Do modern audiences still “get” Jane Austen? At first glance, her star seems undimmed. School trips still schlep around Bath, wearily taking in the Regency crescents and spaffing pocket money on Mr Darcy rubber ducks. And, for TV networks, she continues to be dynamite: Dolly Alderton has just announced yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, this time for Netflix. Unfortunately, this latest revival has been met with muted resignation at best from fans of the novel, or indeed the 2005 film, or indeed the 1995 BBC series. Pride and Prejudice has become a screenwriter’s nightmare in that, like a cursed handful of other overexposed “great works” — Romeo and Juliet, Dracula, and Wuthering Heights among them — it comes up against several generations of fiercely protective audiences, each with their own favourite versions largely contingent on whenever they happened to be a bookish teenager.
Alderton’s version, tellingly directed by Euros Lyn, responsible for the school-romance slop Heartstopper, promises to be “both familiar and fresh” with its cast of “hilarious and complicated characters”, and will star Olympic moper Emma Corrin, Jack Lowden (who he?), and everyone’s Favourite period drama doyenne Olivia Colman. Commenters scoff that the novel’s adaptation has already been perfected — twice. They beg Netflix to look to other Austens, perhaps forgetting that their last, disastrous attempt in 2022, Persuasion, saw Dakota Johnson blunder her way through as lovelorn, headstrong spinster Anne Elliot, with Fleabag rip-off winks at the camera and a conceit which tried to ram modern dating into a world of phaetons and ponies. It was broadly hated, a condescending CliffsNotes parody which approached Austen’s era as irreverently, and far less comically, as Blackadder II did the Elizabethans. Perhaps the question is less “do we still get Austen” than “are we trusted to understand her”.
The pressure to get period drama right is immense. Netflix’s announcement has been partly overshadowed by horror at long lens set images from Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights. Jacob Elordi, as Heathcliff, has sideburns and a gold tooth; Margot Robbie, who fans have pointed out is nearly two decades older than Cathy Earnshaw, looks more than a little goth rock, with more décolletage on display than might have been acceptable at a 19th-century wake. But these details are calculated to perturb; we know Fennel will have the last laugh, being already well known for pulling off unexpected casting and clashing aesthetics. And, crucially, she is not known for the biggest possible crime of the cinematic adapter: being sentimentally wet. She, at least, will not handle this precious material with timidity, nor use it as a vehicle to funnel insipid romance, or patronising lessons about girlpower, down audience’s gullets. She will trust us to go along for the ride. And she will probably use a bit of Kate Bush.
The fact is, as Alderton and Fennel will soon find out, you cannot win in a battle with purists — nor do they make up the bulk of general audiences anyway. The most outraged critics will be die-hard fans of other film or TV adaptations, not readers — they gave up the battle for verisimilitude long ago. How many people have actually read these novels? Increasingly, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights share sainted status as two teen-girl favourites which only happen to have started life as novels.
An unbearably depressing investigation in The Atlantic last year revealed the extent of Gen Z’s declining readership, surveying professors from elite universities in the US who confessed to paring down their syllabuses to extracts and summaries so as to retain the dwindling attention of students. One Columbia don described undergraduates from 20 years earlier reading Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment in successive weeks; now this rate and complexity “feels impossible”. Students have become unused to the feelings of boredom or confusion or quiet contemplation; extended quotations now baffle them, as does a knotty “overall plot”.
You can see the problem with material like Austen’s; she is a writer who stacks clause upon clause, sometimes confronting us with sentences which span entire pages. To return to her after watching any recent film adaptation is to find oneself in the weeds of a sometimes chapter-long discourse on etiquette and morality; her greatest talents — wit and warmth — are accessible only to readers willing and able to deal with a barrage of subordinate clauses. Her writing is sumptuous intellectually, not visually; imagery is strictly secondary to an attendance to social quandaries. For a generation force-fed on a glut of rapid-fire visual media, this is unappealing.
“Increasingly, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights share sainted status as two teen-girl favourites which only happen to have started life as novels.”
There is now an intellectual ocean between those who regularly read and those who do not; one is trained in difficulty, empathy, and the power to imagine — the other, whose refuge is probably social media, has a dearth of all three. Surface-level takes on Austen’s heroines see them as a gallery of already-perfected women waiting for a love match; far from it, in the novels they are frequently jealous, capricious, and hampered by prejudice. But this can only be understood by following their internal worlds through close reading.
Publishing houses aren’t helping matters. Earlier this year, Puffin announced a series of new Austen editions to appeal to young romance readers, with cartoon covers and taglines promising “meet-cutes, missed connections and drama”. The characters are illustrated with pink hair, choppy bobs, and cat-eye winged eyeliner. Puffin seems to assume that readers won’t be interested unless they can directly identify with the protagonist — does she look like me, does her suitor resemble a musician I fancy. Where this has worked (Clueless, 10 Things I Hate about You), modern scripts have mirrored, in a different time, the sharp brilliance of the original. Plonking a cartoon from Heartstopper on an unchanged Georgian text will only highlight Gen Z’s illiteracy, and its understanding that romance books — “smut” — serve only for titillation.
But don’t grind the printing presses to a halt just yet: there is still one demographic we might solidly rely on to shore up the publishing industry. For many a young man in search of companionship has been known to dabble in a bit of good old-fashioned performative reading; now that the sun has returned, I challenge you to go to any cafe, pub or park and not find a thirsty, tote-bag-brandishing, bescarfed berk in little square sunglasses. How often is he turning a page? How often is he looking about, ruffling that floppy hair, angling his pristine volume so that the girls by the window can’t help but notice the word “DIDION”?
I must say I respect the hustle of performative reading — but it is no amateur’s game. For the regrettable entirety of one liaison of mine, a man carried around a translation of Candide — a novella approximately the same length as Mog the Forgetful Cat. He never did get round to finishing that slim-volume babe magnet; never once, as summer became winter, did I witness him even open it. Its job, it seemed, was to sit face-up on a pub table. God knows women fake lots of things, but reading isn’t one of them. You’re not a vibe bro. If you must read performatively, make sure you at least read.
That may be our only hope; such is the reality of the dreary intellectual environment which awaits Dolly Alderton as she prepares to revamp Pride and Prejudice. If we’re still buying books, it’s only because of a honeytrap cartoon cover or because we’re café-dwelling faux-intellectual horndogs.
In such a dire situation, the big question is whether Alderton can keep intact Austen’s unique and brilliant observational style; as Netflix learnt to its cost with Persuasion, what it should absolutely avoid is patronising audiences by dumbing this quality down. If reading imparts the ability to imagine, to empathise, then its desecration by more compelling distractions — TikTok, or the fast and frenetic shots of reality TV — should not have panicking producers scrambling to flatter young readers’ desire to see themselves reflected in every novel in order to like it. It might be more difficult than ever to impress viewers with erudition, but with someone like Austen you have a duty to try.
