Jane Austen Created a Nightmare for Filmmakers

[00:00:00]You have said quite enough, madam.

[00:00:03]I perfectly comprehend your feelings.

[00:00:07]And now I have only to be ashamed of what mine have been.

[00:00:09]>> Comparing Darcy's first proposal to Lizzie across adaptations a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about Darcy's letter to her, which I think marks the very beginning of their romance, at least from Lizzie's perspective. At this point in the story, Darcy has been on the romantic journey entirely by himself until his botched and devastating proposal crashed and burned so utterly at his feet. His attempt to save some small amount of face in the wake of that embarrassment begins by writing Lizzie a letter defending himself against the accusations she'd laid at him in that confrontation. Darcy's letter actually presents one of the hardest adaptation problems in all of Pride and Prejudice.

[00:00:46]In the novel, it's a chapter of just pure exposition and internal reflection.

[00:00:51]But in a film, it's somebody reading a letter.

[00:00:55]It's not exactly cinematic. Every adaptation has to solve this same problem, and none of them solve it in the same way. The various adaptations of Pride and Prejudice have tried a few different approaches when it comes to depicting Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, some of which have worked better than others. Some of them took a more or less literal approach, some avoided the letter like it was the plague, and one completely reimagines how to communicate its information. As usual, I think the most successful version isn't necessarily the most faithful one. Let's get into it.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> Welcome to Think Fact, a 100% human-made YouTube channel featuring video essays about film, TV, and literary adaptations, lately focused [music] on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in anticipation of fresh versions of both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility coming in [music] the fall.

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[00:01:48]Welcome.

[00:01:48]>> It's Bennet.

[00:01:52]>> Mr. Darcy?

[00:01:54]>> Would you do me the honor of reading this letter?

[00:01:57]>> Jane Austen's stories are filled with characters writing letters to each other, which should come as no surprise since that was the primary mode of communicating over distance at the time she wrote her novels. And the epistolary novel, which is a novel made up entirely of letters that characters write to each other, was a form of writing that had been quite popular in the years before Austen began writing her novels.

[00:02:18]She experimented with the form quite a bit in her early years, and it's widely believed that early drafts of Pride and Prejudice may have been written in the epistolary form. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice includes some 40 different letters that are either alluded to or reproduced in part or in their entirety.

[00:02:35]Like she was wanting to have her epistolary cake and eat her free indirect speech, too. Austen is rightly famous for being one of the very first authors to consistently employ free indirect speech in her writing, allowing her third-person narrator to dip into and out of her characters' heads and inner thoughts freely. The effect this had on fiction writing more broadly cannot be overstated. I strongly recommend Evan Puschak's video essay on the subject. He explained it better than I ever could. I'll link to that in the doobly-doo. The epistolary format is sort of the opposite of free indirect speech, restricting the narrative to the written hand of the letter writer.

[00:03:12]But personal correspondence has several benefits for the author.

[00:03:15]It allows a character to expound at length about what they are thinking and feeling in ways that might be awkward for an omniscient narrator's voice. It's limited perspective allows the author to convey untrue or unreliable information in the text, which can build suspense or create opportunities for dramatic revelations. It also allows the author to have some fun in terms of writing in the distinct voices and personalities of the various characters in the novel.

[00:03:41]Early in Pride and Prejudice, for example, Mr. Bennet receives a letter from his cousin, Mr. Collins, and it's the first indication of Collins's character.

[00:03:49]>> I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the right honorable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavor to demean myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rights and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England.

[00:04:12]As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach of my influence, and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures are highly recommendable, and that the circumstance of my being next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the offered olive branch.

[00:04:33]>> Again, good fun in the pages of a novel, but if you're adapting the book to screen, how you convey the information contained in the letter is a choice you need to make. The strictly faithful way to do it would be to reproduce the entire text of the letter, either read aloud by a character or perhaps included in a voice-over narration. This approach goes against a lot of basic filmmaking conventions, however. After all, film is a visual medium, and the old screenwriting axiom to show, don't tell seems pertinent here.

[00:05:04]Also, and this may be less obvious, in a film, information needs to arrive at the moment that it's most emotionally relevant.

[00:05:12]That's why letters are awkward. A novel can pause. Readers can go back and reread sections or stop and consider what they're reading. In a novel, a big part of the pace of the story is set by the reader.

[00:05:25]In film, the pace of the narrative is entirely in the hands of the filmmaker and editor. A director is always asking, "How can I dramatize this for maximum effect at this moment in the film?" In researching this topic, I came across an essay written by a college student in 2017 for the Jane Austen Society of North America that argues that staged theatrical adaptations of Austen's work should always include letters in their entirety. Author Julia B. Robin writes, "An authentic stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice must include Mr. Darcy's letter exactly as Austen presents it to Elizabeth and the reader. Elizabeth needs the time and privacy which his letter affords her to reevaluate her opinions of other characters and previous events. Direct dialogue between the two of them does not give her this option. Mr. Darcy, like many of Austen's characters, makes deliberate decisions regarding how he chooses to deliver significant information. It's actually a decent point that Robin is making that the mode of communication forces Elizabeth into careful consideration of Darcy's words rather than reacting emotionally to the immediacy of a spoken conversation. So, Robin argues, Darcy must communicate via a letter, and I don't disagree, really. However, Darcy's letter is not just for Elizabeth. Austen really wrote that letter for her readers. We are the more important audience for the information contained in the letter. So, an adaptation has to do two different things. First, Elizabeth has to receive the letter, and second, we have to receive the information contained in the letter.

[00:06:59]Those aren't necessarily the same filmmaking problem. Lizzie should ideally receive a letter as opposed to Darcy communicating to her exclusively in spoken conversation, but key elements of exposition can still happen in dialogue or via other means that don't require literally reading a letter out loud in its entirety.

[00:07:17]>> Would you do me the honor of reading this letter?

[00:07:19]>> A would-be adapter of Pride and Prejudice can choose the key things the audience needs to know from an exposition perspective and focus on the letter strictly for Lizzie's emotional shift. Explicate that yes, Darcy wrote it all out for Elizabeth, but what Darcy wrote doesn't have to be conveyed to the audience via the literal and complete text of the letter. Lizzie could tell Jane about its contents, for instance.

[00:07:42]She react to it in a soliloquy. The events described in the letter could appear as flashbacks, or one could include some combination of these approaches or other creative ways of imparting the expository information that Lizzie receives from the letter.

[00:07:56]The letter itself allows Darcy to defend himself on two particular accusations that Elizabeth had leveled at him in the botched proposal. First, that he had intervened and intentionally prevented Bingley and Jane from forming any sort of an attachment. And second, that Darcy had cruelly withheld the living that Darcy's father had bequeathed to Wickham. Darcy defends his reasoning on the first count and dismantles the truth of the second accusation by laying out the length and breadth of his prior dealings with Wickham, which laid Wickham's lies bare for Lizzie to see.

[00:08:28]In the book, the letter is lengthy, almost 2,600 words, longer than many entire chapters in the book. Out of curiosity, I timed myself reading Darcy's letter aloud. At a brisk pace, it took just over 16 minutes. I honestly can't imagine any adaptation on stage or film spending 16 full minutes reproducing the entire text of Darcy's letter. Indeed, the adaptation that spends the greatest amount of time on the letter is the 1995 miniseries, and even that version only spends just over 9 minutes on the entire sequence. The five major English language adaptations of Pride and Prejudice each take a somewhat different approach to Darcy's letter, and we should look at each of them because I think it's a really interesting view into the adaptation process itself. I feel like this is a recurring theme on this channel, but one of the key takeaways for me from looking at how these adaptations handled Darcy's letter is that the most according to Hoyle faithful version is not my favorite one. And spoiler alert, it's not even my second favorite one. Let's begin chronologically with the 1940 MGM film production starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.

[00:09:32]This is one of the examples that sidesteps the letter altogether in favor of simply having Darcy convey the information in a brief conversation. The adaptations roots as a stage play are evident here as we go directly from the first proposal scene to Lizzie returning home to Longbourn, learning of Lydia's elopement, and then within minutes Mr. Darcy arrives having heard the news of the scandal himself, and he uses it as an excuse to finally come clean about all his dealings with Wickham. In this version, Darcy wouldn't have said anything at all about Wickham were it not for Wickham's predatory behavior toward Lydia. This really defangs one of the heartbreaking beats from the book.

[00:10:09]Darcy's letter informing Lizzie of Wickham's true nature makes it so when Lizzie learns about Lydia's disgrace, she feels personally responsible for not telling others about Wickham's character in time to prevent the affair. In the 1940 film, Lizzie didn't even know about Wickham's true nature until after he and Lydia had run off together. Immediately following their conversation, Lizzie tells Jane that she loves Darcy.

[00:10:32]>> Jane, I love him.

[00:10:33]>> 5 minutes of screen time separates the first proposal scene from Lizzie's declaration to Jane that she loves Darcy.

[00:10:40]It would have taken Lizzie longer than that to get through 1/3 of Darcy's letter. So, yeah. The 1940 film was not so concerned with the mode of imparting the information from Darcy's letter. The filmmakers just employed the most efficient exposition they could manage.

[00:10:54]The 1967 version with Celia Bannerman and Laurence Feander also omits the actual letter in favor of a conversation. But here at least, the tone and timing of the discussion mirrors the letter from the book and the broad strokes contents of the letter are preserved. On the whole, it's not a bad way to adapt the information.

[00:11:14]It's perhaps the most obvious approach, but it's not ineffective. Now we come to the 1980 version and who boy, we actually begin with Lizzie's literal inner thoughts as voice over reacting to Darcy's proposal.

[00:11:28]>> His pride, his abominable pride. His shameless vow of what he has done to Jane, his unfeeling response to Mr. Wickham, he did not even attempt to deny his cruelty.

[00:11:39]>> This almost never works in cinema, and this attempt at representing inner voice as voice-over is not an exception.

[00:11:46]It also gets Lizzie's demeanor from that moment of the book wrong, too, I think, but that's a subject for another video.

[00:11:52]Darcy finds Elizabeth out walking and hands her the letter, asking her to read it. She sits on a log, and the camera just sits there as we hear Darcy's voice reading the letter mixed with the sound effects of tweeting birds.

[00:12:04]We dissolve a few times between a crane shot of her reading and some close-ups, as well as a few shots of Darcy stiffly walking away.

[00:12:12]This is filmmaking malpractice in service of textual fidelity.

[00:12:18]Yes, more of the actual language from the letter is presented here compared to the 1967 version, but the 1967 version is frankly better. A conversation between two characters is just more compelling drama than watching one character silently reading. Both versions are guilty of telling rather than showing, but only one of them actually dramatizes the language. I almost want to ask the producers of the 1980 version why they didn't just put the text of the letter directly on the screen and let viewers literally read it themselves. This is stiff, uninspired, and if I'm honest, lazy filmmaking.

[00:12:53]The 1980 version is the most faithful in so far as it's the closest any adaptation comes to just presenting the letter itself, but it's actually my least favorite of all the versions of this scene. 1995's take on the letter is unsurprisingly much better. The series actually presents the contents of the letter in a couple of different scenes.

[00:13:12]First, immediately after Darcy leaves Elizabeth at the parsonage following his failed proposal, he returns to Rosings and at once sets to writing his letter.

[00:13:21]We experience the first part of his missive from his perspective as he writes. Like the 1980 version, we hear Darcy's words as voiceover, but here the story of his dealings with Wickham are presented visually in flashbacks representing a series of painful memories. When the scene concludes, it's clear that Darcy has spent the entire night writing out this difficult narrative. We then cut to Elizabeth the next morning setting out for a walk from the parsonage where she awkwardly encounters Darcy who hands her the letter. Perhaps in an ironic nod to the 1980 version, Elizabeth sits on a log to read it.

[00:13:54]>> All kids love log.

[00:13:55]>> But we don't linger here long. We see memories of Elizabeth's now, of her interactions with Wickham and of Bingley and Jane together. She gets up in a huff and storms off toward the parsonage. We continue to hear the letter, but now it's as though Lizzie has already read it and these are her memories of it as though she's dwelling on it and fuming over it. There's so much showing going on here in addition to telling. Finally, Lizzie returns to her room and finishes the letter, reacting verbally to it with anger and astonishment. Again, the visuals include embarrassing memories of the way her family appeared to Darcy and Elizabeth imagining the scene of Darcy and Bingley's sisters convincing Bingley that Jane was a bad match for him. If you're going to have a letter read in voiceover narration, this is a pretty good way to do it. It manages to be both faithful and creative. It dramatizes the language and uses the filmic medium to accentuate the words and add meaning to them rather than just recreating them. A quick note about the score. Only the 1995 and 2005 versions of this scene use a dramatic score. In the 1995 version, the music accompanies memories and is clearly composed to picture in a technique sometimes called Mickey Mousing, whereby the music gets tense in the tense bits and lilts in the happy memory bits.

[00:15:21]The 2005 film is more somber and pensive [music] throughout. Both approaches work very well, I think. If you've watched a few of my videos, then it should come as no surprise that I think the 1995 version compares favorably to the others. It may surprise you to know, however, that I also want to heap some praise on the 2005 version here, too.

[00:15:40]Joe Wright allowed himself to color outside the lines with his take on the letter.

[00:15:44]This scene is quite brief compared to the others, but what it lacks in detail, it makes up for in artistry.

[00:15:51]Importantly, some of the sentiments that Darcy expresses in the letter were actually already included in the proposal scene earlier. This scene begins with Elizabeth in shock from that proposal.

[00:16:02]The shot of her staring out of her window as day becomes night is the first indication that what we are witnessing is not strictly diegetic. That is to say, it's not necessarily a faithful depiction of the literal events we see on screen. Wright is indulging in some filmic poetry here. Darcy enters and sets the letter down for Elizabeth. Is he really even in the room? Is he just in her mind? She receives the letter, and she must have gotten it somehow, but the literal circumstances are actually a little vague. When Darcy speaks to her, it's the opening lines of the letter.

[00:16:36]She turns to look, but he's gone, already riding away from the parsonage.

[00:16:40]His voiceover continues though, and Lizzie takes in his words. The shots are these long zooms. Wright and cinematographer Roman Osin use zooms throughout the film to indicate longing and internal states. But zooms are fundamentally inorganic. Our human eyes can't zoom. So, zoom shots in movies add an unrealness to the frame where they are used. The language we hear from the letter is simplified from Austen's prose, but the filmic language is so much more complex and interesting than anything in the other adaptations. I think the 1995 version nailed the adaptation of Darcy's letter using a combination of standard filmic techniques done very well by expert craftspeople. But the 2005 film elevates the scene into a profoundly beautiful tone poem.

[00:17:28]Do I wish it was longer? Yes. Do I wish it included more of Austen's actual words? Yes.

[00:17:34]But this is how you turn ideas into pictures and drama.

[00:17:38]As you know, there are things I strongly dislike about the 2005 adaptation, but there's no denying it's an astoundingly beautiful filmmaking. The 1995 series solves the problem of adapting Darcy's letter in the most complete and balanced way. 2005 solves it in the most cinematic and artistically daring way.

[00:17:56]Film as a medium has a hard time with interiority.

[00:18:00]Inner voice is something that novels excel at, but attempts to make inner voice explicit in film usually come off as ham-fisted or cheesy.

[00:18:09]Darcy's letter really exposes that weakness.

[00:18:12]I think watching five filmmakers solve the same problem tells us something pretty profound about how the problem can be tackled artfully. Looking across all five adaptations, I'm not convinced the best question is which one preserved the most words. I think the better question is which one best recreated the experience of reading Darcy's letter.

[00:18:31]Austen wanted her readers to undergo the same emotional reorientation that Elizabeth does, to discover, piece by piece, that they had misjudged Darcy all along.

[00:18:41]That's what the best adaptations preserve, not every sentence. It's that transformation.

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