The Collaborative Article and Video Project about Relationships, Dating, Romance and Sex. With your writings, edits and uploads we can help people make their lives more exciting. We need your help to build this FREE RESOURCE.
Sex, Class And Jane Austen
By Lisa Shaw, 19 Jan 19:31
NEW YORK (AP) -- Andrew Davies is talking about sex. He is also talking about Jane Austen, beloved chronicler of early 19th century English manners.
Her work, Davies argues, "is not just social comedy. It's about money, struggle for individualism, sex -- all the kinds of things that interest us now. People sometimes misinterpret that. Jane Austen is regarded as such a prim writer. Well, she's not, really. The engine of her plot is often sexual desire."
Davies is in a position to know.
At 71, he reigns as the King of Adapters. His long list of Emmy- and Peabody-winning projects includes adaptations of modern fiction such as the splendid British miniseries "House of Cards" (and two sequels) as well as the Pierce Brosnan-starring thriller "The Tailor of Panama" and the two "Bridget Jones" films.
But what has clinched his reputation are robust TV retellings of literary classics by Dickens ("Bleak House"), Thackeray ("Vanity Fair"), Defoe ("Moll Flanders"), George Eliot ("Middlemarch") ... and Jane Austen.
He is well represented in the current festival of six Austen adaptations airing on PBS' "Masterpiece" (the renamed "Masterpiece Theatre"). Four are from his hand. Encores from the mid-1990s are "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," the latter being memorable (among other reasons) for Colin Firth's body-clinging, sopping-wet shirt as Mr. Darcy.
Davies' other contributions to "The Complete Jane Austen" are new productions of "Sense and Sensibility," with David Morrissey. And, airing 9 p.m. EST Sunday, a charming parody of gothic fi
Tags: sex class