Elizabeth And Darcy
Dec. 9th, 2004 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI've just watched the BBC's Pride and Prejudice- all six hours of it in a single session. I started out of duty (Ailz is studing P & P with the Open University) but I quickly became hooked.
By the end of it Elizabeth and Darcy had become so real to me that I was speculating about their future. I thought, these two will live to see Victoria come to the throne and the railways criss-cross the country and their beloved Derbyshire fill up with factories and maybe they'll still be around for the Great Exhibition in 1851. When they're approaching late middle-age someone will take their photographs. Almost certainly theyll get to read Dickens and Tennyson and....
...And then I made myself quite melancholy thinking about how they've now been dead for something like 150 years.
But, of course, they're not dead at all; they're immortal- reborn every time anyone picks up the book or watches a dramatization.
By the end of it Elizabeth and Darcy had become so real to me that I was speculating about their future. I thought, these two will live to see Victoria come to the throne and the railways criss-cross the country and their beloved Derbyshire fill up with factories and maybe they'll still be around for the Great Exhibition in 1851. When they're approaching late middle-age someone will take their photographs. Almost certainly theyll get to read Dickens and Tennyson and....
...And then I made myself quite melancholy thinking about how they've now been dead for something like 150 years.
But, of course, they're not dead at all; they're immortal- reborn every time anyone picks up the book or watches a dramatization.
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Date: 2004-12-09 01:38 pm (UTC)I've never read a single Jane Austen book! Maybe I should. I was too easily put off by all the little talk.
--I like to think about people who, as children, settled on the Great Plains by covered wagon in the 1870s being able to fly across those same Plains by the 1940s. What an amazing change in one lifetime!
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Date: 2004-12-09 02:14 pm (UTC)If you want to give Austen a whirl, the BBC Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth is a good place to start. It's a big budget production and the attention to period detail is awesome. I imagine its available on DVD on your side of the pond.
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Date: 2004-12-09 05:51 pm (UTC)I hope you'll both enjoy the big package of books and tapes--how I love getting boxes of books in the mail!
(BTW, Kate's Complete Works of Charles Fort has arrived, and it was in hardback! I know she'll be delighted--she thinks he's long out of print.)
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Date: 2004-12-09 06:37 pm (UTC)One of Ailz's texts is Frankenstein. She says she's going to settle down and make a start on it tonight.
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Date: 2004-12-09 03:51 pm (UTC)LOL. That surprises me. You are the mistress of little talk! You write about it, you write about your little house and your little life. I would have thought you would revel in it.
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Date: 2004-12-09 05:57 pm (UTC)I'll give Jane a try.
Millions of her loving readers can't be wrong.
(Karen, I thought of you when I read my friend deltamiss's post this afternoon. She's an English teacher, and she has been teaching her eighth graders how to write instructions.
Their adventures were very amusing!
-happy sigh-
Date: 2004-12-09 02:08 pm (UTC)Re: -happy sigh-
Date: 2004-12-09 02:29 pm (UTC)They had such good taste in the Regency. There have never (before or since) been more flattering fashions for either sex.
The one piece of casting I disliked was Alison Steadman as Mrs Bennett. You need to be able to believe that sensible Mr Bennett was once madly in love with this silly woman, but Steadman plays her as a spiky shrew without any vestige of sexiness or charm.
Re: -happy sigh-
Date: 2004-12-09 03:32 pm (UTC)I feel very (and this will sound silly) civilized when I watch P&P. It makes me want to be more of a lady, more genteel, more feminine - which I actually want to be anyway, so it's not as if watching the series has me all topsy-turvy or anything like that. Rather, it serves as a reminder of the woman I would like to be...I really should watch it again.
That's one of the reasons I love to drink my tea (with milk and -gasp- sugar, thank you very much). I think it's a far more civilized drink than coffee could ever hope to be; there is something extremely satisfying about having a nice cup of tea.
Re: -happy sigh-
Date: 2004-12-09 03:52 pm (UTC)I would love to wear one of those full-skirted greatcoats and a top hat. So very dashing!
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Date: 2004-12-09 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 06:58 pm (UTC)My greatest photographic hero(ine) is the Victorian portraitist, Julia Margaret Cameron.
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Date: 2004-12-09 07:14 pm (UTC)So you're a fellow heroine addict, eh? ::nods at icon:: ;)
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Date: 2004-12-09 07:24 pm (UTC)Did you know that Cameron was Virginia Woolf's aunt? Woolf is another big heroine of mine.
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Date: 2004-12-09 07:29 pm (UTC)Not very relevant, but it reminded me: Rita Hayworth and Ginger Rogers were cousins :)
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Date: 2004-12-09 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-09 09:21 pm (UTC)What will you live to see?
What will you miss seeing?
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Date: 2004-12-09 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 12:00 am (UTC)I wonder what I'll see in my life ... when I was little I thought I'd see the most amazing technological innovations ever, like cyborgs and people being uploaded to their computers and living forever. Now things look depressingly dark age-ish.
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Date: 2004-12-10 09:33 am (UTC)It's a society about to end. The industrial revolution is already under way and very soon the dark satanic mills will be casting their shadows over Pemberley.
And Darcy, with his earnestness, his repression, his moral seriousness, is already a proto-Victorian.