Pride and Prejudice 1995 text posts, part 1 of ?

More: Sense and Sensibility 1995 text posts | Northanger Abbey 2007 text posts | Emma. 2020 text posts

(1) Good Omens: 2.05 The Ball (2019 - 2023) // (2) Pride and Prejudice (2005) // (3) Pride and Prejudice (1995)

High Anxiety: Jane Austen's _Emma_

So, for most of my grown-up life, the only Jane Austen novel I'd ever read was Pride and Prejudice. Last week, though, I got very frustrated with the amount of time I was spending on my phone and decided to start re-training myself to read actual books during my downtime. So I grabbed Emma off a shelf of the bookcase in the kitchen and decided to read it for pleasure.

It's a really different experience. I mean, in terms of the world in which it's set, it looks and acts very much like the worlds of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. But the fact that almost the entire novel is narrated through Emma's perspective really changed, for me, how reading it felt. With Pride and Prejudice, the characters you sympathize most with are the ones that are in some way marginal to the social machine with which the novel is preoccupied. You start P&P with the Bennetts, and especially Lizzie, who already feels like she's sort of lost the game by being born into a family with five daughters and an entailed estate; so even though you can't really fairly call her an outsider, she's at least got enough distance from it to talk about it critically. Emma Woodhouse, on the other hand, is (at least from her perspective) the biggest fish in a pretty small pond. Her family is landed and rich; her only sister has already married into the only family in the vicinity that could claim to outrank her own; and she's young and beautiful and deferred to by most of the women she sees socially. And I know this is ostensibly the point: that Emma's privileges have warped her view of both herself and the world around her, and the novel is all about her discovering how her own egotism has led her astray, and how many things she's been wrong about.

All I can say is that Austen World, as filtered through Emma's consciousness but also as constructed for us by this plot, feels very different from the way it does in Pride and Prejudice. In fact, for me as a reader, Emma's social world just feels straight-up dystopian. Which I recognize may entirely be a desired effect.

Spoilers for Emma (the novel; I haven't seen any adaptations of it) follow.

thanks for this detailed discussion! i have so far only watched the movie (movies? the one i recall is with jonny lee miller as mr knightly, but there may be another, i forget. library dvd), but this motivates me to add it to my librivox to-listen list. i did get so much more out of pride & prejudice, listening to a full cast reading on librivox. even just being aware of where the chapter breaks are adds so much.

i also could not live in a world with such high stakes placed on such subtle social minutiae. jr high and high school was bad enough that way, and thankfully time limited.

via indiarosecrawford Get ready with Frog - Pride & Prejudice edition! ❤️🐸 I'm pleased to introduce you to Frogzwilliam Darcy ✨

Jean-Yves Thibaudet • Marianelli: Dawn

𝑓ₒᵣ ⲕᵢ𝑛𝑔 ₐ𝑛𝑑 𝑐ₒ𝑡𝑡ₐ𝑔ₑ

TOP 10 JANE AUSTEN ADAPTATIONS (according to my followers)

crowley holds the book during the entire scene so excuse me while i assume that he went back home (car) and put himself trough four hundred pages of regency romance to understand aziraphale’s concept of falling in love

He did! Can anyone tell which book he took off the shelf? It was set out for him to take, so I assume they wanted him to take a specific one:

Oh man. He took Persuasion. Don’t give up hope (Captain) Crowley (Wentworth).

Thanks for saying it ... that's what I was thinking, too!! (Or maybe Pride and Prejudice or something further right? It's so tough to tell!)

If I recall correctly, a while back Neil Gaiman received an ask inquiring about what Aziraphale’s favorite Jane Austen book would be, and he responded that it would probably be Persuasion. So uh. Yeah.

that's what it looks like to me, either persuasion or pride and prejudice, hard to tell. the angle in the second pic is so steep. either one is fine. whichever, i hope he comes back for the other, and muriel lets him have it.

On Pride and Prejudice and S3 parallels to watch for

(*no Nazi zombies included)

I don't think it's the second "marriage proposal" that is going to matter in S3. That's just the icing on the cake. What's really going to break your heart to pieces will be the parallel to the lake scene encounter at Pemberley Estate. That comes before the quiet, gentle, second suggestion of "lets make a team of the two of us" again.

I keep seeing people write "oh, aziracrow are going to throw themselves together! Oh, its going to be violent! And frenzied! They wont be able to hold back!" Ah, no. I respectfully disagree. I see it possibly playing out very differently.

Round One Master List

Mr Darcy (1995) Vs Robert Martin (2009)

Mr Darcy (2005) Vs Mr Collins (1995)

Mr Darcy (1940) Vs Mr Collins (2005)

Mr Darcy (P&P&Z) Vs Mr Collins (P&P&Z)

Mr Knightley (1996) Vs John Knightley (2009)

Mr Knightley (1996) Vs Mr Elliot (2007)

Mr Knightley (2009) Vs Edmund Bertram (1999)

Mr Knightley (2020) Vs Mr Elton (2009)

Captain Wentworth (1995) Vs Captain Benwick (2007)

Captain Wentworth (2007) Vs Frank Churchill (1996)

Captain Wentworth (2022) Vs Captain Harville (2007)

Mr Tilney (2007) Vs Henry Crawford (2007)

Edmund Bertram (2007) Vs Mr Elton (2020)

Edward Ferrars (2008) Vs Edward Ferrars (1971)

Edward Ferrars (1995) Vs Frank Churchill (2022)

Colonel Brandon (1995) Vs Colonel Fitzwilliam (1995)

Colonel Brandon (2008) Vs Colonel Brandon (1981)

Wickham (1995) Vs Frederick Tilney (2007)

Wickham (2005) Vs Denny (1995)

Wickham (1940) Vs Mr Elton (1996)

Willoughby (1995) Vs Mr Elliot (1995)

Willoughby (2008) Vs Mr Rushworth (1999)

Henry Crawford (1999) Vs Captain Harville (2022)

Henry Crawford (1983) Vs Frank Churchill (1996)

Mr Elliot (2022) Vs Captain Benwick (1995)

Frank Churchill (2009) Vs Mr Palmer (1995)

Tom Bertram (1999) Vs William Price (2007)

Mr Sidney Parker (2019) Vs Mr Bingley (P&P&Z)

Robert Martin (2022) Vs Robert Martin (1996)

Mr Bingley (1995) Vs John Thorpe (2007)

Mr Bingley (2005) Vs Charles Musgrove (2022)

Reginald DeCourcy (2016) Vs Mr Collins (1940)

okay we already know Aziraphale was controlling the humans at the ball and that's how they knew the dance moves.

cool quick question though

WHAT ABOUT HIM

how did HE know what moves to do? are he and Aziraphale THAT connected that he simply just....knows???

Someone's been practicing the Pride and Prejudice dance in front of their mirror since the 90s series with Colin Firth came out, NOT that I'm naming names.

joke’s on darcy, lizzie happens to be besties with mrs collins so do you know what that means? visits. do you know who mrs collins will inevitably bring WITH her???

mr collins. buckle in for some one-sided conversations on the grandeur of pemberley and how there is but one estate only marginally finer, he thinks you will no doubt agree, which can only be, of course, rosing’s park, which can be viewed by his own very humble abode

they’ll all have their dinner and the women will retreat to another room and darcy will stare very, very imploringly to his wife to please, stay. like, please. this man doesn’t shut up. surely you want to talk to him. let’s tag team. please lizzie. he will ask of nothing from you for an entire fortnight if you please actually stay in the same room so mr collins will have SOMEWHERE ELSE to direct his onslaught of ass kissing. lizzie. lizzie.

This is why the Bingleys and the Collinses are invited at the same time.

Meanwhile Lizzie, Jane, and Charlotte are in the parlor, placing bets on how long before Darcy cracks, practically CHUGS his port, and bolts, “WHO WANTS TEA?!?!?!? LET’S JOIN THE LADIES AND HAVE TEA!!!!!!”

lol yes! the regrettable after dinner segregation of the sexes. what sorts of dodges does mr darcy invent to avoid this. "shall we all go for a walk"? someone could play the piano and we could all sing (need all four voice parts in the same room)

More on why Persuasion is the real Jane Austen parallel to Aziracrow, and why Pride and Prejudice is not, because I can’t stop dwelling.

There’s a lot here so I’ll try to structure this in a way that makes sense. Wish me luck.

Their relationship is definitely more like Persuasion than Pride and Prejudice. I always assumed everyone went for P&P because not as many people have read Persuasion. It's one of Jane's less well known works. We are deliberately shown all six of her novels on the shelf though and I'm pretty sure we aren't shown which one Crowley picks up and holds, everyone just assumes it's Pride and Prejudice. Since he knows nothing about her works he wouldn't know that was the most famous of them and therefore would have no reason to specifically pick that one up.

Jane Austen. We're having a Ball.

(aka, it’s a truth universally acknowledged, that an angel in possession of a good bookshop, must be in want of touching his husband’s hand)

I have been asked to explain to those who are not familiar with Jane Austen whether I think there are references or parallels between her works and our Crowley and Aziraphale. It’s gonna be a long post - sorry in advance - so take a nice cupperty and make yourself comfortable. Before starting, let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about some visual parallels and loose references in the plot. We are not dealing with a retelling or anything like that. It’s just something niche that you may find interesting or somehow entertaining.

A brief introduction to contextualize Jane's novels. She lived in the Regency era (wouldn't you like to see a Regency GO flashback?), her six novels were published between 1811 and 1818 (posthumously). She may or may not have been a brandy smuggler or the mind behind the 1810 Clerkenwell diamond robbery, but she was certainly quite an interesting personality. Despite having written some of the most famous love stories of all time, she never married and had little experience of the world. But she was very cultured and an avid reader. At the time, gothic novels were spreading: overly dramatic stories, usually set in the Middle Ages, in places such as monasteries, abbeys, or haunted castles. The main characters were pure, innocent heroines, classic villains and fearless heroes. Jane read these novels - she even made some parodies of them - and thought, nope, that's not me.

“I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life […] No, I must keep my own style and go on in my own way.”

Basically, I’m doing my own thing, get over it. Jane was primarily a great observer of society, with its many ridiculous rules, and of human behavior, with all its contradictions. People's emotions, a great dose of irony and society’s criticism are the core of her novels.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Crowley and Aziraphale? Now we get there. I will talk briefly about the novels Emma and Persuasion, before the main course Pride and Prejudice. I apologize to all the Janeites out here, but I need to simplify the plots as much as possible to stay stick to the points that I believe are relevant as references for Good Omens.

1. Emma. The titular character, Emma, ​​believes to have a real talent as matchmaker: she’ll spend the entire novel looking for the perfect husband for her friend Harriet, with disastrous results. She’ll come to realize to be not such a good reader of people as she thought she was.

Why should we care? Aziraphale mentions Jane Austen for the first time thinking about how to make Nina and Maggie fall in love. Like Emma, ​​Azi and Crowley will try to play the matchmakers, with disastrous results.

More parallels: Emma herself appears to be not interested in romantic love and desire, until she has a big love epiphany moment. Rings any bell?

Relevant quote: “I cannot make speeches. If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.”

Did I watch this several times?

Did I giggle every time?

This is a masterpiece. I don’t think you need to have even read or watched Pride and Prejudice to appreciate this, though of course if you actually know Pride and Prejudice this goes from funny to hysterical.

Aziraphale basically did a Crowley, didn’t he?

He was like- I want a passionate and romantic love confession just like in Jane Austen…

And he got it. Oops.

fortunately for everyone, crowley left out the bit where darcy insults lizzie's class/family, more or less, at least in the way mr darcy does it. unfortunately, that element still sneaks into aziraphale's speech, "you're (hell/demons) the bad guys", lumping crowley in with the rest when he has never really belonged there. but yes, all the passion and agitation and NGK is there.

i just got done listening to both Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice on librivox. there are a handful of versions of each to choose from, i went with the full cast dramatic readings, which was fun. lots of applicability! A tale of two cities is on librivox too, i am going to give that a try next.

The thing about romance is, it makes a good story.

As soon as Neil described season 2 as "quiet, gentle, romantic" I figured we'd be in for it, because as he's the first to point out, writers are liars. And the best way to deceive is with truth.

Season 2 is romantic. The trappings of romance are everywhere. Crowley tries to set up Nina and Maggie by trapping them under an awning during a rainstorm, a classic cinematic bonding technique. Aziraphale's chosen method comes from his beloved books: the ball, the dancing, appearing as a pair in public, hands held as you twirl gracefully with your heart thrilled and racing. If they can set up a sensational kiss that will unlock the happy ever after. They've lived on earth, they've studied the tropes, they know how romance works.

The problem is a story is only a story.