begin as enemies, sparring with language, they end up as lovers. The very title of the book is in reference to the biggest obstacles in their romantic comedy, his pride, her prejudice.
Over a couple of hundred pages, they duck and dive and dance around these obstacles. Just as we think they will never see each other again, they are drawn back together. And then comes the first great reunion – when Elizabeth unexpectedly encounters Darcy in his grand, bucolic home of Pemberley. Elizabeth’s prejudice is defeated. She sees Darcy for who he really is, and who he really is, is the perfect man for her.
So, of course, here comes the turmoil. God, she’s good! Just as Elizabeth realises she loves Darcy, her youngest sister runs away with a soldier, plunging her family into ruin and rendering all her remaining sisters unmarriable. Elizabeth, having been in reaching distance of all she could ever hope for – a perfect match, both in love and marriage – loses it all.
And then!
Not only is her family saved, they’re saved by Darcy in what is arguably the greatest act of romantic heroism in literature. He does not do it for glory, he does not do it to explicitly win Elizabeth back. He does it for her peace and happiness – “I believe I thought only of you.” We are left with two people who have been transformed by love; whose every preconception has been overturned simply by coming to understand each other.
Nora Ephron, the queen of this genre, said that Pride and Prejudice is “one of the greatest romantic comedies ever written” because it is “a novel about the possibility of love between equals”.
Elizabeth Bennet is the magic ingredient – a flawed but fierce heroine who, in Ephron’s words “is as close to perfect as she can be and still be interesting”. The moment in the book when I fall in love with Lizzie every time I read it comes after her first meeting with Darcy, when she overhears him calling her “tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me”. Instead of feeling humiliated by this insult from a man of much higher social status than her, she laughs it off, telling the story “with great spirit amongst her friends”. Austen couldn’t be clearer – this is a woman who not only knows who she is, but likes who she is.
So, how do you find a man to match the perfect literary leading lady? Austen had the answer – you don’t. You construct a man who is flawed – snobbish, rude and emotionally cold – and you create a story that makes him become worthy of her.
But, of course, Pride and Prejudice is not just a story of romantic love, it is a story about family too. The Bennet family is a chaotic clash of characters, all of whom are deeply recognisable.
And then there is Mrs Bennet. A character so exquisitely drawn that she has become her very own archetype. “The business of her life was to get her daughters married”. Without marriage, they will be homeless when their father dies. And penniless too, as Mr Bennet has neglected to set money aside for them. It is a very, very serious business, and no one seems preoccupied by it other than Mrs Bennet. To my mind, she is the most serious character in the book. She is the true heroine.
This effortless shift between the emotional, societal and trivial resonates for so many because it replicates the multi-textured experience of real life. The living world of Pride and Prejudice is so like real life that we connect with its characters as though they were our own family members and friends. In the end, it’s not its engrossing plot or its witty dialogue, it is the emotions that underpin it all. Wounded pride, fast infatuation, being lied to by a charming stranger. Embarrassment of your family. Terror that you might never get the future you’d dreamed of. The mortification of misjudging someone or being misjudged. Finding yourself falling in love with the last person you ever thought it would be.
It is a book of enormous feeling. People don’t have opinions about Pride and Prejudice, they have feelings. That is why everyone has so much to say about it. That’s why this little living world will be one I return to again and again and again.
This is an edited extract from Dolly Alderton’s introduction to a new edition of Pride and Prejudice published by Penguin ($25). The series premieres on Netflix on December 3.
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