This is one of those topics that a lot of people have opinions about, and I am one of them. I intend to dump some thoughts about that on this blog, specifically what I would do if some insane person put me in charge of new adaptations of the novels I find most interesting. This initial post is about the ground rules I’m working from:

-These are not primarily “fancasting” posts, although I’ve done those in the past and I may offer up some casting ideas as I go along.

-I see these novels, as a lot of people do, as being primarily about a subculture of genteel English Regency people, where the womenfolk have very few options besides marriage, and where they generally had to choose between marrying for pragmatic reasons and marrying for emotional reasons. The big fairy tale ending is when the more important female characters manage to find male characters who check both boxes to some extent.

-This necessitates being somewhat focused on the economics of the characters’ situations, which is, believe it or not, something that can probably actually be conveyed onscreen, given the right people with the right skill sets.

-Regency England was a time and place where people of non-European ancestry tended to be urban middle class or working class. There were some people of such ancestry who managed to rise to upper class levels, or upper middle class with some ability to socialize with the upper class, but again, they tended to be based in London and the major port cities. Austen depicts a much more rural, and I think probably much more white, section of society. When she calls people brown, she means they’re white people who have successfully tanned instead of burned in the sun. My mental vision of the books necessarily reflects this. Other people’s mental vision will lean instead towards the modernized demographics of Bridgerton or Persuasion 2022, and I don’t have a problem with that, so long as they don’t demonize people who have a different understanding of the demographics.

-I think there’s a tendency in certain circles to over-excuse certain Jane Austen characters – Mrs. Bennet, Mary and Lydia Bennet, the Crawford siblings, Mr. Darcy, most of the heroines – and over-demonize others, mostly the father figures and the more sedate love interests (Brandon, Knightley, Edmund Bertram). Some of my character comments in the individual posts will be in reaction to this, and I may come down more harshly on certain characters than the reader may like.

-At this moment, I only have strongish thoughts on Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, although I might develop stronger thoughts on Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion at some point. For Lady Susan, I don’t think I can improve on the Whit Stillman movie, and I don’t care enough about Emma or Northanger Abbey to really tackle those in depth. (Also, I think the only things really wrong with the 2007 NA and the 2020 Emma are their attempts at being titillating.)

-One last general comment on casting: All characters who are supposed to be good looking need to look good in Regency clothes. For women, this generally means either a column or a lollipop body shape, for men, a wiry swimmer’s build with good legs, and a relatively long neck with a diameter on the smaller side. I liked Colin Firth, Matthew MacFadyen, Johnny Lee Miller and Johnny Flynn just fine at a performance level, but I really could not stand the way Firth and Flynn looked like turtles trying to pull their head into their collars, or the slovenly approach Miller in 2009 Emma and MacFadyen in 2005 P&P took to deal with the same problem. No more bull-necked men in Regency suits! It’s inhumane to both the actors and the viewers!