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It’s shaping up to be an Austenite autumn. We had the swoony adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, then another helping of The Other Bennet Sister on the way this Christmas.
But before that, Netflix is putting its extensive corset collection to new use with a Pride and Prejudice update, for which the first trailer dropped today.
The snapshot is all dappled lighting and longing gazes, with Mr Darcy (Jack Lowden) skimming stones and suggestively rolling up his white sleeves – it looks spot on.
Then there’s Lizzie Bennet (Emma Corrin), with her period-accurate pin curls (a bit looser than Jennifer Ehle was subjected to in the BBC series) and a proper good look at the dastardly Mr Wickham (Louis Partridge), whose sideburns should have a billing of their own.
Set to the swell of the orchestral score, we see Pemberley, Fiona Shaw in her second Austen adaptation this year and then, if it were possible, even more sideburn from Mr Collins (Jamie Demetriou).
But what most struck me watching the Pride and Prejudice trailer wasn’t the mutton chops or the fact Lowden has finally been allowed to be handsome in the promotional materials (just in time for the Bond final call).
It was Olivia Colman. As the trailer reveals, her character Mrs Bennet has been gifted the novel’s opening and most famous line as dialogue.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,’ she says, with a level of poise I have yet to see in a screen adaptation of the Bennet matriarch.
Dolly Alderton, who has adapted the beloved novel for Netflix, said she elected Mrs Bennet as the recipient of the narrator’s line ‘because it’s the central drama of her story’.
‘It’s all she’s thinking about,’ Alderton continued, referring to Mrs Bennet. ‘It’s a preoccupation that any time a single man comes into her orbit she’s thinking this might be safety for all of my daughters, this might be salvation not just for one of them but for all of us.
‘So the fact that this is so in her mind all the time felt that it had to be her line. It was most natural for her to take it because it’s all she thinks about.’
It suggests the rather loathed character is about to be given a modern, sympathetic reappraisal, which is a logical step in a culture that has become obsessed with looking at the way classic villains have been misunderstood.
Mrs Bennet is by no means the villain of Pride and Prejudice, but she stands in clear opposition to the romance her daughters and the readers/viewers crave.
Her sole preoccupation is to marry the five off and, having just rewatched Sense and Sensibility, it is clear to see why. With no male heir, their estate is set to pass over the Bennet girls, leaving them to either find husbands or prepare for a life far lower than the one they are accustomed to.
No wonder she’s always screeching. It’s an incredibly stressful prospect and one which her lackadaisical husband pays no mind to.
But that is not the interpretation of Mrs Bennet that has been popularised. SparkNotes, the arbiter of all literary brilliance, describes her as ‘miraculously tiresome’ (ouch) as well as ‘noisy and foolish’.
The 2005 film’s characterisation of her is particularly harsh. Brenda Blethyn’s Mrs Bennet is chaotic and annoying, by design. Meanwhile, her husband is played by the lovable Donald Sutherland as a man doomed to live out his days with this woman.
Then there’s The Other Bennet Sister, which of course isn’t Austen canon, but very recently gave Mrs Bennet the actual villain edit.
Ruth Jones’s incarnation is cruel in a way that those with mothers who forever say the wrong thing can relate to. She represents the font of all of Mary’s insecurities. Our heroine spends much of the show trying to stay the heck away from her.
Colman’s Mrs Bennet still shades of the histrionics. Lizzie describes her as ‘very animated’, which is still nicer than SparkNotes.
The trailer shows her yelling at Mr Bennet with pointed irony about making things ‘so dramatic’, as he sits reading the newspaper that must be glued to the character’s fingers at this point, with its ubiquity across adaptations.
But giving her that line – arguably, the most famous opener in literary history – suggests a reevaluation of the character.
Yes, Mrs Bennet has a knack for the embarrassing and only cares that her daughters marry, not that they do so happily. But she is the reflection of the time, where the options for women are laid out by Lizzie in the trailer: social pariah spinster or wife.
Will you be watching the new Pride and Prejudice
It’s how we see hideous marriages, like Charlotte’s union with Mr Collins, and why another Mr Darcy might have never wedded Lizzie at all, because Regency marriage is a business prospect.
Mrs Bennet, more than her husband and her idealistic daughters, understands the rules of this society and is driven to near hysterics by the implications of it for her children.
Alderton’s reverence for Austen’s writing is clear, as is her understanding of the gendered economic imbalance that was so part and parcel of the period that Austen sold the copyright for this novel for £110, despite wanting £150, and received no royalties.
I wouldn’t love living with a whirling dervish either, but Mrs Bennet deserves more credit than many adaptations have treated her with. After all, it’s a bit too of-the-period to be blaming a woman for reacting to the ills of this man’s world.
Pride and Prejudice drops on Netflix on December 3.
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