We’re finding joy with Jane Austen TV.
We’re celebrating Pride with ‘Fire Island’ and ‘Gentleman Jack’. We're reading Regency books. And we’re blowing past our first birthday with the Austen Connection.
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Hello, friends!
Happy June, happy summer, happy everything: It’s time to have some fun. The Austen Connection is celebrating our first fun year of newslettering, podcasting, posting, and essaying about all things Jane Austen.
So this post is dedicated to finding some joy - which is a theme that comes up in our podcast conversations often. Everyone, everywhere, whatever we are talking about regarding Austen and the stories, including the hardship, marginalization, revolution, war, oppression, and disparity (ok that’s a lot - don’t worry we’ll get back to the fun) - everyone in every time and culture deserves stories wrapped in art, vision, and joy.
And some of the places we are finding joy in addition to the actual novels of Jane Austen are the masses of Regency-themed and Austen-adjacent TV that has been screening and that we’ve been exploring over the last few weeks. And since Regency TV and screen adaptations are going nowhere - these conversations will continue as we continue here at the Austen Connection to dig into the novels, the themes hiding in plain sight, and also dig into podcast production on a third season of the Austen Connection podcast - stay tuned!
Your Plain Jane has just emerged from an avalanche of teaching, producing, and also actually applying for a new job - which was successful! And is not so different in fact from the old job except that you are now receiving letters from *Professor Plain Jane! (To be exact: NTT Professional Practice Assistant Professor Plain Jane.) This road is being embarked upon with much gratitude and excitement - about the Jane Austen work, and the work-work. Thank you for being part of it!
Also, please let us know what you have been reading, watching, and not-watching when it comes to Austen-adjacent books, screen offerings, and the Regency. We love to hear it!
And in the meantime, here’s the Jane Austen and Regency TV that is bringing an awful lot of fun these days. Enjoy!
We’re in a ‘Vanity Fair’ nightmare. We’re saying yes to the TV show and no to the novel.
Our last post explored Jane Austen’s Power Girls - and there’s one bonus power lady we left out just so we could save it for a conversation all on its own. And that is the power-girl theme going on with the marvelous character of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, both the epic novel by William Makepeace Thackeray and the gorgeous 2018 television series.
The 2018 series is engrossing, innovative, and addictive. Thanks to Amanda Rae Prescott and this Smithsonian article about Regency-themed television for pointing us to this series, starring Olivia Cooke, Bridgerton’s Claudia Jessie, and Johnny Flynn as a brilliant and beautiful Will Dobbins, the hero of this “novel without a hero.” (Behold Johnny Flynn pining over multiple hours and episodes and then shouting love into the rain!).
This counts of course as Regency TV because even though Vanity Fair was written by William Makepeace Thackeray in 1847 and is a product of the Victorian era, it is set in Regency England and all its trappings, and specifically around the drama of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, right when Jane Austen was publishing.
The series inspired us here at Austen Connection to run out and borrow a beat-up library copy of the novel. And the reading is still in process - but so far it seems clear that even though Thackeray has created an epic, multigenerational tale of class and war and love, this tale takes so much from Jane Austen and yet doesn’t manage to deliver what she delivered two decades before this iconic Victorian epic was published.
While Thackeray is - like Austen - a master of satire, and a wickedly funny observer of society at all levels, he just doesn’t manage to muster the heart and soul that both Austen, and also his contemporary Tolstoy, writing War and Peace in the same setting of the Napoleonic Wars, manages to find in all the rabble and rubble of human selfishness.
Where is the lively Lizzy, the steady Anne Elliot or the long-suffering Pierre from War and Peace? Or anyone with any redeeming values, for that matter? We realize this is simply Thackeray’s own stated vision of humanity, and that he comes close to a more complicated portrait with the character of William Dobbin. But we’re saying no to this novelist for typecasting every single female of his acquaintance. And he especially can’t seem to stomach his own fascinating creation: the witty, strategic, and fascinating Becky Sharp.
Let’s face it: While engrossing and certainly an achievement in literature, Thackeray seems to get in his own way. His novel reflects all the Colonialist, racist, sexist, basic Regency biases that weigh down his satire without his ever presenting any alternative vision. Are we wrong?
Thackeray creates wonderful parodies in his characters, but he can’t seem to rise above it all to find the humanity in a way that a disadvantaged spinster writing in a Hampshire cottage managed to do at least two decades before him. And he doesn’t genuinely understand what it means to be playing this society courtship game for high stakes; he seems to experience it all as a bit of a romp, which consistently undermines the maneuverings of his own anti-heroine, Becky Sharp.
Thackeray creates wonderful parodies in his characters, but he doesn’t seem to rise above it all to find the humanity in a way that a disadvantaged spinster writing in a Hampshire cottage managed to do, at least two decades before him.
And Thackeray’s vision is a bit of a nightmare version of the Regency, as if someone took the gowns, the balls, the bonnets, the royalty, the seductions, and ran them through a nauseating funhouse of deceit, corruption, and greed that leaves you feeling dizzy and disoriented. Of course this is what Thackeray set out to do, and he succeeded in brilliant, illuminating, and provocative satire.
But we want more - and we might find the 2018 Vanity Fair series to be one of these rare instances where the screen version of the story adds value to the original. Creator Gwyneth Hughes’s camera does not shy away from Olivia Cooke’s Becky Sharp. It not only takes her in, but lets her throw some knowing glances our way, breaking the fourth wall, as Thackeray wonderfully did, and celebrating her power the way her own author declined to do.
Thackeray’s vision is a bit of a nightmare version of the Regency, as if someone took the gowns, the bonnets, the royalty, the seductions, and ran them through a nauseating funhouse of deceit, corruption, and greed that leaves you feeling dizzy and disoriented.
Vociferously disagree or agree on this assessment of Vanity Fair, the novel and/or the series? Let us know!
We’re doing it our way at Shibden Hall
Y’all, it’s a bossy brilliant lesbian landowner in Regency England, managing her land and business, providing for her family, and promiscuously embracing years-long love affairs and serial seductions, and get this: Writing about it in secret coded diaries.
It’s based on a true story and it all happened at Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire, England, in the early 19th century. And those diaries are written in several languages and math symbols, documenting her day-to-day life of managing her estate and various business and agricultural pursuits while also traveling, adventuring, and conducting a colorful love life that ended with a long-term marriage. The diaries were found by a subsequent Shibden landowner, and then finally decoded in the 1980s.
This is the life - also published in memoirs - of Anne Lister. It’s brilliant, it’s amazing, and it’s a BBC television series now wrapping its second season and streaming on HBO Max: Gentleman Jack.
This is going to sound like hyperbole but: This series may well contain some of the most beautifully-choreographed love scenes and sex scenes to ever hit the screen. Tell me if this is an exaggeration!
The series is written and directed by Sally Wainwright, and its production values, the music, the acting - with the gorgeous Suranne Jones as Anne Lister - are simply superb. Suranne Jones, who is also credited as an executive producer on the series, has a face that is so expressive it seems to convey years and lifetimes of love and pain in every scene; and the music features hard-driven fiddle and drumbeats of a song composed by Belinda O’Tooley and Heidi Tidow in 2011. The music carries viewers on an emotional journey throughout every episode.
One of my favorite things about this production and this story is an amazing thing about Lister’s own life: She was so powerful and accomplished as a well-respected land-owner and community member in her time that she seems to have managed to live the way she wanted to live - not exactly openly, but many of her peers seemed to have accepted her as unique and as the impressive human she was, though complicated and flawed. T
hat’s not to say there weren’t oppressions and bigotry - and painful episodes are relived in this series - but what we get in this drama is a little bit of power, a little bit of triumph, a lot of love (the heartbreaking kind, the sexy kind, the joyful kind) in a 19th century lesbian romance. Did someone just say joyful, heartbreaking, 19th-century based-on-a-true-story lesbian romance? Yes, we did.
And not only is this production a game-changer for Regency-watchers and 18th and 19th century scholars and period drama fans - but there’s now a BBC documentary about the impact the program has had, and how some older female viewers have watched it, realized that their attraction to this series and its love scenes goes deeper than pure curiosity and have actually come out, some of them in their later years. They say the series has effected a life change, in this documentary titled Gentleman Jack Changed My Life. (See more on this and Anne Lister in the links at the end of this post.)
Did someone just say joyful, heartbreaking, 19th-century based-on-a-true-story lesbian romance? Yes, we did.
But again - there are many reasons to watch this totally-bingeable series - the history, the slices of true 19th century life, the unique first-person account of the lesbian experience in 19th century England - but perhaps the best reason is that it is beautiful, sexy, and will bring you the joy we all need right now.
We’re celebrating Pride at Fire Island
So here’s the plot: Two people come together at a dance - one is rather haughty and rich; the other, a lively, intelligent soul with a loud, obnoxious family. And they fall in love, after a few arguments!
Darcy and Lizzy! Yes, and also: Fire Island!
Only in this version of Pride and Prejudice, our Lizzy is Noah, a smart, well-read, soulful nurse who can’t stand the stuck-up entourage of pediatrician Will, who would love to get involved with Noah. But Will, like a certain Austen hero we know and love, gets in his own way and, after a disastrous and insulting first meeting, Will’s unsavory social graces are all too evident.
We could go on and on continuing to describe the plot of Pride and Prejudice as retold in this story - including the embarrassing “mother” (Margaret Cho), the problematic “siblings” (in this case, a group of gay friends who gather annually at a Fire Island house), the hot, lying “Wickham” (badly behaving porn star, what else), the center-stage friendship between Noah and Howie (Bowen Yang), the satire, the money troubles, the threat of displacement, the class snobbery, finding your own family, and the chapters of smoldering passion amidst social rules and restraints - but you’ll have to take our word for it, that it’s all there in Jane Austen and in Fire Island, and it all turns out well in the end.
Special shout-out to this production for taking the spirit of Austen into an utterly contemporary, diverse, happily-ever-after romcom. This film makes you believe that the Austen spirit is all the stronger when pushing our love stories to the boundaries of social change - and that makes sense, because Austen herself was pushing and challenging. And if these themes and stories move forward with a retelling of Pride and Prejudice that incorporates a family of racially-diverse LGBTQ characters finding love and joy in contemporary New York, we feel that’s just the way Austen would have wanted it.
Your absolute favorite parts of Fire Island will be your absolute favorite parts of Pride and Prejudice: those arguments and confusions between our two beautiful lovers who we know will end up together once they can come to terms with, well, their pride and their prejudice.
Your absolute favorite parts of Fire Island will be your absolute favorite parts of Pride and Prejudice: those arguments and confusions between our two beautiful lovers who we know will end up together once they can come to terms with, well, their pride and their prejudice.
Noah and Will meet, appropriately, over books. (Don’t we love it when our romcoms make the characters readers? You know we do.)
And, appropriately, Will is so bad at the conversation that Noah just talks over him, saying almost to himself, “Do you really not know how to do this?”
Small talk, Will. Small talk, Darcy. Try it sometime. (And it’s because you really can’t that we love you, nevertheless.)
After an Underwear Party (Fire Islanders and LGBTQIA clubbers know) involving an alphabet of drugs (literally: G, E, K, MDMA) on display, Will and Noah end up shouting at each other in the rain - move over Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, this is a wonderful scene - and kudos to screenwriter and star Joel Kim Booster for giving them some actual Things To Shout About, including of course acceptance, rejection, judgment, misunderstanding, pride, and prejudice, but also: consent, porn, drugs, STDs, and Lyme disease.
It’s beautiful. It’s now.
Watch it, celebrate Pride, and cue up Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” - a reason alone to enjoy, and make a party out of, this film.
We’re hanging out with Communists in Love
We have a problem with Conversations with Friends - yes there’s an Austen Connection - on Hulu:
The substance of the conversations is missing. The camera seems uncomfortable lingering, in the space of ideas and dialogue.
The problem is that this lingering is literally what Sally Rooney’s book is about - the conversations we have, the dialogue that provides the soundtrack to our world, our politics, our lives, and our loves.
And as we’ve mentioned in one of our most popular posts ever, much of that substance, in Rooney, is about economic systems, capitalism, socialism, communism, and how these structures can offer a new way of loving. And the ways that who and how we love can provide a basis for society.
In her characters’ relationships, Rooney is also examining disparity - in gender, in economics, in sexuality, in age, and power, and how those inequities shape us and how our relationships can both be challenged and stimulated by these disparities.
In her characters’ relationships, Rooney is also examining disparity - in gender, in economics, in sexuality, in age, and power, and how those inequities shape us and how our relationships can both be challenged and stimulated by these disparities.
And Austen also is examining, yes? - disparities in gender, economics, and power and how we navigate these disparities in life and in love.
That’s the Austen Connection to Sally Rooney.
But in this series, the bite is taken out of the story, as the political passions and the genius of the characters, especially that of Bobbi, is diluted, we feel.
And why? For Romcomdom? Can Romcomdom not handle communists in love?
I think we’re grown-ups here and we can sit at the big people’s table and handle these conversations with our love stories. Austen - a cited influence of Rooney’s - didn’t seem to stop to consider whether we could handle these issues within our love stories. She just went for it - and 200 years later, there’s no reason now to not just go for it.
Meanwhile, just watch Fire Island, Gentleman Jack, and maybe some Eric Rohmer films to see how a camera can hover in a conversational space. How politics can inhabit romantic, cinematic conversations.
And how complicated, political, disparate love can unfold on the screen - when you go for it.
We’re finding, or not, our HEA in ‘The Courtship’
Here’s what we got - we’ve got a former Seattle Seahawks cheerleader, who is also a software engineer and who brings with her the most amazing, beautiful family on the planet, and she is also nice and genuinely looking for love.
We surround her with eligible bachelors, and also her family, in a Regency setting - the UK’s Castle Howard - throw some cameras into the mix, teach everyone how to (rather clumsily) dance and talk at the same time, and we’ve got a Regency-themed reality-TV show.
It remains unclear whether anyone watched this. (Let’s take a poll - did you watch?)
But now that this show’s finale has aired, and bachelorette Nicole Rémy has chosen her suitor, we stand by our initial assessment that reality television is most likely a disaster for anyone who signs up for it.
And we’ll add to this assessment that the entire Rémy entourage - including Nicole’s mother, physician Dr. Claire Rémy, father Mr. Claude Rémy, sister Danie Baker, and brother Dominic, all of whom are steady, honest, gorgeous and exemplary throughout this crazy series - are simply too good for reality television.
Someone take them and give them something worthy of them - or even better let them get back to their rich, valuable lives away from the cameras and away from us. And we wish them all the best. No doubt Nicole Rémy will find something to do that is worthy of her intelligence and her charisma, and also will find love.
And let’s hope we all do!
Let us know your thoughts on Fire Island, Gentleman Jack, Vanity Fair, and all the Regency content you’re watching, not watching, and reading right now - we love to hear it!
Here’s to finding and celebrating love, family, Jane Austen, and Pride, dear friends.
Have a beautiful week watching, reading, newslettering, and loving.
Yours most truly,
*Professor Plain Jane
Community and links:
Helena Whitbread first decoded Anne Lister’s diaries - here’s her website about Anne Lister
Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire, Anne Lister’s estate
More on the life and loves of Anne Lister
The Calderdale Museums and West Yorkshire Archives are digitizing Anne Lister’s diaries - you can see recent scans here
British Museum information on the Ladies of Llangollen, who were the companions Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, contemporaries whom Anne Lister met.
One of the best things about the BBC Gentleman Jack series based on the life of Anne Lister is the theme song by musical duo O’Hooley & Tidow - Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow
NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour tackles Fire Island
Troy Patterson writing about the 2018 Vanity Fair series in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/amazons-new-vanity-fair-turns-becky-sharp-into-an-endearing-plucky-go-getter
Smithsonian Magazine interview with Amanda Rae Prescott and Goucher College Professor Juliette Wells on Regency-themed screen adaptations
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