The first grown-up film I really fell for, aged ten or 11, was Sense and Sensibility (no, I was not super cool at primary school). I remember wishing passionately, bitterly, that my hair was gold and curled like spaghetti-hoops; that someone would come along and break my heart so I could write them insane letters by candlelight and then charge up a hill and mumble poetry into the rain. It was with some relief that I realised later that these fairly weird fantasies revealed less about me than the tides of history tugging me along. I was born three years after Sense and Sensibility’s premiere in 1995 (it was more widely released in the UK a few months later) – the year that Jane Austen, like her heroine Anne Elliot (from Persuasion) before her, enjoyed her triumphant second bloom.
Austen, as you might have heard, turns 250 this year – tomorrow in fact! (Rejoice, for the anniversary coverage is nearly over.) But a much more significant date in her afterlife is 1995. That was the year that modern-Austenmania swept Britain and America, tormenting generations of women (plus a few enlightened men) with gorgeous and impossible visions. Mr Darcy diving into the lake. A delicately sideburned Willoughby looming through storm clouds on a literal white horse. Mr Darcy coming out of the lake: wet, white cotton singing against the verdant Derbyshire dales. Alan Rickman reading The Faerie Queene aloud as though from beneath several hundred tonnes of nicotine and gravel.
This was the year that Pride and Prejudice (the Andrew Davies/BBC version), Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Clueless (a modern Emma adaptation) hit screens big or small, on one side of the Atlantic or the other. Today, it would be a treat to have a year without a new Austen film. But in 1995, hard as it is to believe, there hadn’t been one for almost 50 years, not since Laurence Olivier played Darcy in 1940 (extremely funny and well worth watching, in spite of the mad costumes). Suddenly, along came this burst of cinematic sumptuousness: looser, brighter and more fun than anyone realised an 18th-century novel could be, yet still loyal to the lancing words on the page. Measured by popular reach and cultural impact, 1995 was probably the single biggest year Jane Austen ever had. When it came to our wind-whipped romantic fantasies, it turned out, little had changed in 200 years.
What happened in 1995? What prompted a mysterious conclave of Jane Austen gods to declare that this would be the golden year? Blame, as always, Americans, whose crisp dollar bills (and vision) funded most of these productions. Sense and Sensibility was the pet project of a young producer at Columbia Pictures, Lindsay Doran; the BBC made Pride and Prejudice with the obliging coffers of US TV network; Sony Pictures Classics put Persuasion into cinemas, even though it was shot for telly; and of course, Clueless was an all-American dream. British TV deregulation and the booming independent production sector also played a role, galvanising the BBC, as it stared down an impending charter renewal, to rethink its dusty approach to costume drama.
But as in the plots of so many Austen novels, a lot was serendipity. These adaptations were all the fruit of different minds, and since they went into production around the same time, there doesn’t seem to have been a copycat effect. Doran had wanted to adapt Sense and Sensibility since she first picked it up, aged 22, in the reading room of the Brompton Road library. “It just struck me as such an obvious movie,” she told me. Pride and Prejudice, meanwhile, was cooked up during the screening of a different and somewhat mediocre costume drama, when producer Sue Birtwistle turned to writer Andrew Davies and whispered that together they should make “a really sexy” Austen adaptation.
Actually, all the 1995 adaptations are steamy: they’re full of hot young actors in scoop-necked Regency dresses and clinging breeches grazing fingertips in ballrooms. Oddly, Clueless, the only contemporary update of the bunch, is also the least raunchy, partly because it takes place in a high school but also because something about the restraint imposed on humans by the period adaptations seems to crank the heat. Davis actually wanted Darcy to take his lake dip naked (much more historically accurate) but had to settle for the shirt. It was the right decision, I think: leaving something to the imagination, as Austen always does, is a powerful trick. Even so, you can see the loosening effects of contemporary Hollywood on these adaptations, particularly Sense and Sensibility: the famous shot of Willoughby (Greg Wise) carrying ankle-twisted Kate Winslet home in his arms was, according to Doran, inspired by The Bodyguard. So luck had a hand in this 1995 bumper crop but also a more mysterious force: the quiet, collective recognition that it was time to Make Austen Sexy Again.
The impact of the year that the media dubbed “Austenmania” was immediate. Pride and Prejudice began on September 24 and a month later Bridget Jones (herself a loose Lizzy Bennet adaptation) was writing in her diary: “Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. Love the nation being so addicted.” At Christmas, Entertainment Weekly crowned Jane Austen one of the top ten entertainers of the year. The appeal crossed geography, gender (Doran remembers a New Jersey Sense and Sensibility preview where men “cheered like it was a football game” when Rickman got the girl) and generations.
“I think a critical thing about Pride and Prejudice is that a lot of our generation’s mothers watched it pregnant,” a friend mused recently. I immediately called my mum: “Weird question. Were you pregnant the first time you watched the BBC Pride and Prejudice?” She asked me when it came out. “Oh, then yes, I was.” Unprompted, she began quoting bits at me (specifically unbearably annoying Mary urging her sisters “to pour into each other’s wounded bosoms the balm of sisterly consolation”). I quoted some Sense and Sensibility back. The 1995 works created a shared language between mothers and daughters: a network of jokes and quips and images, of things to watch together on wet December afternoons.
While the long-term effect of this massive, unregulated dose of candlelit longing on the general population has yet to be comprehensively studied, I cannot help the solipsistic (and thus quite Mariannish) belief that the people it had the biggest impact on were those born around 1995, like me. The script for Netflix’s glitzy new Pride and Prejudice (yes, another one) has been penned by bestselling millennial Dolly Alderton. Born in 1988, she’s spoken about her love of the diaries that its writer and star Emma Thompson kept on the set of Sense and Sensibility, where she fell in love with Greg Wise, the actor playing Willoughby – a fairytale within a fairytale. Call us Generation Jane, if you will. Or Generation Hopelessly Unrealistic, if you prefer. Recently I asked another friend what influence the 1995 Austens had on her. “They [gave me] the false assumption that men are secretly wonderful,” she said.
[Further reading: Jane Austen and me]
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