Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

[BeaAndBen]

I’ve been enjoying P&P yet again, and reached the absolute delight of Chapter 56.

Lady Catherine’s visit to Longbourn is something I look forward to each time. She’s so utterly ghastly, and Elizabeth so resolute and devastating in her replies, that I grin through the entire section.

Are there bits of favourite books that particularly stand out to people?

Miss Pettigrew getting her makeover -“England expects….” makes me laugh every time - or maybe Anne Elliot reading Captain Wentworth’s letter?
The concept of Angels as explained to Moist von Lipwig?

Thank you. Thats the one, I love it.

Strange that anyone would accuse the Mitfords of being in touch with 'real life', but I find it so well observed. Nancy Mitford is a brilliant writer.

Nancy Mitford is a brilliant writer.

I agree - her novels are so funny and her historical biographies are excellent, very readable and more likely to inspire an interest in the subject than dry academic work.
She never gets a mention in any book about 20th century literature as they’re too low brow I suppose, but nonetheless her trilogy, The Pursuit if Love, Love in. Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred have never been out of print and have been translated into numerous languages.

In my view Nancy Mitford is unfilmable as well. Which is a bit awkward when there have been two adaptations in recent years as well as one in the early 80s which I did watch and which was at least well cast. But it seems like the adaptors didn't notice that she does quicksilver monologues - there will be a whole page of one person speaking, with the responses and reactions of the other person written into the monologue, but not shown - an entire scene done by one person, with all the events seen through that one character's perceptions, so that you not only know what's happened, you know the character intimately. Naturally if you're trying to film that you split the words up between two people, or add people laughing at the jokes, and the pace slows to a crawl. I think even the 80s version which at least kept to the text, was quite dull really. More recently they did stuff like adding Linda talking about her masturbation habits. I cant express how far that was from the era and from Linda as a character.

More recently they did stuff like adding Linda talking about her masturbation habits. I cant express how far that was from the era and from Linda as a character.

I agree. What on earth did the screenwriter think that would add to the story.
I also agree the books are unfilmable.

I love this. Three things came to mind.

For some reason I love the passage in The Great Gatsby about the guests:

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the peni­tentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammer­heads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls...

And I love in Nicholas Nickleby where he meets the Cheeryble brothers.

And I love the lengthy passage in Sense and Sensibility where the stingy, unkind Fanny adroitly convinces her husband not to give the Dashwood wife/daughters anything.

We were watching an old episode of Inspector Morse last night, and who should pop up but Barbara Leigh Hunt AKA Lady Catherine. It was made within a year or so of the BBC production. She was a very fine actress. (I tried to add a photo of her but no luck.)

Edited to apologize for lack of photo!

Leigh-Hunt of course!