Jane Austen scores a double ton

BANGALORE: The 200th year of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice starts today. A book that's vibrantly alive on screen, on tube and bookshelves was published on Jan 28, 1813. That year also saw the publication of Byron's The Giaour and Shelley's Queen Mab. Arthur Schopenhauer published On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Robert Southey became the Poet Laureate of England.Byron and Shelley live only in English textbooks; Schopenhauer in philosophy courses. Robert Southey is all but forgotten. But Pride and Prejudice continues to fascinate, with soaps and big-screen adaptations de rigueur, even in India. Trishna, one of the earliest serials on Doordarshan, starred Kitu Gidwani as Lydia Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice (2003) had Aishwarya Rai cast as Elizabeth Bennet. The recent Sonam Kapoor-Abhay Deol starrer Aisha was based on Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility'.
Last month, the Baroness of crime fiction, P D James, published Death comes to Pemberley, a fanfic, sequel and homage to her favourite author. She wrote, "I can well understand the attraction of continuing the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. Austen's characters take such a hold on our imagination that the wish to know more of them is irresistible, and it is, perhaps, not surprising that there have been more than 70 sequels to Austen's novels."There have been several film adaptations. The earliest was a 1940 version scripted by Aldous Huxley, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as Mr Darcy and Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennett. There have been TV serials - three times in the fifties, once in the sixties, once in the eighties (twice, if you count Trishna).
The nineties saw what many consider the definitive adaptation - the BBC version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the latter getting a wet-shirt scene that was called "one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history". Keira Knightley giggled her way through the 2005 movie adaptation.It's not just on movies and TV where Pride rules. Seth Graham Smith's "mashup" combines Austen's characters with "zombies, ninjas, skunks and chipmunks". The book was so successful that it hit #3 on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned a prequel and a sequel, as well as another Austen reworking - Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters. Philip Jose Farmer set his Evil at Pemberley House at Darcy's and Elizabeth's home. There are versions of the story where Jane Austen meets Barbara Cartland - P & P meets The Sheikh. There is Lizzy the Vampire Slayer and there's Mr Darcy the Vampire. Lizzy becomes Darcy's mistress. Darcy has a new rival.A search for "Pride and Prejudice sequels" returns 362 results on Amazon.com.
A search for "Mr Darcy" returns more than 1,600 results. And all this is published fiction. As for fan fiction, there are around 2,000 stories based on Pride and Prejudice, with stories crossing over with anything from Avatar: The Last Airbender to the X-Men on fanfiction.net alone.In 2009, Marvel comics launched the Pride and Prejudice as a limited-series comic. You can buy a "What do you mean, Mr. Darcy isn't real?" T-Shirt or an "Obstinate, headstrong girl" (which is what Lady Catherine De Bourgh calls Elizabeth) pajamas. There are "Mrs Darcy" mugs and "Dibs on Darcy" coasters. PBS.org, of all places, sells Pride and Prejudice T-Shirts - made in Nicaragua.Last year, Reflexive games released Matches and Matrimony, a dating-simulation videogame featuring characters from Austen's most popular novels.
However, if you aren't careful in your gameplay, Elizabeth Bennett could end up married to one of the less intelligent characters.Austen has become an industry, 200 years after her death - so much that Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, ranted,
"It seems as if, with the arrival of Jane Austen on the literary map, there was a sudden and unanimous consensus reached within the critical fraternity to the effect that socially realistic parlor-dramas and sparkling comedies of manners were not merely the most lofty point to which all writings might aspire, they were the only form of writing that could be considered genuine, serious literature. Thus, at a sweep, all genre fiction and all fantasy were ruled unclean, consigned to the outlying slums and ghettos past the ivory battlements of literary respectability."