Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius

Why do documentaries these days have to give voice to the opinions of "famous celebrities" on any given subject. I could not care less about what a, so called, "celebrity" thinks about Jane Austin unless they are speaking about the subject as it relates to their acting.

Whatever happened to actual experts. In this documentary, as far as I could tell, there was only one - or maybe two - that seemed qualified to speak authoritatively about Jane Austin as a writer historically. The rest were fluffers to inflate this into three parts when it could have been one.

I would not classify this as a serious documentary. Which is what I really was hoping for.

Big fan of Jane here and I have watched most of the modern adaptations, plus several documentaries so I was intrigued by this documentary's claim that it will show us something new from her letters.

It did show me quite a few new things about Jane's own life and the genesis of her characters, but sadly there isn't much quoted from her letters. Perhaps there aren't many noteworthy passages since Cassandra carefully selected the tame and innocuous ones and burned all the rest with the aim of protecting Jane's legacy. I don't think she quite realized how much people would appreciate her sharp wit and astute vision of society at large. If you take out the romance her writing style and her depictions are so precise, relevant, charming, funny, irreverent, cheeky, so many things all at once, the woman was absolutely brilliant.

This documentary states she introduced the free indirect speech and unreliable narrator techniques. I had no idea, this was not how Austen was taught to us, so I am glad that her writing techniques are given prominence here.

She anticipated Dickens apparently. See I have never actually read Mansfield Park, but I have seen three adaptations of it, and the passages read out here do lead us in that direction. I had no idea about that either. Or about how political and how important this particular novel was to her or who Mansfield was or that it even was a real person. I sympathize even more with her now finding this out. I really liked Mansfield Park so I couldn't understand why people were not keen on it.

What I found upsetting and possibly the only thing that bothered me here was that the one movie they chose to illustrate Persuasion was the weakest one and quite controversial among Austen fans, the recent Netflix one with Dakota Johnson, who is perfectly adorable and I find her charming as an actress, but the writers absolutely murdered the original novel. There are two previous adaptations that are incredibly strong and one of them has the highest critical acclaim possible, the one with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. Maybe they couldn't get the rights to that one or the one with Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones. Or maybe Netflix needed another plug, I don't know but they deserve to be told off for this gross mishandling on Persuasion here.

Who knows what Jane Austen could have given us had she lived. She probably had ten more good novels in her, at least. Such a waste of a genius indeed. And all these publishers ignoring her or trying to swindle her and she never saw her name publicly on her work, again something new for me, although people in the upper circles did find out.

One edition was a thousand books and that was a roaring success. Crazy that. How literacy has changed things.

An interesting biography of Austen, at least for someone like me who had little knowledge of her life or works, (though I studied Emma at school many years ago, without enjoying it much).

The format was however rather hard work, jumping around with annoying frequency from one interviewee to another and from dramatised scenes to archive clips from adaptations of her works & back again. This all made for a rather disjointed & frenetic end result.

Perhaps there should have been a warning at the outset: 'Contains rapid fire scene changes which some viewers may find discombobulating'.

At times I found it easier just to close my eyes & listen. But then I became aware that the ends of the interviewees' sentences were being clipped in quite an unnatural manner. Some kind of post-production software perhaps? I suspect that this is quite a widespread issue on TV these days.

The experience was hardly improved by the luvvies emoting & gushing about Austen. The tears! Such drama! An honorable exception was Samuel West, who pitched his comments nicely.