There’s a broadly accepted narrative about Jane Austen: that not only was the great British novelist talented, ambitious and independent-minded in an age when women were expected to be none of those things, she was also effectively an apostle of modernity, which is why we never tire of her observations. That’s the character drawn in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.
There might not be a formula for genius, but there is very much one for Rise of a Genius. Like 72 Films’ previous three-part documentaries under the same banner for the BBC about Mozart and Shakespeare, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius is a combination of impassioned talking heads and dramatic reconstructions, with Juliet Stevenson narrating. Again, the dramatic scenes are shot in Budapest with Hungarian actors (there’s a reason the characters don’t speak).
Just as the Shakespeare series celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s birth, this one marks Austen’s 250th. And it’s a busy year: Netflix has just announced a huge cast (including Olivia Colman and Rufus Sewell) for its new production of Pride and Prejudice. Filming is under way for The Other Bennet Sister, which develops the character of Mary Bennet from the same book. The BBC has already screened Miss Austen, which centres on the mystery of why Jane’s sister Cassandra burnt thousands of Jane’s letters when she died.
The loss of all but a handful of the letters is a matter of grief for Austen scholars and it’s noted in the first minute of Rise of a Genius that we were denied access to “her innermost thoughts” when they were destroyed. So it’s up to the line-up of commentators to tell us what those thoughts might have been.
“Her voice is so strong and funny and perceptive – and her work is still being copied and stolen by people like me,” says Helen Fielding, who has long said that she wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary as a loose adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
“I learnt most of what I know about writing by trying to imitate her,” Fielding has said in an interview about the production. “She is my favourite author and the first novelist to write realistic portrayals of real women – with wit, intelligence irony and understanding. She’s an observer and social commentator, and an absolute master novelist.”
Indeed, it’s not hard to perceive Austen’s themes about the world’s expectations of women in Fielding’s other work as a newspaper columnist. Perhaps a 21st-century Jane Austen might have been one of those.
“She’s not just writing about romance,” says Irish author and academic Colm Tóibín. “We should see her as a political novelist.” Tóibín, too, has acknowledged consciously referring to Austen in his writing. A scene in his 2009 novel Brooklyn centres on a moment of manners at a dance that was “a little homage to Jane Austen”.
Actor Charity Wakefield, who played Marianne Dashwood in the 2008 production of Sense and Sensibility says Austen “is telling young women ‘I see you and I hear you’ – which I think is such a modern thing”.
The programme’s determination to fill in a contemporary meaning to the author’s life hasn’t pleased all critics.
Writing in The Spectator, author and critic James Walton grumped about “the liberal use of the word ‘modern’ – which on television is about the highest compliment you can pay to a writer from the past, proving as it supposedly does that the writer in question isn’t so irrelevant as to give us characters who aren’t just like ourselves. Again, those irksome pedants might argue that the point of fiction is to find out about other people. But the programme stuck fast to the approved idea that the point is to find out about us. (After all, what finer subject could there be?)”
Walton has a point. And as was the case with the Mozart and Shakespeare series, the constant flow of talking heads (who include, for some reason, Cherie Blair, wife of former PM Tony Blair) imposes a rigid, flat pace on it all. We tend to hear more about the drama and heartbreak in Austen’s life than we feel it. By comparison, the recent Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty used a similar format but did a better job of telling a story.
Nonetheless, there is plenty here for Austen fans to delight in, in particular, the observations about her technique and new ways she found to write – with novels then new to the public – might send viewers back to the pages to absorb them afresh. Which, after all that talking, might come as a relief.
Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, Sky Arts, 8.30pm, Tuesdays, from September 2.
