At 12 years old, I plucked Pride and Prejudice at random from my grandmother’s bookshelf. A recklessly expeditious gobbler-up of doorstoppers, I had skimmed through many a dull descriptive paragraph in my time. But I didn’t want to miss a single word of Pride and Prejudice. Austen had mastered the storyteller’s art of providing ever so slightly less detail than I craved. Like many other readers before and since, I was hooked.
Though Austen’s famous free indirect narration is all but impossible to transfer to the screen, Pride and Prejudice’s dialogue adapts like a dream, and so we keep bloody well doing it. Within the last week three more adaptations were announced. Netflix is developing two of them: one based on Pride, a YA novel by Ibi Zoboi which resets the story in Brooklyn, the other a direct adaptation scripted by Dolly Alderton. Meanwhile, the BBC has commissioned a spin-off drama about Lizzy Bennet’s bookish sister Mary.
