Proud and Prejudiced?

2000 (or thereabouts): I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was 13. I can’t say I fully understood it very well, but I was proud of having read it. I had a conversation with a supply teacher in an English lesson once, who told me I was “too young to appreciate Jane Austen”, which incensed me, and still irritates me now. He was partially correct in that I hadn’t got a lot out of it the first time, but not in that young people shouldn’t try and read difficult things. Anyway.

2012: I had heard of the P.D. James sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley. Despite avoiding P&P-related sequels at all cost, I decided to read it as she is a well-thought-of writer. I was not especially impressed; it seemed the book could not tell whether it was a Pride and Prejudice sequel or a murder mystery, and I didn’t think it succeeded in either venture. I also didn’t like the constant referring back to the original book, as though James were trying to constantly remind us of how familiar she is with it. Despite James’ own attestation of how she had caught the characters’ manner of speaking, I didn’t feel the language was particularly authentically Jane Austenesque, and the characters especially expressed themselves in a very 21^st century manner at times.

Summer 2013: Although I have seen the BBC series several times, as well as the 2005 Keira Knightley et al film, I hadn’t read it since that first tender reading until last summer. The BBC series is beautifully done and is the definitive version of the story,  but there is something very charming about the 2005 film – it’s beautifully shot and some of the casting is lovely (though not that of Lizzie…). I finally decided to re-read it during the summer break of 2013 after having seen an amusing but sketchy outdoor theatre version (Mrs Bennet’s voice was based on Sybil Fawlty, which gives you some idea), and couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it sooner. In my mind, P&P was overrated compared to the rest of Austen’s work, and cited by people who’d read no other classics but had seen the series. I think I re-read it in about 4 days, I enjoyed it so much.

In tone it is quite light and very humorous, although with great depths of characterisation and careful plotting. I found it moved along at a good pace and allowed me to see the motivations behind many of the characters’ actions that you just can’t get from a TV series, which seems obvious but there you are. Ironically, I had been proud and prejudiced about the similarly titled novel – but I will be re-reading it more frequently from now on!

Christmas 2013: BBC broadcasted a lavish adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley filmed mostly at Chatsworth. Although I hadn’t enjoyed the book very much, I am always up for a period-set drama because they always look so lovely – and for the most part, this did. Some of the characters were very well cast (particularly Georgiana, Lydia, and Georgiana’s lawyer love interest). HOWEVER:

-Colonel Fitzwilliam was completely villainised, even more so than in James’ book, which is awful as in P&P itself he is a kind, lovely young man whose only reason for not proposing to Elizabeth himself is clearly that he is a younger son and can't afford to marry an almost penniless wife.

-I LOVE Anna Maxwell-Martin as an actress. I think she’s wonderful, and I’ve seen her in some great stuff (particularly BBC’s Bleak House), but she just isn’t Lizzie. She has Lizzie’s inner spirit but she doesn’t have the bright eyes Lizzie should have. Plus, her hair was a mess and she wore the same dress through all 3 episodes. You’re not telling me the mistress of a house like Pemberley wouldn’t be having her hair done carefully every morning by a lady’s maid, no matter how lighthearted and carefree she is by nature – it’s just what would have been expected.

-I had the same plot grievances as with the book (see above).

January 2014: Discussed Death with a good friend who also studied English at uni with me, and she agreed with my summary of it – in fact she didn’t watch more than the first episode of the TV programme, although she read the whole book. Instead, she recommended a book she had been given as a Christmas gift. Despite my busy weekend it distracted me the whole time and I finished it in two days. It is called Longbourn, is by Jo Baker, and follows the lives of the servants at the Bennet household in Hertfordshire. I did look at the Author’s Note, though, and liked this statement: ‘…what the servants get up to in the kitchen, unobserved, while Elizabeth and Darcy are busy falling in love upstairs, is, I think, entirely up to them’. Here is what I really like about Baker’s approach:

-unlike James, she is not trying to emulate Austen’s writing style, realising this is going to cause more problems than it solves. Instead she writes in a beautiful, quite literary, and very 21^st century style full of imagery and varied syntax.

-it is painstakingly researched; things you didn’t even think you’d need to know about early 19^th century life for servants is reproduced in detail – making soap, laundry day, serving at meals… in this respect I can only compare it to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies, which is high praise indeed.

-it exposes many hidden things about Austen’s world that remain hidden in her novels, not just the lives of the servants. The flourishing slave trade is brought to our attention from the opening pages, and Bingley’s fortune is known to have come from sugar. There is briefly a love interest between the main character and a ‘mulatto’ footman from Bingley’s Caribbean estate. The realities of army life are exposed, not just the light-hearted world of officers in provincial Austenesque towns.

-although the storyline and timing remains incredibly accurate to P&P, that novel’s characters are of relatively little interest to Sarah (the maid the novel follows) except as they interact with her – so we see Mr Collins, Mary, Elizabeth, Mrs Bennet and Wickham in some detail, but Mr Darcy is literally a back and a smell as a door is opened to him, and he is not even mentioned until a quarter of the way through the novel. P&P is the backdrop to this story, rather than the driving force of it.

The characters Baker describes seem as real as Austen’s, and inhabit the flip-side of her world convincingly. Not a money spinner riding off the success of the most famous of Austen’s novels, Longbourn is a thoughtful, careful alternative look at Pride and Prejudice which is carried along by beautiful writing and imaginative plotting.

The moral of the story? Don’t turn up your nose at books everyone raves about until you’ve read them, and if you’re going to write a spin-off of a well-loved classic novel, don’t try and be the writer (like James) – be inspired by them and use their work to springboard you into something new creatively (like Baker).

'What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth'. Discuss.

Between the ages of about 13 and 15 I was unhappy. Before then I enjoyed primary school or was managing OK with the senior school transition. After that I was busy working on my GCSEs before escaping to sixth form. The reason I was unhappy wasn’t anything particular, it’s just I was a teenager. I was also not very popular, difficult to get along with and acted like I was superior to everyone else. In any case, books were my escape. I think it was in this period that I would read almost one book per day. I remember coming home feeling miserable and lying on my bed with yet another book, escaping.

Books help us deal with reality. Or at least, they seem to give us the impression that there is shape to our lives, that one day we will get to the end of whatever thing is troubling us and move on, in the same way that we know the hero or heroine will win through in the end. I suppose when I was reading fantasy novels I was, in my imagination, also adventuring in ways I never would in real life. My own quest was to finish my five years in secondary school intact.

I’m fairly sure that if I were to read back over some of those novels – mostly a mixture of fantasy novels and novels about children in various wars and conflicts – they would evoke that part of my life. It’s this layering of reality and fiction that I’m finding while reading Reading Lolita in Tehran (Aza Nafisi, 2003). I must have picked it up a few years ago but never got round to reading it until a friend told me how much she’d enjoyed it. I’m about three quarters of the way through and am indeed finding it very interesting, although it’s difficult to know how much of it is fact and how much (especially conversation) is fabrication. It’s about the author’s career teaching English Literature at various universities (and a book group) in Tehran, Iran, during the 1980s and 1990s and is stimulating and heartbreaking at the same time. It did remind me, oddly, of Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006). This is the story of a young girl, Matilda, who lives on a tropical island where the only white man becomes the teacher and uses Dickens’ Great Expectations as his main teaching aid. Considering Mister Pip was so highly acclaimed (and was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker prize) I was underwhelmed, but I have a feeling that if I had more affection for Great Expectations (my least favourite Dickens) I might have enjoyed it more.

My overall impression is that in Reading Lolita in Tehran it seems that the novels and writers under discussion are being read into the Iranian society of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas with Mister Pip the emphasis seems to be to be on the utter foreignness of the text. It’s completely out of place on the island, and wondering about this other world – Pip’s world in unknown England – is what helps Matilda to escape what is happening in reality. For Azar Nafisi and her students, every novel becomes a starting point for political debate and to illustrate what is happening in Iranian society. Lolita, a young girl whose life and textual voice has been taken away from her, seems to embody the position of Iranian women, with so many rights and freedoms taken away from them. Yet literature is for these women an immense escape. Nafisi describes how, racked with insomnia during night attacks at the time of the Iraqi-Iranian war, she would read. Yet she describes herself as being capable of greater concentration than usual under these straitened circumstances.

Right at the beginning of Reading Lolita Nafisi tells us she warned her students: ‘...do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.’ Yet she admits that “It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov’s novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.”

Perhaps C.S.Lewis was right to say that ‘Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it’ after all. Because in the end what we bring to our reading of any text – our beliefs, prejudices, experiences – shapes how we view it and how we remember it, as well as how we experience life itself.

On a lighter note... Literary highlights on stage and screen recently for me have been:

BBC’s new adaptation of Emma. Light and delightful, although everyone is far too beautiful! (Oddly enough I quite enjoy adaptations of Emma although I heartily dislike the book itself and only got through the whole thing with much will-power and at least three false starts)

RSC’s production of Hamlet as shown on Boxing Day in the UK. David Tennant impressed me greatly, particularly by the fact that he genuinely made me laugh. There was something particularly memorable about the grave scenes (the digging of Ophelia’s grave and her burial) for me, although I’m not enough of a Hamlet buff to know why. Of course, when you sit through three hours of something like that, it does make it slightly (and accidentally) amusing to see the majority of the cast die in the last 5 minutes!

A stage production of Flat Stanley (original book by Jeff Brown, 1964) which I went to see this very afternoon with my mum and two of my young cousins. Anyone else remember the story about the boy whose notice board fell on him in the night and made him flat? It was excellently staged and lots of fun, although the fake American accents were a little grating.