When we left off, the Bingley party had just left Netherfield. We resume some time later in London…

-Darcy meets the Bingley sisters on the streets of London. (Location shooting to be done at the same time and place as any exteriors for his later search for the eloped lovers; be sure to give him separate costumes for both scenes.) Caroline tells Darcy that she has seen Jane Bennet in town. Calls her encroaching, among other unflattering things. Darcy says the girl isn’t that, merely weak-willed and of an insipid disposition. If the mother didn’t come along there is nothing to worry about. But she’s staying with her mother’s relatives in Cheapside! Caroline says. Darcy frowns. Caroline pleads with him not to tell Charles that Miss Bennet is in town. Darcy looks uncomfortable. The subject is unlikely to arise, he says, and I do not intend to bring it up.

-Since I find Jane’s journey to London depressing, we do not see any of it. We cut to her at Longbourne (not necessarily indoors) discussing the Bingley sisters’ treatment of her in London with Lizzie, in terms similar to her letter in the book. Lizzie is thoroughly disgusted with both the young men of Netherfield. They come back into the house to find a group of militia soldiers underfoot. Lizzie teases Wickham pretty sharply about his conquest of the heiress Mary King, then Aunt Gardiner takes her aside. They both shake their heads over Jane’s hopeless passion for Bingley, then Aunt Gardiner raises the question of Wickham’s conduct, and Lizzie defends him strongly, as in the book, with a subtext that she still cares enough about him to where no one but her is allowed to criticize him. The tail end of this conversation leads into Lizzie mentioning her upcoming trip with Sir William and Maria Lucas to visit the now-married Charlotte at Hunsford Cottage.

-The Hunsford/Rosings adventure proceeds pretty much as in the book, although we see enough of Darcy’s side of things to realize that his aunt wants him to propose to Anne, and Anne does not want that at all. (I like the idea that she’s in love with some mildly inappropriate man like Mr. Collins’s curate, or a military friend of Colonel Fitzwilliam who is staying at Rosings with the nephews). Maria Lucas, who usually gets left out of this segment, is a comically timid person: afraid of Darcy, afraid of Lady Catherine, afraid of the vaguely sinister Gothic architecture at Rosings. We leave in the part where Lizzie keeps getting lost and running into Darcy and he has a weird way of talking as though she might be staying at Rosings itself when she is next in Kent.

-Hunsford Cottage is apparently close enough to its home farm that Lizzie can joke, in the book, about pigs getting into the garden; if we need a funny interlude somewhere we might actually have that happen. Hunsford the house is a pleasant, cozy structure, large enough to give Mr. and Mrs. Collins a measure of personal space apart from each other, and house several servants as well. It needs to be clear to the viewer why Charlotte thought that this property was worth marrying the man attached to it; the viewer doesn’t necessarily need to agree with her decision but like Lizzie they need to be able to understand it better.

-Something most versions don’t dwell over much on is the similarities between Mr. Collins and his father-in-law Sir William Lucas; it might be worth having more interactions between the two, preferably with Charlotte present, to underline that really, Charlotte’s been surrounded by men like this all her life.

-It might also be fun to show Charlotte, one of the few people to guess that Darcy is interested in Lizzie, actively encouraging him. Maybe on a certain evening the Lucases and Collinses show up at Rosings, and Charlotte tells Darcy that wink, nudge, Lizzie stayed home with a headache, and when he expresses a desire to walk over after dinner (while everyone else is playing piquet or something) to see how Miss Bennet is getting on, Charlotte makes approving noises…

-The first proposal occurs as in the book: it’s evening, she’s begged off from dinner at Rosings with a slight headache, Darcy shows up, genuinely worried about her and inquiring after her health, lurches into a confession of his feelings that is initially somewhat panicked but grows more confident and obnoxious as he goes along. I think a sense of a close, stifling evening with distant rumblings of thunder might help set the mood, without being as blatant as 2005. And then the storm breaks just as Darcy is walking home after his verbal throwdown with the love of his life, and he gets rained on….

–I know a lot of fans fetishize The Letter (partly because they lived after the era of the handwritten letter), but to me, a GenXer who had to write thank you notes to relatives on every occasion, The Letter is just a somewhat inelegant relic of the lost first draft of P&P, written in epistolary form. I also really dislike the attempts to film Lizzie actually reading the letter; to me they range from the dull to the hideous. The people who think that a reserved man would find it more easy to communicate this way somehow fail to notice that he talks there in much the same way he does out loud, complete with the bullet-point-like organization of his thoughts that last showed up when he was explaining the ladies’ reasons for taking a stroll around the Netherfield parlour. They also fail to notice that he is committing to paper an account of a very scandalous incident involving his sister, which is going to be read, hopefully privately, in a household that includes such gossips as Mr. Collins and his father-in-law. Nope. Doesn’t pass the smell test. Even Austen knows it’s a little lame; later in the book she has him hoping Lizzie burned the letter.

–In my version, he makes his case for his handling of the situation with Bingley to Lizzie’s face; and the viewer is perhaps a little moved by his refusal to throw Caroline under the bus when he says he regrets concealing Jane’s presence in London from Charles. He *does not* dump his family’s deepest darkest secret, complete with names and dates, on a woman he doesn’t expect to see again after she leaves Hunsford. He talks about the assistance his father wanted him to give Wickham; he talks about Wickham attempting to elope with a very young heiress of his acquaintance he doesn’t name. Both he and Lizzie are pretty angry throughout this, with his cold anger burning down to regret and apologies by the end, and her hotter anger fading into a mixture of bewilderment and frustration. It’s important that Lizzie come off as dignified rather than petulant when putting him down; Italian Lizzie’s quiet but fierce rage at the end of her conversation with Italian Lady Catherine(1) comes closest to my idea of how Lizzie should be in the first proposal. You can make her a tigress here all you want, what you shouldn’t make her is a snotty snowflake.

-Back home, Lizzie catches Jane up on all of this, including Darcy’s part in separating Bingley from Jane. (In the book, Lizzie spares her this, but it’s something people whine a lot about, so we might as well show how telling her everything would play out.) This part is a mistake, because Jane just blames herself for not expressing herself better to Bingley. Coming back inside, they find Lydia in the act of wheedling/tantrumming their father into giving his permission for Lydia to go to Brighton. Lizzie tries to get him to change his mind, and the conversation goes as in the book, but with more sense of what Mr. Bennet is letting himself in for if he *doesn’t* let Lydia go to Brighton. At the dinner celebrating Lydia’s eighteenth birthday, Aunt Gardiner decides to jolly Kitty out of the sulks by taking her on the Derbyshire expedition, which already includes Lizzie, Jane, and Mr. Gardiner.

(1) The Italian first proposal has not survived although the Italian miniseries as a whole is still around. I assume their Lizzie was equally angry there. My second stop on my time traveling, Austen-adaptation-watching trip, will be to 1957 to watch the Italian first proposal scene. First stop is to Feb-March 1952 to watch the first long form BBC version of P&P. Third stop; Canada 1958 for the Patrick MacNee version.