I wrote 3500 words on Hunter Healer King 3 last week along with 500 words on the space regency. Yesterday and today I wrote the opening chapter (~2500 words) of a mystery that’s been in the planning stages for several years. Where was I going to find the mental energy to do a bit of Austen blogging for Wednesday? And there goes Andrew Davies shooting his mouth off in the presence of people with microphones, aaaaand we’re off to the races. 

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy on the other side of the Atlantic, Andrew Davies was a Big Wheel in British television adaptations. On my side of the pond he is probably best-known for scripting the 1995 Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth, the 2005 Bleak House with Gillian Anderson, and the 2007 Northanger Abbey with J.J.Feild, but there are many, many other period pieces on his resume. In his heyday, he was very good at distilling the long, semicolon-laden sentences of Georgian and Victorian novelists into something modern actors could say and modern audiences could understand, and subtly developing character arcs that the author either kept in the background (Fitzwilliam Darcy) or deemed unnecessary for the type of story being told (Henry Tilney). But somewhere along the way Davies lost his mojo, or became merely the frontman for a younger, less-talented assistant screenwriter (at the time I type this, he is 89) and dwindled into a mere purveyor of mediocre soap opera. So, here are my thoughts on the proposed adaptations he describes here; note that only The Watsons seems to have people even talking about funding it. 

–Emma from Jane Fairfax’s POV, with psychopathic Frank Churchill ruining his own life, nearly ruining Jane’s, and dying, only for Widower George Knightley to move in and console Widow Jane. I find myself wondering if he couldn’t get funding for a Tenant of Wildfell Hall movie he (or the much younger writing assistant) were working on, so they turned it into an Emma/Wildfell Hall mashup. If so, the ploy doesn’t seem to have worked, because Davies complains about having trouble finding funding for the project. While not the biggest fan of Emma, the novel, or Emma Woodhouse, the character, I think that the idea of pushing the virtuous stereotypical heroine to the fringes of the novel and focusing on her frenemy instead is one of the more interesting things about the original Jane Austen novel. Making the story all about Jane Fairfax just turns it into a generic melodrama, and making Frank Churchill into a generic rake is a much less interesting exercise than trying to square the circle of his good and bad traits. 

–Mansfield Park: but with a big chunk about life on the Antigua plantation, where Sir Thomas Bertram has a second family. First off, there’s no indication in the book that this is his “main source of income” as the article claims (may be quoting Davies or simply retailing illiterate conventional wisdom on this point, it’s not really clear). Sir Thomas doesn’t seem to start worrying about the “property in Antigua” until after the debts of his wayward son Tom put a major dent in his cashflow. At that point, when every pound counts, is when he decides head off to Antigua to see if he can straighten out the problems with the property there. To me, it seems more consistent with a guy realizing he’s tight for money and needs to manage every asset he has to the utmost, than with a guy who depends primarily on the property in Antigua for his income.  

–As far as the slave issue goes, I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that Austen signals in passing that Edmund and Fanny read abolitionist authors sympathetically, and that Sir Thomas can have a positive conversation with Fanny about the slave trade (yes, that’s Edmund’s take, but if there’s a character in the book whose wishes Edmund is actually usually correct about, it’s his dad). Basically, the author signals that there’s not a lot of daylight between the romantic leads and the overbearing father-figure in their views on this topic. I will add, as I have before, that nothing in the actual text of the book specifies whether Sir Thomas owns a sugar plantation (invariably run on slave labor), a lumber plantation (often run on free labor) or some other, less common type of property. To the extent that sugar was by far the most profitable product of that part of the world, the fact that his property in Antigua isn’t giving good returns might even point to it not producing sugar. Or it might point to something else. The simple fact is that the handful of slavery-adjacent references in the novel may well be nothing more than window-dressing, given that women authors of the time who were passionate abolitionists usually found a way to address that openly in their novel.

–None of that really matters to the process of adapting Mansfield Park, in the sense that you can make a perfectly good version of the story that leans into the slave issue and a perfectly good version of the story that leans away from it. However, as with Frank Churchill, I feel that trying to make sense of the good and bad traits that Sir Thomas actually shows on the page is more interesting than simply reducing him to Simon Legree (if you don’t know who that is, look him up). For that reason, I personally favor adapting MP in a way that leans away from the slave issue, but it is strictly a personal preference. 

–As far as Sir Thomas having a “second family” in Antigua, it depends on what you mean by that. There is zero indication that he’s ever visited Antigua before that time he takes Tom over and then sends Tom back some months later and carries on alone. To all appearances, he’s been managing this property via mail til that time. At no point in a fairly long stretch of the book where people are fretting about whether Sir Thomas is going to make it back okay, does anyone say, “Well, he went and came back without trouble that time X years ago, so I don’t see what the fuss is about.” The first reference to the property even existing occurs at a point in the book when Sir Thomas has been married about 16-17 years, so he might have inherited it from a more distant relative rather recently at that point. The Ellen Moody calendar for MP has him spending maybe one to two years over there, which gives him just about enough time to become attracted to a local woman (of whatever ethnicity or social status you want) and father a child on her, which…okay, that counts as an alternate family unit, but it’s like one step up from the John Willoughby-Eliza Williams situation in S&S. Sir Thomas’ enthusiasm for seeing his English family again, including people he has previously underrated like Fanny, is also not really consistent with him leaving his heart behind in Antigua in any sense…unless maybe he’s lost the alternate family unit back there to cholera or something of that nature.

—Alternatively (if you were me, and somewhat invested in the Redemption of Sir Thomas Bertram), you might give him a biracial half-brother with a family of his own in Antigua, and watch him come to terms with that. I don’t know which direction Davies purports to be going with this, or how far along he is with scripting this one. All I can say is that the article writer makes it sounds like a bad retread of the 1999 Patricia Rozema adaptation of the same novel. (But we’re talking about the guy who blatantly borrowed Emma Thompson’s version of Margaret Dashwood for his 2008 script for Sense and Sensibility, so we certainly can’t rule out him doing the same with Rozema). 

-The Watsons: Davies correctly observes that it has a lot of great characters, to which I would retort that the same could be said of Sanditon, and nothing I’ve heard about that Davies-written expansion of a Jane Austen fragment suggests that he did justice to them. However, if WBGH, the wealthiest and most effective PBS affiliate in America, is saying things to their Limey producer buddies like “We can’t fund this Watsons thing because of the current administration cutting federal PBS funding,” I suspect that means they don’t like the pilot he wrote, or were unhappy with how Sanditon turned out, or something. If they thought it would do well, they’d find the money somewhere, because let’s face it, generally Jane Austen sells, and in particular it’s been pretty good to WBGH.