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So I'm still not sure quite how I got sucked into watching this most "chick movie" of all "chick movies": a six-part, British-made, costume-drama romance adapted from the novel by Jane Austen — but I loved it. I think I finally get the British class structure.

source: Amazon.com

Ann (and, frankly, most of the women I know) love Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice, and also this 1995 BBC production starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. (It has such a following that the fact that Firth also starred as a character named Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary was not lost on that movie's audiences.)

But I have not usually been successful at tackling Jane Austen's writing. It's not that I can't appreciate the minute observation of a dense social setting. I am after all a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Aubrey/Maturin" series, set in Austen's time but in Britain's Royal Navy. (In fact, I've often tried to explain O'Brian's books as "Jane Austen goes to sea.")

A big part of my difficulty with Austen's books is remaining patient with the people who are immersed in and constrained by the British class structure. All of the problems in Austen's novels — well, this is how I think I've looked at it — could be solved by someone just taking the small trouble to tell some highfalutin' snob to "Step off!" But that barrier has been largely removed for me by this production.

It's by no means that now I feel that ossified class distinctions are any more fair than before. (As a slightly cranky, post-Watergate [or perhaps I should say "post-Andrew Jackson"], progressive American, it could scarcely be otherwise.) What this film accomplished for me is not to grant the justice of such class systems but rather their reality. This production has helped me see that Austen's characters, though I wish they weren't, truly are immersed in and constrained by a powerful social system that's otherwise quite alien to me.

One of the most effective ways the producer Sue Birtwistle and the director Simon Langton achieve this is by making houses nearly characters in their own right. In particular, the Bennets' Longbourne and Darcy's Pemberley (both "screen names" for the real "actors" Luckington Court and Lyme Park, respectively) are filmed in a way to provide crucial understanding of the differences between the two families, no less than dialog, costuming, or acting can. I must admit that the long, opulent shots introducing Pemberley help me to take a new view of Mr. Darcy — to find a new view of the truth behind his hauteur (as, indeed, Lizzie Bennet perhaps does at those same moments).

There's much else to say about a five-hour costume drama (including, for instance, the resemblance I saw between Lady Catherine de Bergh and the Queen in A Bug's Life), but I'll let it go at this. This production has educated me, providing me a visual sense for the edifice (literally) of the eighteenth-century British class structure that I can carry with me — perhaps even back into a fresh attempt at reading Austen herself.

first published May 2, 2004