Jane Austen, who was born 250 years ago on Tuesday, on December 16th, 1775, wrote satire, comedy of manners, marriage plots, social realism, Gothic parody and, of course, horror.
As multiple stage and screen adaptations have made plain for modern audiences, the pioneering novelist is responsible for one of the most squirm-inducing scenes in all of English literature. Watch, or read, between your fingers. Grip your armrest for support. The episode in question features – there’s no way to sugarcoat this – a picnic.
“They had a very fine day for Box Hill; and all the other outward circumstances of arrangement, accommodation, and punctuality, were in favour of a pleasant party,” is how the seventh chapter of Emma begins.
A very fine day. All set up for a pleasant party. Are those suppressed memories returning yet?
READ MORE
“Seven miles were travelled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving,” Austen writes, tormenting us some more.
But there’s a dread-inciting “languor”. Four pages later the ominous words land with chilling simplicity: “Emma could not resist.”
Today the thriving Austen industry thinks nothing of bringing ardent admirers – empire-line dresses optional but, let’s be honest, preferred – to the scene of Emma’s catastrophic self-own. Brave Janeites can join organised day trips to the Surrey spot where the writer once imagined a social carnage so excruciating that it leaves our heroine “agitated, mortified, grieved” and in tears.
As a veteran of a record-breaking Regency promenade at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath in 2009, I’m all in favour of cosplay, especially if it means I can combine a bonnet, lace fan and very large pint in one photograph. But a picnic at Box Hill? Why not swing by Hanging Rock while you’re at it? It’s obviously a wretched scheme. The view would scream of past blunders and – Austen adaptations being much like buses, or proposals in Pride and Prejudice – future blunders, too.
For Emma will publicly insult Miss Bates. She will cast doubt on her poor friend’s ability to say “only three” dull things, even though it’s her own flirting partner, Frank Churchill, who is being tediously verbose. She will repay good-natured self-deprecation with a cutting joke, delivering a disasterclass in punching down.
Alas, some Austen adaptations are unable to resist overegging everything. They tip Emma from a clever, endearing but scornful person into a nasty, self-pitying idiot. Alternatively, they dwell on Miss Bates’s pained response for so long that you can’t help wondering if she’s milking it.
What I like most about how Austen wrote her picnicageddon is that Emma’s jibe, though it wounds Miss Bates, seems as if it’s about to pass off without wider comment. Mr Knightley is grave, but when is he not? Eventually, Emma herself grows tired of “flattery and merriment” and wishes she were alone. As she waits for her carriage home, there’s a false lull.
But we haven’t suffered through every agonising second of the picnic faux pas for nothing. We’ve got a dramatic pay-off to savour.
“It was badly done, indeed!” Mr Knightley chastises Emma in the middle of his long speech about her absent compassion and general rich-girl cluelessness.
Successive screenplays mean the admonishment is now fondly remembered in a slightly different form.
“Badly done, Emma!” Jeremy Northam rebukes Gwyneth Paltrow in the Miramax film from 1996. She does a little shame-cry, then he repeats his verdict, whispering “badly done” over her shoulder like a paternalistic truth-teller who is not angry, just disappointed.
“It was badly done, Emma. Badly done, indeed,” Mark Strong growls at Kate Beckinsale’s back after he puts her in her carriage in ITV’s small-screen take, also from 1996. Beckinsale is barely afforded the opportunity to defend herself, which Book Emma makes a spirited attempt to do, even though (or, more likely, because) she knows Mr Knightley is right.
Universal’s 2020 film loses marks for sticking precisely to Austen’s line, which now sounds wrong without the invocation of Emma’s name. It gains them for the performance of Johnny Flynn, who appears wholly stung by Anya Taylor-Joy’s unfeeling behaviour. He’s evidently only reprimanding her because he loves her.
Still, there’s a clear winner, and it’s the BBC series from 2009.
As Romola Garai, the best of all Emmas, hears Jonny Lee Miller approach, she seems to sense that some remonstration is coming. Miller hesitates but gets his first “badly done, Emma” out early and soon settles into the task of scolding her, throwing in a second one after everything else is out of his system. Garai argues back but is left floundering by a log. Five stars.
This harrowing mess will ultimately be resolved with a dose of self-knowledge followed by the apparent “perfect happiness of the union”. Austen knew we could only take so much abject misunderstanding. But, just like this full year of celebrations to mark her birth, that happiness, perfect or otherwise, has been earned.
