Masterpiece Theatre

Many of you are probably already aware of this, but I just found out and got really excited. PBS is airing all 6 novels plus a drama based on Austen's life starting in January 2008. Many of them are new adaptations (well newer, many of our British friends have already seen them). I am most excited to see Persuasion.

Link to PBS announcement

I am Lavinia by the way. Just recently joined the group. :D

I just started reading Jane Austen a few months ago, so I'm quite excited about this. I hope they'll all be good. I think I'm most excited about Northanger Abbey, since I've never seen a film adaptation of it.

Masterpiece Theatre is also showing Jane Eyre, at the end of December.

I am surprised Masterpiece Theatre (or the powers that be) would remake Persuasion when they have a perfectly wonderful adaptation already. They had the sense to keep the excellent Pride and Prejudice and the okay Emma, but the old Persuasion was much better than the old Emma.

Hey Lavinia, welcome to the group. Its always nice to meet someone else who appreciates Austen. I have seen all of the new Austen movies(except Sense and Sensibility which will premiere during this Austen fest). They are pretty good. I absolutely love Persuasion with Rupert Penry Jones and Sally Hawkins. It was so well done. I also like Northanger Abbey as well. Its been a long time since I read the book so I do not know how faithful it is to the book but I really liked it. I was not overjoyed at this adaptation of Mansfield Park. In my opinion Bille Piper was not a very good Fanny. But overall it was okay. I am really excited by what PBS plans to do. I am hoping that this will win some new fans to all things Austen.

Anyway its nice to meet you. My name is Patricia by the way.

>3 compskibook:, compskibook, I think MPT is just showing them in the US. Northanger, Persuasion, and Mansfield were all recently remade by a British company (I think ITV) - people speculated they remade those because the originals were less high-profile than the films of P&P, Emma, and S&S.

I'm excited about Masterpiece Theater's Complete Jane Austen series, but was a tad disappointed with the first episode (Pursuasion). What did everyone else think?

There is another topic in this group (Film Adaptations - Persuasion) where we are discussing it. The consensus seems to be: ghastly.

One thing I really love so far is the promo for "The Complete Jane Austen" set to Coldplay's Fix You. One of my favorite songs with one of my favorite authors!

I think it's fascinating that they've scheduled Miss Austen Regrets for the night they have to compete with the Super Bowl...

Do you think they even realized it? Actually, it is perfect. I usually leave the party at half time. By 9:00 I will have seen all the good commercials and I will be sick of football. It will be time for Austen!

Actually, I would imagine that it did occur to them, but with an eye to counter-programming. The point is to offer something entirely different from the big draw on TV that night in order to capture the percentage of the population who aren't interested in that major event. If you have nothing likely to do that, you do a re-run of a show; if you have something unique and likely to appeal to an entirely different demographic, you run that. Austen is fairly removed from the Superbowl, so that may be the thinking in this instance.

Was "Miss Austen Regrets" an ITV production? Have our friends in Great Britian seen it yet? I was just wondering if it is worth running home for.

>12 compskibook: - it's a BBC production (it has it's own mini-site Miss Austen Regrets. (Not that it says much).

It hasn't been shown in the UK yet, which is a little worrying as it was due to follow on from the latest BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

Newsweek had high praise for Miss Austen Regrets but I'll have to wait and see. I am glad to be home to see it tonight (and like you jillmwo happy to push aside the superbowl).

I'll have wait and netflix Mansfield Park as I was off seeing the play Journey's End last weekend (a beautiful and hearbreaking play about British soldiers in the trenches in WWI).

FYI: If Miss Austen Regrets is bad, the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility is on Turner Classic Movies right now.

Unfortunately, that's a channel we don't get.

I just watched it and enjoyed it quite a lot. Olivia Williams is nice casting, the details of her life are not woefully exaggerated. I recognized certain lines of dialogue as being taken from her letters.

Most of all though it brought home the financial precariousness of her family situation and how little she was paid for her writing.

I have to confess I missed a bit here and there so my tolerant husband could check the superbowl scores.

How'd he like them? (I note that you're currently listed as in a Super Bowl-neutral location, but that just means he could be rooting for either side.)

He wasn't strongly rooting for either side in the superbowl but still felt a male obligation to participate slightly. I joked it was his Napoleonic war and he had to check to see which side was winning.

He also watched Austen with me. I think he enjoyed Northanger Abbey more which he watched a couple weeks ago.

I just watched it and enjoyed it quite a lot. Olivia Williams is nice casting, the details of her life are not woefully exaggerated. I recognized certain lines of dialogue as being taken from her letters.
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I really liked it. I thought the casting of Jane was good--the actress made her seem like a real, breathing person, and not some perfect literary icon. I liked the scene where she was hung over--just never considered that an option for Jane Austen before :-)

I also thought it was quite sad, especially the end. She snapped at Fanny not to feel sorry for her . . . but I did.

And like the other films, it was delightful to look at. The sets were gorgeous.

Miss Austen Regrets was astoundingly good. My expectations had been very low, so it was a wonderful surprise to see Jane Austen's life depicted in a way that was faithful to her character and experience, and not too sensationalized. Olivia Williams's portrayal was lively and moving by turns. Even my husband (avowedly a disliker of Austen) was riveted by her performance.

By the way, do you think it's safe to assume that the screenplay was written by someone who is really passionately pro-Austen? Poor Fanny Knight certainly received her comeuppance for the catty comments she made years later about her aunt's lack of "refinement".

I liked it. I also thought it was rather sad at the end. Maybe it would have been nice to tell how well her books have done over the years.

Did people actually keep telling her to make her clergymen better? Mr. Collins was quite ridiculous, yes, but Eleanor Dashwood and Fanny Price both ended up with very nice and respectable clergymen.

> 22 Did people actually keep telling her to make her clergymen better?

I wondered that too. In her time, everyone knew and appreciated that this was the career path of most second sons. It usually had to do with birth order, and little or nothing to do with "vocation" as we think of it.

But even in Austen's time, there was some discontent with the approach of haphazard ordination of individuals who clearly were ill-suited to the profession. Internally, the Church of England was dealing with those (primarily the Methodists of the time) who felt that the habitual practice served neither the Church nor the public very well.

I would recommend Irene Collins' Jane Austen and the Clergy for additional research and/or background reading.

> 24

Hmm, I'm not sure if you're replying to my message or not.

I was not suggesting that the "haphazard ordination of individuals who clearly were ill-suited to the profession" was a desirable thing. (My own feeling is quite the opposite.) Rather, I was indicating that Jane Austen's fiction was an honest representation of the result of that policy; while some of her clergymen were honourable and compassionate men, many others were quite appalling.

From the little I've read, it seems that this was widely acknowledged in Jane Austen's time. This is why I was wondering whether Austen's contemporaries really would reproach her for not portraying all her clergymen as paragons of virtue. It would be like - I don't know - getting outraged at a 21st-century novelist for not portraying today's politicians as selfless individuals whose sole and abiding concern, without exception and at all times, is the public good.

Chameke: I'm sorry I wasn't clear and I never meant to suggest that anyone on this board thought haphazard ordination was a good thing.

My point was that the practice was already being questioned within the Church and that it might be expected that they would feel Austen's pokings as unkind, to say the least, and even perhaps unwarranted, given that she was a woman. The Church would already consider the issue to be a sore point and they wouldn't relish someone making fun of them.

My idea is based on recollections of what I have read (some years ago in some instances) about the Church and Jane Austen. I may be piecing things together incorrectly. But I do think that Austen might well have been criticized for her portrayals.

>26 jillmwo: Ah! I see :-) Thanks for clarifying that.

I'm at home with a bug today, and my brain is rather fuzzy, so that may be impairing my ability to communicate. As in the classic Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot:

Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Male Shop Owner (suspiciously): What do you mean, "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold.

Anyway, you never know, I could be someone who likes haphazard ordination. Zap! You're a vicar!

More seriously, jillmwo, thank you for recommending Jane Austen and the Clergy. I'd never heard of it, but upon checking online, I discovered that my regional library has a copy at one of its further-flung branches, so I've put a hold on it :-) Much obliged!

PBS runs a forum where the Masterpiece-Jane Austen series is being discussed, if anyone is interested in reading more:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewforum.pbs?f=235

There is also an amusing article in the New Yorker called "Everybody Loves Jane" that is about the series. You can read it online at:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2008/01/21/080121crte_televisio...

My favourite line from the article:

"the Austen logjam has many pleasing aspects—as well as aspects that will vex Austen maniacs, but, as far as I can tell from the various Web sites devoted to the author, being vexed is part of the joy of being an Austen maniac."

Who, us?

They also call this an "Austenpalooza" Made me smile, anyway.

How true, Nickelini! We do love to be vexed. Thanks for the article. My other favorite line:

"Demerits must be handed out to this film for the use of the kiss cam—that business of circling rapidly around lovers like an untrained puppy when they finally kiss for the first time, and then pulling up into a crane shot to show us the enviable mansion that they are about to move into."

I finally watched my tape of Miss Austen Regrets and I really liked it. Far better than Becoming Jane IMO. I wish I still had my mom's book of Jane's letters to Cassandra so I could compare but it "felt" accurate - if that makes sense.

Hey Nickelini did you listen to the NPR discussion of The Complete Jane Austen ? They couldn't say enough wonderful things.

I just checked my local PBS listings to see what Jane Austen flick to get in the mood for tomorrow night . . . alas! No Austen this week. Instead they're showing the Osmond's 50th anniversary. (Are they joking? How does THAT compare? Yikes).

Sad on the west coast of Canada . . .

32 - Hey Nickelini did you listen to the NPR discussion of The Complete Jane Austen ? They couldn't say enough wonderful things.

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Because I can only get NPR on the internet, for some reason I usually forget to check it for cool things. I wonder if this is in their achieves. I'll have to look it up.

I had that same problem last week Nickelini- stinking pledge drive Osmonds.

That's their idea of a pledge drive? The Osmonds? Now THAT is sad.

I thought the same thing when I surfed past it.

Well, Marie Osmond lasted quite a while on Dancing w/ the Stars; maybe they thought they could ride on the coat-tails of that?

#36 I know Nickelini and AnnaClaire. Bring back Austen if you want my money!

Masterpiece is reshowing Sense and Sensibility the next two coming Sundays (Feb 1 & 8). I'm looking forward to it since I missed it last year.