Here are My Pride and Prejudice’s all time top 10 pictures of the ‘oddity’ that is Mr Collins. In no particular order and from all the major screen and TV adaptations we have Tom Hollander (2005), David Bamber (1995), Malcolm Rennie(1980), Melville Cooper (1940) and Guy Henry (Lost in Austen).

Elizabeth’s lively, outspoken personality shocks and surprises many of the characters around her. She is, of course, accused of being an ‘obstinate, headstrong girl!’ by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, after her Ladyship had already observed that she ‘gives her opinion very decidedly’ for such a young lady. In the 1995 BBC TV series, Lady Catherine seems to be shocked every time Elizabeth utters a syllable.

By contrast, Mr Darcy’s admiration and love for Elizabeth is ignited by her wonderfully independent mind and spirit. We might take such a trait to be obviously attractive, but if you read the extract we posted from Fordyce’s Sermons, you’ll have seen that this wasn’t considered the case at the time.

Fordyce’s widely read Sermons for Young Women recommended that women avoid being witty around their husbands, for fear of scaring them away to the local tavern. There, they would drink away the sorrows suffered at the hands of their terrifying spouses. His work was informed by the hugely influential Emile (1762), a treatise on education by the Romantic philosopher Jean-jacques Rousseau. Here is Rousseau’s view on the role of women and how they should conduct themselves:

Woman was made specially to please man; if the latter must please her in turn, it is less a direct necessity; his merit consists in his strength, he pleases by that fact alone. This is not the law of love I grant; but it is the law of nature, which is antecedent even to love. If woman is formed to please and live in subjection, she must render herself agreeable to man instead of provoking his wrath; her strength lies in her charms.

If all of this has you reaching for a bucket, then consider Rousseau’s warning:

Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason.

You are just being unreasonable!

As is obvious from the book, Darcy, who was a very powerful man from a traditional, established family, was being quite unconventional in choosing an outspoken wife like Elizabeth. Indeed, Mary Russel Mitford, a novelist writing in 1814, even went so far as to suggest that Darcy should have married Jane! Elizabeth, she wrote, suffering from an ‘entire want of taste’ was only fit for Wickham!

This is what our poor Lizzy was up against.

Almost everyone ‘knows’ that Elizabeth and Mr Darcy have dark hair, and that Jane and Mr. Bingley are blonde-ish. The idea is so ingrained that Jennifer Ehle dyed her eyebrows and left her hair unwashed for her audition for the 1995 series. Colin Firth’s ginger tendencies, as described by Andrew Davies, were one reason that the screenwriter was unconvinced about his playing Darcy. ‘We couldn’t have a ginger Darcy, could we?’ he joked. But why couldn’t we?

Jane Austen wrote nothing about the hair color of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice (although she does have dark eyes), and was similarly silent about Darcy’s, Jane’s and Bingley’s barnetts, so where does this certainty come from?

Casting directors have seen it differently in the past. In the 1940 adaptation, Greer Garson’s Elizabeth has blonde hair, while Jane Bennet (Maureen O’ Sullivan) is a brunette. Also, in the 1980 series, Elizabeth Garvie has light brown hair and, again Jane’s (Sabina Franklin) hair is dark. However, from the 1995 BBC production the hair color has been fixed, as is evident in the 2005 movie and in the TV spin-off Lost in Austen.

Hair color is of course richly symbolic within our culture; blonde shades, like the color white, signify sexual and moral purity. Jane Bennet, for this reason, could never join the Pink Ladies. Also, blondeness – unfortunately for some (including me!) – still hasn’t lost its association with dumbness in our culture. Perhaps binding these together is our association of blondeness with childhood, puberty being the time when hair thickens and becomes darker.

Dark hair and features are of course more readily identified with moodiness, mystery and danger. It’s obvious, therefore, why it suits Elizabeth and Darcy’s fiery courtship. Perhaps it’s also considered more masculine. Andrew Davies did describe Elizabeth as something of a tomboy, because of her love of country walks, her very ‘unladylike’ habit of arguing with her superiors, and her willingness to get muddy. He said he thought it might be Jane Austen’s code for saying Elizabeth had lots of sexual energy (there he goes again!)

Dark hair is also symbolic of the generally more complex world of the adult. Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship is contradictory and complicated from the start. They both struggle to contain their emotions. Bingley and Jane’s relationship is far simpler. Theirs is such an innocent courtship that it’s hard to see it as adult at all. Bingley is indecisive and Jane is shy. Both are, of course, childlike traits.

In fact, it doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to see the relationships of Elizabeth and Jane, and Darcy and Bingley, as both containing Parent-Child elements. Elizabeth is both awed and saddened by the naivety of Jane’s worldview. She is like a parent with no way to protect her daughter from the cruelty of the adult world. Likewise, it’s only when Darcy ‘pretty much’ gives his permission for Bingley to marry Jane, that the former finally proposes. His words, therefore, must have carried greater authority than those of a typical friend. Moreover, despite trespassing on his younger friend’s hospitality at Netherfield, he speaks to Bingley with an abruptness that few friends would tolerate.

I’m sure there could be other reasons for the automatic way in which most of us associate Elizabeth and Darcy with dark hair and Jane and Bingley with blondeness, but these are what occurred to me. Did I miss any other hints in the book as to their appearance, or have we just filled in the gaps with our own cultural associations?

Lizzy

Darcy’s behavior at the ball scene has the capacity to shock me every time I read it. We know that he is misunderstood, that he is shy, and that he has the awesome responsibilities of his estate to consider. And yet, on every read, I am offended anew by his treatment of Elizabeth. Here is the moment from the 1995 series:

Getting this thoroughly unpleasant, early Darcy right is a major challenge for dramatizers. We have an entire novel to get used to his transformation, but making it plausible over a movie or TV series is a different matter. We have to dislike him, but not so much that we put down the book, leave the cinema or don’t bother to tune in the following week. Here is how Darcy’s offish exterior was treated in the 2005 movie and 1995 series:

Colin Firth (1995)

Colin Firth explains his character’s behaviour as follows:

I agree to go to this party with my friend Bingley. He encourages me: ‘Come on, it’ll be a great party with lots of women.’ I arrive. I’m terribly shy – terribly uneasy in social situations anyway. This is not a place I’d normally go to, and I don’t know how to talk to these people. So I protect myself underneath a veneer of snobbishness and rejection. Bingley immediately engages with the most attractive girl in the room, and this makes me even less secure.

As Firth explains, Darcy was, by the terms of the day, Bingley’s superior. Therefore, having his friend suggest that the he make do with the plainer sister would have compounded Darcy’s foul mood.

Matthew Macfadyen (2005)

Director Joe Wright’s explanation of Lizzy and Darcy’s early relationship is a little simpler:

In the beginning, Darcy can’t deal with the fact that he fancies Lizzy. They are like children in the playground – in the way that kids pull hair because they don’t know how to express their feelings. He needs her to tease him and to be able to lighten up with her.

In Matthew Macfadyen’s own take on the early Darcy, he mentions the proposal scene, set of course in the pouring rain in the 2005 film:

He is a serious young man, with huge responsibilities for his estate, and he has never met a young woman like her. When he proposes to her, first explaining how unsuitable a match she is, he makes that explanation out of integrity, not arrogance.

It’s interesting that in each of these explanations, there is an attempt to justify (or at least rationalize) his behavior, to link the early Darcy to the gentlemen that Lizzy bumps into at Pemberley. By contrast, Jane Austen was content to paint a pretty simple picture of his character after the ball scene:

[Mr Darcy's] manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

So this is how Darcy’s apparent inconsistency has been explained by dramatizers. Please add your thoughts below!

In Lost in Austen, Mr Wickham’s character is redeemed in a bold but fairly plausible way, at least on first viewing. Amanda Price discovers that Georgiana Darcy is not as innocent as Jane Austen would have had us believe. After refusing Georgiana’s sexual advances toward him, Mr Wickham chooses to hide this truth and allows Mr Darcy to believe that he had ‘ravished’ her. He also comes to the aid of the injured Mr Bennet. At this point Amanda declares – ‘Wickham, you are a bastard but you’re the right bastard at the right time.’ Is this version of his character believable? Jane Bennet tried to believe that neither Darcy’s nor Wickham’s account could be quite correct; that the moral reputations of both men could be left intact. It’s a nice idea that she could have been right.

However, Wickham did extort the equivalent of more than one million dollars from Mr Darcy, which he gambled and otherwise wasted away. He also lied to anyone who would listen about his dealings with the gentleman. When the militia moved to Brighton, Wickham left with another mountain of debt, having conned his way into credit agreements with various traders.

Mr Wickham’s decision to elope with Lydia was a strange one. The Bennets have no money, so his motivation could not have been financial. He had no intention of marrying Lydia, it is said, so perhaps he was being led purely by his sexual desire. If so, then why run off with a gentleman’s daughter? Less troublesome encounters would surely have been possible for an officer stationed in a famous ‘gay bathing place’ like Brighton?

In any case, at the end of the book, where Jane Austen describes the future of Lydia and Mr Wickham, there is little to redeem his character. They stay together of course, but in time become bored with one another. They live a restless life, never able to live to their means and dependent on the charity of Mrs Elizabeth Darcy.

So while it’s a nice idea in Lost in Austen, in the novel the cracks of ambiguity in Wickham’s moral character are very slight indeed. I do find his elopement with Lydia a little hard to rationalize, but overall he’s pretty much a straightforward 19th Century villain – a superficially charming, yet amoral hedonist.

Are you willing to believe, like Jane, that Mr Wickham ‘is not so undeserving’ as we might have thought. Or is he, as we always believed, in possession of ‘neither integrity or honour?’

Lizzy

You can watch the whole of the movie for free on our site.

Pride and Prejudice 1940 is primarily a wartime comedy, seeped in 1940s glamour and star quality, and only secondarily an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Having written the dystopian novel Brave New World, screenwriter and novelist Aldous Huxley showed that he’s nothing if not versatile with this movie, billed at the time as ‘the gayest comedy of the year.’ The script is so light in tone, and so light on its resemblance to the novel’s storyline and characters, that purists will find it wholly insufferable. Those with a sense of humor or affection for this era of Hollywood, will very quickly fall in love with it.

The movie stars Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson as Mr Darcy and Elizabeth. Olivier is far too soft and likeable from the start, but his screen presence is just magnetic beyond all reason. Huxley even gives him some of Bingley’s lines, which he delivers so sweetly that it’s incomprehensible that Elizabeth doesn’t just leap on him at Netherfield and have done with it! His first proposal to Lizzy is also only very mildly offensive – nothing compared to the insults implicit in the 1980, 1995 and 2005 adaptations.

Most impressively, Greer Garson is equal to Olivier’s legendary presence. While Jane Bennet (Maureen O’Sullivan) is very beautiful, Garson is so stunning that it’s difficult to imagine her being second in beauty to anyone. By the standards of the movie, she is actually quite a faithful Elizabeth. She certainly has all the ‘sweetness’ and ‘archness’ that Jane Austen envisaged, and is wonderfully spirited.

The costumes are completely wrong for Jane Austen, with the movie given an 1840 setting, and the contrived accents are loveable but mildly distracting.* Darcy is pronounced ‘Darsay’ and ‘marry’ has become ‘melly’ for some reason, but you will still cheer when Darsay and Elizabeth finally agree to melly at the end.

Likewise, the wartime dialog and mannerisms make it difficult to suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself fully in the story, but there is still so much to enjoy. Had the 1980 adaptation involved yuppie gentlemen with filofaxea in their hands, discussing their investment portfolios and comparing business cards before all saying ‘ciao,’ it still wouldn’t have dated the piece as obviously. This makes it a kind of period period-drama, which – depending on your point of view – can even add to the fun.

To be clear, though, some of the plot changes are quite shocking, particularly those that involve Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I won’t go over them again here to avoid spoiling the surprise, but you can find the relevant Lady Catherine clip here. When watching the 1940 Pride and Prejudice movie, you may find yourself asking ‘Is nothing sacred?’ a few times, but if you enjoyed ‘Lost in Austen’ or don’t mind a little artistic license then you shouldn’t find anything too unpalatable here.

Your glamorous friend,

Lizzy

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*This post initially contained a throwaway reference to the ‘apparent’ use of Gone with the Wind costumes in the movie, which, as one anonymous poster convincingly argued, may be something of a myth. Feisty counter-arguments quickly flowed in which I, as this site’s owner, have neither the knowledge nor – I confess – the interest to assess. Therefore, the simplest thing seemed to be to remove the reference altogether. I hope that everyone fervently interested in MGM’s wartime costume recycling policies can find a happy home somewhere else in the blogosphere. Apologies to everyone who posted!