Jane Austen
Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's "Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance", and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, "The Bennets" (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of "Pride and Prejudice" starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of "Pride and Prejudice" and continuing on to today, class is subtly downplayed as the United States is officially an egalitarian nation where all people are equal and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.
Pride and Prejudice (1995 TV series)
Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice" had already been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, including BBC television versions in 1938, 1952, 1958, 1967 and 1980. In the autumn of 1986, after watching a preview of Austen's "Northanger Abbey", Sue Birtwistle and Andrew Davies agreed to adapt "Pride and Prejudice", one of their favourite books, for television. Birtwistle in particular felt that a new adaptation on film would serve the drama better than the previous videotaped "Pride and Prejudice" television adaptations, which looked too "undernourished" and "unpoetic". The needs of TV scheduling forced Davies to change his original plan of a five-episode adaptation to six. Birtwistle and Davies then offered the first three scripts to ITV in late 1986 to build on the guaranteed BBC audience, but the recent TV adaptation led to a delay. When ITV announced its renewed interest in 1993, Michael Wearing of the BBC commissioned the final scripts with co-funding from the American A&E Network. Director Simon Langton and the art department joined pre-production in January and February 1994.
Although Birtwistle and Davies wished to remain true to the tone and spirit of the novel, they wanted to produce "a fresh, lively story about real people", not an "old studio-bound BBC drama that was shown in the Sunday teatime slot". Emphasising sex and money as the themes of the story, Davies shifted the focus from Elizabeth to Elizabeth and Darcy and foreshadowed Darcy's role in the narrative resolution. To portray the characters as real human beings, Davies added short backstage scenes such as the Bennet girls dressing up to advertise themselves in the marriage market. New scenes where men pursue their hobbies with their peers departed from Jane Austen's focus on women. The biggest technical difficulty proved to be adapting the long letters in the second half of the story. Davies employed techniques such as voice-overs, flashbacks, and having the characters read the letters to themselves and to each other. Davies added some dialogue to clarify events from the novel to a modern audience but left much of the novel's dialogue intact.