Jane Austen

[BaconAndAvocado]

Currently listening to a Radio 4 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and loving it.
I’ve read and enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

What are the others like?

I know her characters can be vicious.

Daily Motion😀

I'm so old I remember an absolutely cracking version of Mansfield Park by the BBC in 1983. It starred Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fanny and Robert Burbage as Henry. They were the drippiest pair imaginable, but somehow really likeable. I'd love to watch it again.

Persuasion is my favourite book closely followed by Pride and Prejudice.

Does anyone have any insights as to Sir Thomas's thoughts when Fanny says she can't marry Mr. Crawford ?
He starts asking something and then says, it can't be possible. Fanny is hugely embarrassed.
Is he hinting that Fanny is in love with Mary Crawford?
I think someone wrote a book on the subject.

Yes, I so agree with this. The miracle of a book is that it has captured the mind of someone long dead. When you read Daniel Defoe or Samuel Johnson, for example, you are inside the mind of an 18th-century man. That's the wonderful thing about literature. It's absurd to expect them to think like we do. If they did, they'd be less interesting.

Another thing I hate is the attempt to 'cancel' authors (cancel them!!!...god, it's like something out of Stalin's Russia). If you look hard enough, you can find a reason to cancel every novel and painting ever created. The critic Harold Bloom judged each work on its aesthetic merits. In other words, how beautiful original and profound it was. Lots of great artists were horrible people. Evelyn Waugh was vile, and so was Philip Larkin, Hemingway, Byron, Shelley and Milton. But their language is sublime. I doubt the people who built the Taj Mahal were nice – certainly not by our standards. Should we knock it down? It's just insane.

A minority are out to destroy the literary canon. And believe me they are serious. Literature lovers need to start fighting back.

He’s wondering if she’s in love with Edmund. Then says to himself it’s not possible because they’ve been raised as sister and brother.

Fanny is embarrassed because she doesn’t want Edmund and the family to know she is in love with him.

Great recommendation of DailyMotion, most useful!

No, he’s asking whether her affections are already engaged elsewhere, which he thinks is unlikely because she’s so young and has hardly met anyone, and because of her blush (which he ascribes to her youth and modesty), then he checks whether she could possibly be in love with either of her cousins by talking about how Tom is unlikely to marry soon, but Edmund is likely to marry Mary imminently. When Fanny reacts calmly to him saying this, he writes off the idea of her being in love with one of her cousins.

I lost this book in a move but this thread’s reminded me to her another copy. It’s Austen’s childhood / teenage writings & I think everyone on this thread would really enjoy it.

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780543900845/Catharine-Writings-Austen-Jane-0543900843/plp

I’m old enough to have watched this when it aired. It was truly great.

I also rate the Garvie P&P.

I cannot abide the cancel culture taking place in the world.

Sylvestra Le Touzel is a neighbour of a friend of mine and is very cool. I’ve never seen this adaptation, alas.

Amused to see Jonny Lee Miller, possibly the world’s oddest casting as Edmund in the 1999 film version, plays one of Fanny’s younger brothers in the Sylvestra Le Touzel tv series, and Samantha Bond is Maria Bertram — I imagine she could have been excellent.

Mansfield Park (along with Charlotte Bronte’s Villette) is a novel I’m always casting an adaptation of in my head. Casting Fanny is tough — you need someone who can suggest a quiet sanity and strength under the mousy exterior, and who is capable of suggesting a lot by expression and body language, because I don’t think she has a single interesting line of dialogue. Most of my possibles are now far too old. A young Samantha Morton might have been good. Olivia Colman as Mrs Norris? A younger Matthew McFadyen, who was so miscast as Darcy, as Edmund?

it needs to be a series, not a film — it needs space for all the set pieces like the visit to Sotherton, the play, Fanny’s ghastly visit ‘home’ etc etc.

I can see why it’s not been done, though — prim, dull Fanny, prim and dull Edmund as lovers whose courtship JA doesn’t even bother to narrate, the lively, witty characters are the villainous Crawfords, hard to make a contemporary audience share Fanny, Edmund and Sir Thomas’s feeling that private theatricals are morally compromising, or that Mary Crawford is a wrong’un because she doesn’t think Edmund should be a priest. And you have to convey Fanny’s unspoken love for Edmund and heartbreak at his attraction to Mary with nothing but facial expressions, camera shots etc.

https://www.carrotsformichaelmas.com/2016/07/11/if-i-could-cast-austens-mansfield-park/

You may find this interesting, @NineteenOhEight

James Corden! Really?😀

Gosh, she has some strange ideas!!! James Corden would be a dreadful Mr Rushworth — it doesn’t need broad comedy, but the kind of person who might have been a good Mr Collins, decent, but dopey, amiable but weak-willed, and in Rushworth’s case, leavened by being very rich. Tom Hollander might have been good when younger.

Eleanor Tomlinson is far too physically striking to be wallpaper Fanny — I’d struggle to believe in her being exhausted and wrung out after a bit of walking in the sun, or from missing out on her daily ride.

I'm trying to cast MP in my head as well now😁.

Some of that blogger's ideas are weird...however I agree that Hayley Atwell was well-cast as Mary Crawford in one of the adaptations. I also liked Hugh Bonneville as Rushworth.

The 1983 version is by far the best IMHO. Sylvestra Le Touzel was a believable Fanny, I thought. I also liked Angela Pleasance as a very zoned-out Lady B, and Bernard Hepton as Sir T. I did not warm up to Nicholas Farrell as Edmund.

I think my problem is that I don't know any young actors!

I'm faceblind so I'm no good at remembering who's who with actors. I have looked up some of the names mentioned above.

Rushworth you need someone good looking enough to plausibly be vain about his cloak, but nothing striking. I guess a lot of actors you could tone down how good looking they were by altering hair cut, facial hair, make up etc. Tall would be good, since he's so scathing about Crawford's height. Definitely heavy set (this is canon). He needs to be able to adopt a permanently slightly vacant expression, like Tim Nice But Dim. James Corden is far too short (as well as being very annoying, and not being able to do a convincing RP accent). Hugh Bonneville was probably well cast when he was younger (I can't remember having seen him in it). I think Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) might be good, if he could bulk up again.

Anything with James Corden in it is an immediate 'no thanks'.

Same here. Extremely annoying, could not act his way out of a very small paper bag.

Hugh Bonneville was probably well cast when he was younger (I can't remember having seen him in it)

He was in the 1999 version - the one with Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas - which is an interesting piece of casting.

I can see why it’s not been done, though — prim, dull Fanny, prim and dull Edmund as lovers whose courtship JA doesn’t even bother to narrate, the lively, witty characters are the villainous Crawfords, hard to make a contemporary audience share Fanny, Edmund and Sir Thomas’s feeling that private theatricals are morally compromising, or that Mary Crawford is a wrong’un because she doesn’t think Edmund should be a priest.

It comes back to what I was saying earlier about needing to immerse yourself in the mindset of the times. It's a shame that, based on most screen adaptations, it would seem that contemporary audiences are either unwilling or unable to do this. Mansfield Park loses most of its point if you approach it from a 21st century perspective. You have to realise that the Bertram women acting while Sir Thomas was at sea was the 18th century equivalent of them dancing naked down the high street drinking champagne while their dad was on a life-support machine.

I read Northanger Abbey after Mansfield Park. It's such great fun after MP which I was surprised to find quite harrowing in parts.

There was an amusing adaptation of Northanger Abbey with Katherine Slezinger as Catherine, Peter Firth (not Colin!!) as Henry Tilney and Robert Hardy was entertaining as General Tilney.

I remember seeing the Elizabeth Garvie P&P version and am always fond of Sylvestra le Touzel so liked her as Fanny.

My favourite adaptation is probably the Gwynneth Paltrow version of Emma I'm afraid because of my major Jeremy Northham crush .

Also like Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry Jones in Persuasion; their final kiss is very believable imo.

It is a truth universally acknowledged (or should be) that Jeremy Northam is very crush-worthy.

I do like Jeremy Northam too. I liked the 2007 Persuasion in general, and their final kiss is heartwarming (I find it a much better ending than the 1995 on a ship one, even if it was legally impossible for Wentworth to have bought Kellynch)...

but their first kiss is soooo unbelievably long. There's hestitating and shyness over a first kiss (or at least first kiss in 8 and half years), and then there's Persuasion where it takes forever. They really overdid that bit. It's practically as long as the proposal letter.

In fact, I don't like that whole scene:

Anne running all over Bath to find him, in a frankly implausible way (I heard it was supposed to represent her inner turmoil or something, but I could do without that being shown in such an anachronistic way)

Ending up about 30 seconds away from her own front door, so why does Charles leave her with Wentworth?!

Rushing the revelations about Mr Elliot

The actual kiss build up - the shot of her mouth is so close that you can see her spit several times, it's quite offputting

Wentworth makes little to no effot to kiss her until she's been hanging there for at least 20 seconds (which feels like a lifetime), she has to do all the work.

I mean, I still think it's romantic and fuzzy if I don't let myself analyse it too much. But given the quality of the film overall, I thought that scene was a real letdown.

You have to realise that the Bertram women acting while Sir Thomas was at sea was the 18th century equivalent of them dancing naked down the high street drinking champagne while their dad was on a life-support machine

Especially in a play called Lovers' Vows, dealing with sex outside marriage and illegitimate children.

Well, not really. It’s private theatricals, not Drury Lane — a combination of an unsuitable play with ‘immodest’ female parts, the throwing together in artificial intimacy of unmarried men and women, Sir Thomas being at sea, and his preference for a ‘quiet family party’ over the ‘bustle’ of acting when he returns, make it undecorous. A less risqué play, or one with only male parts, or featuring only the Bertram siblings or only married people, would have been less of a big deal.