If Jane Austen’s novels run on closed social worlds, courtship rituals, status anxiety, gossip and relentless scrutiny of who’s coupling with who, it follows that the obvious contemporary equivalent would be reality television.
That’s according to Andrew Davies, the writer who has spent decades modernising British period dramas.
Speaking on Radio ۴’s Today programme on Monday, Davies revealed that he had been watching Made in Chelsea while working on an adaptation of Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons.
“It’s stimulating really for relationships and ideas,” he said of the Channel ۴ series, which follows the relationship dramas and social rivalries of affluent young residents of west London. “These young men and women in The Watsons, for example, are very analogous to Made in Chelsea.”
Davies, whose memoir An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts is out this week, is responsible for the legendary image of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging from a lake in a wet shirt in his ۱۹۹۵ BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which went some way to injecting Austen into Bridget Jones, written by Helen Fielding around the time it aired. His approach, he said, had been about “bringing out the sex that’s inherent in Austen”.
He has previously described his ۲۰۱۹ adaptation of Sanditon as “Love Island” in Austen’s world and talked about whether Charlotte would “friend-zone” someone or experience a “fanny flutter”. Meanwhile Rose Williams, who starred in the series, said she believed “Austen would probably write something satirical about Love Island if she were alive today”.
Joe Bray, an Austen scholar and professor of English at the University of Sheffield, said of the author: “Jane Austen was a shrewd observer of the fashionable manners and fads adopted by the young … and the plots of most of her novels are driven by sexual attraction and/or secret liaisons and engagements.”
The Steele sisters in Sense and Sensibility, he suggested, “would make perfect reality show contestants”.
Austen also pioneered a way of representing the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her female characters that can be difficult to translate to screen. But Bray noted that Austen herself loved gossiping about neighbours and acquaintances in letters to her sister Cassandra. “I can’t say for certain whether or not she would be a viewer of Made in Chelsea or Love Island,” he said, “but … she would be interested at least!”
An academic essay on Made in Chelsea described the programme as a “kind of homage” to Austen, arguing that its subject was the “courtship rituals” of young people with money and property, and compared its social world to Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
There is indeed a human link between Made in Chelsea and Netflix’s forthcoming Pride and Prejudice: the latter’s writer and executive producer, Dolly Alderton, began her career as a story producer on the reality show – where, she has said, her job involved turning the romantic entanglements of wealthy young Londoners into “a four-part comedy drama”.
It remains to be seen whether the Netflix series draws any inspiration from Made in Chelsea, but Reddit users have previously theorised about whether Alderton took inspiration from the reality show, or her TV adaptation of her memoir Everything I Know About Love. “Who do we think the character ‘Kyle’ is based off? I’m getting Spencer Matthews and Jamie Laing [both Made in Chelsea cast members],” one wrote.
In her ۲۰۱۶ modernisation of Pride and Prejudice, Eligible, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s transplanted the Bennets to contemporary Cincinnati and made Chip Bingley a former reality-TV star who had appeared on The Bachelor.
“Reality dating shows are so formulaic, and courtship in Austen’s time was rigid and proscriptive,” Sittenfeld said. In other words, reality TV provided a modern equivalent for Austen’s world of carefully prescribed romantic encounters; in place of the wealthy unmarried man arriving in the neighbourhood, there is the reality-TV bachelor whose romantic availability is already a matter of public interest.
That may explain the extraordinary portability of Austen, from Clueless, which transplanted Emma to ۱۹۹۰s LA, and Bridget Jones’s Diary to Fire Island, Persuasion and the forthcoming Sense and Sensibility.
John Mullan, a literature professor at University College London and historical and dialogue consultant on Bridgerton, identified another parallel.
“In Austen’s fiction, courtship mostly takes place under the eyes of others,” he said. “Young women and men who might fancy each other are very rarely alone.”
But, he added, there is a crucial difference: “What about propriety, restraint, repression? These are also key to Austen’s stories and characters.”
