Elizabeth And Darcy

[poliphilo]

I'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.

Comments

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

You know in the approximately two milliseconds I have ever given to considering the rest of Elizabeth and Darcy's lives, I always imagined them growing old in Magical Eternal Regency Land...

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Jane Austen gives us very little sense of the larger society in which she lives. But the TV version is different. We get glimpses of old men in ill-fitting wigs, and drunken servants, and Darcy working out in the gym - erm, I mean- practising with his fencing master.

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.