Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Lost in Austen (The Mini-Series)

Wow! Elizabeth Bennet’s parents must have certainly liked sex a lot when they were younger. Granted, they lived in a time with little -- if any -- birth control, an age in which a married woman was expected to look forward to having a large family. But I never realized until I saw the 2008 mini-series Lost in Austen what a large family they had -- and I cannot help thinking how unlikely such a family would have been if there had not been some point in the Bennets’ lives when they actually looked forward to the act of conception.

Indeed, it says something about Alex Kingston’s portrayal of the Bennet family matriarch that I found myself empathizing with a character most adaptations of Pride and Prejudice just as soon wish I not identify with. After all, even with the help of servants -- who, of course, have to be paid -- it could not have been too easy for a young housewife to meet ends meet when there was little money to go around and so many mouths to feed. Indeed, while it is easy for the average twenty-first century TV viewer to lay back and snicker at how shamelessly she promotes the marriage prospects of her daughters, I cannot help thinking how unlikely it is that she does all this because she likes playing such a scornful role.

Indeed, it could be argued that, like most women I have known in similar positions, Mrs. Bennet is a realist. She is not marrying her daughters off because she necessarily wants them to be unhappy; she is doing so because the society in which she is living does not give her much choice. The Bennet family does not have the financial resources to support such women in perpetuity and there were not a whole lot of jobs available in that time and place for a woman in their class. And those that were were not generally open to a woman of the Bennet family’s class. So it is either marriage or some nameless fate which is sure to be worse than marriage. Given such circumstances, it could be argued that Mrs. Bennet’s desire to see her daughters married well if not necessarily happily is an act of love -- or at least, it is as close to an act of love as we will ever see Mrs. Bennet display in this mini-series.

But you all are probably wondering about why I am going on and on about Mrs. Bennet when it is her daughter Liz who usually gets the lion’s share of attention in such adaptations. Well, for one thing, Liz (played by Gemma Artherton) does not spend much time on-screen in this version. Early on, she appears in the bathroom of a twenty-first century woman named Amanda Price (played by Jemima Rooper), a bibliophile with a thing for Jane Austen novels. The first time she runs into Liz, Amanda thinks she is a hallucination. She has trouble picking up on the fact that the Liz she meets is a real person and not just a fictional character -- a confusion which we TV viewers are undoubtedly supposed to find ironic given that Amanda, too, is a fictional character.

Liz appears to have wandered into Amanda Price’s apartment by means of a magic door and seems to be as fascinated by Liz‘s world as Amanda is by Liz‘s. But Amanda does not appreciate this too much and blows her off until the second time she appears at which time Amanda actually opens the magic door and finds herself entering the world of Pride and Prejudice.

Of course, the minute she steps over the threshold into this world, the door slams shut behind her and Amanda is unable to open it. Nor does Liz give her too much help, preferring to stay in Amanda’s old world rather than to go back where she came from.

Amanda soon gets involved in the world of the Bennet family and introduces herself as a friend of Liz. Liz backs her up on this by giving her a message through the magic door which introduces her to her father and explains away Liz’s absence by pretending Liz is away visiting a respectable friend in the London suburb of Hammersmith. However, that does not keep Amanda from soon making a dog’s breakfast of the original storyline for Pride and Prejudice.

One character falls in love with Amanda instead of with a Bennet daughter, another blames her for various mishaps and Mr. Darcy himself -- a character Amanda swooned over in the real world -- takes an active dislike to her.

Can Amanda smooth things over in time for a traditionally Austenian happy ending? And can she ever go back to the twenty-first century after being seduced by the various luxuries of Liz Bennet’s era? For the answer to those and other questions, you all will simply have to watch the mini-series.