Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice

The literary historian who identifies fiction with the novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to get along without the novel, and until he reaches his great deliverance in Defoe, his perspective is intolerably cramped.... [T]he word novel, which up to about 1900 was still the name of a more or less recognizable form, has since expanded into a catchall term which can be applied to practically any prose book that is not "on" something.

--Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

The audience for this latest adaptation of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice will probably find it with or without reviews, and enjoy it irrespective of its quality. So it feels almost irrelevant to say that it's very good, much better than the trailers led me to expect. The 1940 MGM version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as the mutually antagonizing lovers Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy was based on a stage adaptation; this one was adapted directly from the book by Deborah Moggach and directed by Joe Wright with as much feel for what it means to be a novel as any adaptation of one I can think of.

In distinguishing the novel from prose romance generally, Northrop Frye wrote that the novel's "chief interest is in human character as it manifests itself in society." The novelist focuses on individual experience, giving herself as much direct access to the characters' thoughts and feelings as suits her purpose. At the same time, however, she sets the individual within concentric and overlapping circles that circumscribe family and household, community and fellow countrymen, co-religionists, members of the same sex, all of which we expect to be described believably. In this way the novelist simultaneously creates subjective and objective worlds that must feel as if they were being recreated from real-life models rather than dreamed up.

The objective world of the novel, i.e., the setting, also functions as a stage for a drama that derives from the defining attributes of the characters. And somehow, paradoxically, if the characters are convincingly, and engagingly, individual enough, all humanity may identify with them. That is, we recognize in the characters' defining attributes aspects of our own personalities and project ourselves into the resulting drama, which may be no more than to point out the kernel of allegory at the core of naturalistic character development. As applied to Austen's novel, you may recognize Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth as Pride and Prejudice personified and still feel that you know, or "are," in whole or in part, either or both of them.

Apart from voice-over, a movie can't replicate novelistic narration, certainly not within a comfortable stretch of theater-sitting time. A movie version of Pride and Prejudice is thus limited to what can be shown or spoken aloud. Fortunately, as the 1940 version shows, Austen's plot is a sturdy romantic comedy that can be staged on sets. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have five daughters to marry off, in descending order of age if they're to do it properly. (Marrying the younger girls first might cause comment that would lessen the older girls' chances of marrying at all.) The Bennets do not have any income to settle on the girls, however, and even the house they live in will pass on Mr. Bennet's death to a cousin. Mr. Darcy, a wealthy young man with noble connections who is visiting in the neighborhood, falls for Elizabeth although he sharply feels the inferiority of her social rank. He's both aloof and utterly candid, a combination that means he's not falsely ingratiating, but that also causes him to wound Elizabeth's feelings in the very act of proposing to her. For her part, Elizabeth is likewise drawn to Mr. Darcy but believes a slander against him because his extreme stiffness makes the lies of the attractive blackguard Wickham appear probable. In the final act Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy recover from the missteps caused by the character defects that give the book its title.