It is one of the most famous scenes in British television history: Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerges dripping from a lake to bump into Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet, a significant turning point in their relationship.
From Saturday, fans will be able to get a closeup view of the white shirt that Firth wore for the moment in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The shirt is the centrepiece of an exhibition opening at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire.
Jane Austen Undressed focuses largely on the undergarments that Austen heroines would have worn under their Regency dresses, but one of the main draws is bound to be the Firth shirt.
The curator Sophie Reynolds said she was sure Austen fans would be thrilled to see the shirt, which has spent most of the years since in the hands of a professional costume company.
“I think people will be excited to see it in the flesh and hopefully no one will go up and hug it,” she said. “As a thirtysomething I am excited, I have to say. Most women of my generation seem to be Pride and Prejudice fans. The BBC version really has converted a whole generation, especially young women, to Jane Austen.
“It was the way I came to know her – I was 11 when it came out. I hadn’t really heard of her but I watched it and it was a lightbulb moment. I’ve heard this story from so many of my friends – we were absolutely hooked.”
Reynolds said the BBC show was a “comfort blanket” for many people. “I think it hasn’t aged in the way that most costume dramas have.” The shirt was “simple” but completely memorable, she said.
The famous scene was fabricated by the show’s adaptor, Andrew Davies, and does not appear in the novel, which Reynolds accepted horrified some Austen purists. Firth has said the role was a mixed blessing. “Looking good and strutting around is very boring,” he said in 2020.
But Reynolds argued that the scene worked well, communicating Darcy’s character development, a metaphorical shedding of his formal layers, his seriousness, his self-importance. Stripping Darcy down to his shirt was the 21st-century equivalent of removing his clothes down to his underwear, making it a revealing moment literally and figuratively.
The exhibition features other famous underclothing such as a petticoat Ehle wore in the BBC show, and stays worn by Anya Taylor-Joy’s Emma Woodhouse in the 2020 film Emma.
The Jane Austen Undressed exhibition runs until 2 October.
