Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)
A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,
Continue reading “The Golden Age of Adaptations” →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.
Continue reading “Andrew Davies Strikes Back (Maybe)” →(Regarding the Austenian series of posts, it’s going to take some time for me to get the Elliots, Musgroves and Hayters straight in my head and write them up. In the meantime, here’s a followup on the latest Sense and Sensibility adaptation).
These are about a week old or a little more, and I was hoping to find some source other than a reddit thread, but I didn’t, so here we are. I’d been a little anxious about costume designer Grace Snell, who didn’t seem to have much in the way of period work, but I like the clothes so far, which look solidly Regency (don’t ask me to match them to a particular year) and have some cool details in terms of embroidery and lace. Wealthy Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) wears flamboyant green and gold. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) wear shades of gray/black and purple/lavender, with Elinor being the more somberly dressed of the two. I’ve seen conflicting claims about whether these were in fact “half-mourning” colors as far back as the Regency, or whether they were more of a Victorian thing, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “our dad has been dead between six and nine months,” and it looks good on them.
A couple pictures include Ceara Coveney (Elayne in Wheel of Time, one of the brighter points of Season Two and Three), wearing a very pretty light gray outfit. Possibly our Lucy Steele? One shot has a very tall, well-dressed man in the background with a slight receding chin. He might or might not be Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon. If so, cause for rejoicing, dude does have enough neck for Regency collars! The group shot of Mrs. Jennings with the Dashwood sisters also has a couple of men in the background, although it’s not really clear who they are.
All in all, good job so far. My main beef with what I’ve seen of the Netflix Pride and Prejudice costumes is that they don’t really feel like a unified aesthetic, just “here’s a bunch of clothes from about the right period, with some effort to distinguish between characters who care about their looks and those who don’t. Hope you like them!” These S&S clothes do feel like there’s more of a coherent idea behind them, if that makes sense. Unlike the P&P first look, these seem to be informal behind-the-scenes shots that aren’t meant to give a sense of the production’s cinematography. As a result, I don’t know if the final film will be as gray-toned as these images suggest. On the one hand, S&S lends itself more to that kind of somberness than P&P. On the other hand, the last BBC S&S, which is admittedly 17 or 18 years old at this point, did something similar. We shall see.
Let’s get the book’s official statement on the subject out of the way first. Late in the novel, Harriet’s father is stated to be a tradesman, marital status unknown, who is “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.” Her father approves of the match with Robert Martin, and there’s a suggestion he possibly settles money on Harriet on her marriage. Nothing is said of the mother. I personally do not think Harriet is related to anyone we meet in the book. No named character in the book is high enough in status to weather the scandal of being known to have fathered or given birth to an illegitimate child. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it, just that they wouldn’t have kept the child, and the accompanying risk of gossip and scandal, in the neighborhood of Highbury. However, the alternative theories are potentially of interest to people writing Jane Austen spinoffs, so let’s go over them. You’ll notice I don’t really address the question of whether particular character seem moral/immoral enough for certain behaviors; a lifetime of reading murder mysteries makes me unwilling to go that route in discussing what fictional people are capable of.
Continue reading “Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents” →As previously stated, we are using Ellen Moody’s 1813-1814 calendar for the main events of Emma, because I don’t see any obvious reason not to.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Other Parents in Emma The Novel” →A quick Gutenberg skim on my part showed no days-of-week directly linked to days-of-month in the text, such as seen in P&P or Mansfield. Jo Modert, whose work I do not have direct access to, says that the main events of Emma seem to be mapped to an almanac for 1814-1815. Ellen Moody, after citing Modert, maps the novel instead to 1813-1814, for reasons that are not obvious to me. The only cultural reference known to point to anything earlier is Miss Bates getting confused about whether Ireland counts as a separate kingdom or not. Miss Bates is both ditzy and insular, so her continuing to get confused on this point long after it was a topical issue is plausible. Thus, this cultural reference doesn’t really wed Emma to a particular timeframe the way the soldiers billeted upon Meryton does with P&P. For once, I’m accepting Moody’s calendar without modifications. Mostly because I really don’t care that much about this novel, which weds considerable brilliance of technique, mood and psychology to two fairly unpleasant heroines, manipulative Emma Woodhouse and self-martyring Jane Fairfax. The only female characters in this one that I am at all fond of are Miss Bates and Harriet Smith.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Emma Woodhouse, and Their Friends, The Knightleys” →As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2” →Ellen Moody admits that only 1796-1797 fully works with the two strongly given dates in the text (Thursday, December 22 for the ball at Mansfield, and a “particularly late” Easter the following spring) but goes with R. W. Chapman’s 1808-1809 dates for the main body of the story, with a bit of handwaving about how the novel is obviously pieced together from partial drafts written at different times, and the “particularly late Easter” is merely an artifact of that process. Here, I am going with the 1796-1797 timeframe for the main plot, which I consider to start with the arrival of the Crawfords and the testing of Edmund and Fanny, and backdating accordingly. But the calendar of the book is heavily debated by scholars, and if you’re doing some sort of crossover work with the elder generation of another Austen novel, you have a lot of room to fudge the timeframes with this one.
This novel is comparatively easy, in that we have three sisters and their husbands and maybe two other, basically offscreen, sets of parents to keep track of. We start with the fabulous Miss Wards: Miss Elizabeth(1) Ward, Miss Maria Ward and Miss Frances Ward. They were apparently all three of them very good-looking, possibly blonde(1.5) with seven thousand pounds apiece(2) which translates to 350 pounds a year or 87.5 pounds a quarter.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1” →This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025” →Edgeworth was a popular “lady novelist” of Jane Austen’s time, perhaps best-known today for her novels (Castle Rackrent, etc) critiquing the Anglo-Irish gentry and their mistreatment of their Irish Catholic tenants. Austen admired her enough to namecheck Belinda in a positive way in Northanger Abbey, and sent her a copy of Emma upon publication. Edgeworth took a while to warm up to Emma and disliked Northanger Abbey even more heartily than I do, but thought moderately well of Mansfield Park, and when I read Belinda for myself, I saw a certain resemblance to Mansfield Park: the thousand foot view of the plot, the messy characters. The setting, the character types and the plot are very different though, and the craftmanship not in Jane Austen’s league. That’s the short version; if you want more details, along with spoilers for most major plot twists, plus me pontificating about adaptation possibilities, read on….
Continue reading “Belinda, By Maria Edgeworth” →
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