Lost in Austen and reading about the 'past'

‘I’m having a bit of a strange postmodern moment here’

‘Is that agreeable?’

                        (Lost in Austen, ITV, 2008)

In ITV’s Lost in Austen a reader of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice becomes caught up in the action of the fiction in a kind of narrative-time-slip. The heroine, Amanda Price, becomes magically enmeshed in the world of Pride and Prejudice through an interface in her bathroom, swapping places with Elizabeth Bennett who enters modernity (and becomes ‘real’) with relish (hence the mobile phone). Price has to negotiate various aspects of the novel rely on her knowledge of Austen to ensure a happy ending in reality and fiction. Price eventually stays in the fictional world to be with Darcy, who she falls in love with, leaving Elizabeth Bennett in the contemporary, ‘real’ world. Lost in Austen is part of a suite of dynamic reimaginations of Austen’s work, texts which consider the fiction of the past as something that might be easily disrupted, rewritten, rejigged, or improve with the addition of zombies and seamonsters. The quote that is an epigraph to this chapter comes when Price asks Darcy climb into a manmade lake, visually quoting the most famous scene from the seminal 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice in which Colin Firth, playing Darcy, emerged dripping from a pool. Price satirically points out the way in which Pride and Prejudice has become a set of tropes to be played with and detached from their original, giving rise in recent years to film (Chadha 2004), advertising, novels (Grahame-Smith 2009), reality television (Channel 4 2002) and newspaper columns (Fielding 1995-6). Austen, and the fictional ‘past’ that she represents, opens up a visual and textual palette that allows film makers, novelists, and television writers incredible latitude to reinvent and rework. The fictional past becomes a repository of themes, ideas, images and discourses to fuel new and dynamic work (and this is in addition to the numerous continuations, sequels, prequels of Austen’s novels that have been being written since the mid-Nineteenth Century (de Groot 2009, 65-6)).

Quite apart from playing rather neatly with the conventions of costume drama, and challenging the ways that reader-viewers engage with the idealised past that Austen in particular represents, Lost in Austen dramatically represents the motif of encountering with the past through reading about it, and anticipates various ways in which reading-engaging-empathising might be construed. The past is a place which has a strongly delimited narrative, where things happen that are correct; yet at the same time the local, the domestic, the particular might be interrupted, fragmented, spliced or confused. Price is aware that she is imagining, dreaming, inhabiting another’s world, but her very manifestation in that world changes it subtly and turns it into a story about her; it is a physical iteration of the central theory of romance fiction, that is, that it allows the fantastical projection of the reader’s self into the story (McCracken 1998, 75). Fiction in Lost in Austen allows a space of possibility, ensuring that the reader can hold a – physical and imaginative – place in then and now. This imaginative simultaneity demonstrates once again the interesting demands that historical fiction makes of the reader, and the implications for a model of the historical imagination are clear. The ways in which readers of historical novels engage with the past are sophisticated and thoughtful. How do we, as readers, solve the seemingly commonplace conundrum that historical fiction is real and not real, that it must cleave to fact and authenticity even as it points out its own specious falsehood? How, within all this, do we deal with our own affective, empathic relationship to the past and the narratives we read?