To think Marianne shouldn't have married Colonel Brandon?

[squoosh]

Okay Willoughby was a cad and a bounder and took himself out of the running, but I do think that Brandon swooped in to take advantage of her rain induced fever which had left her a bit dazed and compliant.

It's a bit creepy that he falls in love with her because she reminds him of his long lost, 'fallen', dead love. Plus he's a bit intense, the laughs wouldn't be forthcoming and I'll warrant he expected her to do all kinds of dark shit in the bedroom.

Ideally she'd have had another couple of seasons in London and met lots of nice suitors or maybe even nipped across to Pride and Prejudice and married that nice Colonel Fitzwilliam.

I walked past Willoughby/Greg Wise in Covent Garden a few months ago. He looked slightly less dashing in a baseball cap.

When I was 20 and saw it I thought she was "settling" for Brandon, and fancied Greg Wise myself much more than Alan Rickman. The ending really pissed me off! When I saw it more recently I thought Brandon was much hotter, how lovely he was in general and realised she had properly fallen for him.

A bit like my own experiences, I met DH when I was 23 and he is very much a Brandon type. But I had fun with a few Willoughbies before that- glad I didn't marry any of them though...

Everyone is forgetting about Catherine out of Northanger Abbey. Surely that is "loves young dream"?

I have always thought that Cassandra talked Jane out of her engagement as Cassandra didn't want to be single when Jane was married.

I agree that JA didn?t try to idealise marriage, she wasn't a romantic novelist, and demonstrated plenty of examples of mean, bickering relationships. But with Marianne, I just feel Brandon swooped in when she was at her most vulnerable. He?s intense and brooding without being sexy. The sort of man who?d hover in doorways spying on her, snoop on her private correspondence and feel threatened by any passing young buck.

He?s like a big fat thumb squashing the life and spirit out of her.

As someone said up thread, marriage in Jane Austen is not solely about romantic love as the basis for a successful marriage. There are many other reasons why people marry and often these are just as important as love. Austen was a realist who understood the plight of middle and upper class women for whom the only respectable future is marriage. Most of her heroines have to learn something about themselves before they can earn a loving marriage - Lizzy has to let go of her prejudices, Emma her superiority and arrogance, Marianne her excessive sensibility. Austen did not approve of "wildness" almost all her "bad" characters are reckless in some way.

Charlotte Lucas is on the shelf, she has to marry to acquire "an establishment", so even Mr Collins is preferable to a life looking after her siblings and then her aged parents, dying an old maid.

Brandon is perfect for Marianne. She wants true, deep, passionate, romantic love, and falls for Willoughby, who has all the appearance of being her romantic hero, but is false, and self centred. Once she realises the difference between what is real, and what is surface, she sees that Brandon is that man- he is capable of deep, long lasting love, he is a true romantic!

I always thought the problem would be Christmas down the Brandon house. Marianne sitting down to dinner with her husband, his ward, and Willoughby's child must have been a bit tense.

But I would always choose Captain Wentworth with his spirit of brilliance. Yum.

No one has mentioned the Mansfield Park with Johnny Lee Miller playing Edmund. It's not exactly true to the book, it certainly has more life to it and makes Fanny seem quite decent.

Billie Piper as Fanny Price was so wrong.

I mean Billie Piper in anything is wrong, but that one especially so. The Johnny Lee Miller one was better.

Johnny Lee Miller made a great Knightley as well. I believed that this was a man who would willingly spend his evenings with an elderly neighbour.

Johnny Lee Miller made a great Knightley as well. I believed that this was a man who would willingly spend his evenings with an elderly neighbour.

sorry, posted twice.

Billy Piper as Fanny was a travesty, although I do quite like her as Sally Lockhart. In fact, most of those TV ones were abominable. The S&S one copied most of the ET film but cast people who looked like pugs in most of the leading roles, and the Mansfield Park one was embarrassingly awful.

I hated the Persuasion TV adaptation, but Rupert Penry-Jones as Captain Wentworth????

YES PLEASE

Oh and talking of bloody awful, Gwynnie as Emma, anyone?

'cast people who looked like pugs in most of the leading roles'

The actress who played Elinor had the exact same voice and mannerisms as Emma Thompson. Was so odd.

It's strange to see Kate Beckinsale as Emma and then see her as she is now, all boob jobs, hair extensions and Hollywood teeth.

Also, back to the OP, Marianne is a doofus. She was lucky that Brandon was so forgiving!

I love Fanny Price, although reading Mansfield park as a teen, I couldn't get my head around the fact that they were cousins. Wierd.

Also, I've always preferred Jane to Lizzie.
This seems quite telling, but of what, I'm not sure

LOVE the KB Emma, especially the lovely little Harriet.

Pugs

Oh yes Dominic Cooper is hugely puggish! He also puts me in mind of a mediterranean leprechaun.

:)

To compare the novel and Ang Lee/ Emma Thompson film version is interesting.

In the novel, Colonel Brandon is definitely middle-aged (only a few years younger than Mrs Dashwood), not attractive, wears an elderly flannel waistcoat against rheumatism, etc. He's definitely never positioned as romantic hero. Clearly ET/Ang Lee knew this wouldn't fly in the modern cinema, so cast the Older But Smouldering Alan Rickman, thereby softening the fact that Marianne settles for a safe, companionate marriage, rather than the wild romantic love of the Romantics.

But the film as a whole completely inverted Austen's argument, which was pro-sense and anti-'sensibility' in the contemporary sense of hyper-responsiveness and sentimentality. For Austen, careful, conventional, reserved Elinor is right, and passionate, unconventional, passionate Marianne is wrong. But to modern readers, Elinor can look ridiculously repressed and hampered by her own stiff upper lip, whereas we tend to see Marianne's impulsive ways as those of a normal teenager.

And the Ang Lee film tweaks Austen to make her more palatable to a modern audience. Austen's semi-'punishment' of Marianne by almost killing her and marrying her off to a father figure is softened by the casting of AR, and we see repressed Elinor bursting into hysterical tears in front of her suitor, as if the moral of this story involves Elinor needing to express her emotions as much as/ even more than Marianne learning to repress hers...?

I like the Marianne/Brandon pairing-I like to think that she realised his good qualities and that she loved him as much as her. But then I also love Emma and Knightley.
The pairing I always wanted was Mr Collins and Mary. I know the point JA seems to make about marrying for money/love, and I love that Charlotte kept Mr C in his book room facing the road or walking/gardening for beneficial exercise . However I do think Mary liked him, or maybe the chance to shine rather than being the plain sister?

Has anyone watched Bride and Prejudice or the Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube? The latter are doing a version of Emma next.

Oh and anyone else love the moment in the Vicar of Dibley where Geraldine is proposed to and makes the noises Elinor makes when Edward proposes?!

PS to Mansfield Park fans, especially those who enjoy the witty, wicked Crawfords, there is an extremely good 'sequel' called Mansfield Revisited by Joan Aiken. its set a few years after the end of MP, sends Fanny and Edmund off to the West Indies on family business, and focuses instead on Susan Price, Fanny's sister, and reintroduces the Crawfords and Tom Bertram. I normally loathe modern sequels to classics, but this gets it very right, is completely faithful to the original, and does some very clever tweaking to plot and characters. Much recommended.