Director's Notes On Pride and Prejudice  

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.   However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

The first two sentences of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

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The idea of bringing Pride and Prejudice to life on our stage was not mine. Christine Whalen, a long-time company member, and now one of our regular production stage managers, approached me with the suggestion. She knew I was always seeking shows in addition to the “curriculum Shakespeares,” that would please both a student and an adult audience, and she said, “people will be so excited if you do this.” I said, “Really?” I remember she gave me a pitying look, because clearly, I was clueless when it came to the Jane Austen universe. I was indeed quite clueless.

I agreed to read several existing stage adaptations (there are many) and after the first few, I called Christine to say that I didn't really like them all that much. I felt that they each had their attributes, but all failed to please completely, mostly because I felt they had failed Jane Austen. Knowing that the trade of adaptation was not new to me, she suggested I do my own. “Cool,” I thought, “I've adapted plays before but never from a novel. How hard could it be?” Thus I embarked on what has turned out to be the most challenging writing project I have yet attempted. It is important to mention that the idea of finally presenting the work of a classic female author on our stage added much fuel to my fire, and while the challenge has indeed been great, I have not one regret. It has been a most exciting journey into, what was for me, an undiscovered country. Seventeen drafts (or so — I've lost count) later, with much collaborative help from my cast on the last revision, I can only hope that I have brought the book to stage-life in a manner which would please Miss Austen. I am thrilled that she is the first female author to grace our stage, and as so many great minds have pointed out, her piercing comprehension of the human character rivals Shakespeare's.

While the principal plot of Pride and Prejudice (originally titled First Impressions ) concerns marriage and the principal mood is comic, like Shakespeare, the layers are multitudinous. One could sum up Much Ado About Nothing or Taming of the Shrew with the exact same sentence. To stop there, however, would be an act lacking all sense and sensibility. I offer much thanks to everyone who helped me go far beyond my first impression of the Jane Austen universe.

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“…a very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lapdogs and parrots, nor chambermaids and milliners, nor recontres and disguises. I really think it is the most probable I have ever read. It is not a crying book, but the interest is very strong…I wish to know who is the author or ess as I am told.”

—Annabella Milbanke (later Lady Byron) writing to her mother on Pride and Prejudice in 1813, the year of its publication

“You could not shock her more than she shocks me; beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see an English spinster of the middle class describe the amorous effects of “brass”, reveal so frankly and with such sobriety the economic basis of society.”

  — W.H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron, Part I

“…a very pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger — things that should now be left to ladies' maids and sentimental washer-women.”

—Sir Walter Scott in 1815, upon his first reading of Pride and Prejudice

“The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.”

—Sir Walter Scott in his journal after his third reading of Pride and Prejudice

“…an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face: a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers: but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”

—Charlotte Brontë, in a celebrated attack in a letter to G.H. Lewes, 1848

“…Jane Austen may have been protected from the truth but precious little of the truth was protected from her.”

—G.K. Chesterton

“There are those who think Jane Austen tea-tablish, as there are those who think that Mozart tinkles.”

—Louis Kronenberger

“Among the writers who have approached nearest to the manner of [Shakespeare's characterizations] we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.”

—Thomas Babington Macaulay

“In Miss Austen there is, though restrained and well-nuanced, an insatiable and ruthless delight in roasting and cutting up a fool.”

  — George Saintsbury

“At first sight, Jane Austen's manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs.”

  — Vladimir Nabokov

“Adopting Jane Austen's eyes to see people and situations as amusing rather than infuriating does wonders for one's blood pressure.”

—Sallie Wadsworth

“How did I feel about Jane Austen? [Somerset Maugham] asked. —I said that…I thought her one of the six greatest English writers (the others, as I did not say, are Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Keats and Dickens). We spoke of Jane Austen a moment. Why did all the people who didn't like her dislike her so much? I asked. —Oh, because she didn't care about public events, didn't mention the Napoleonic wars.—“

—Edmund Wilson

“The oddest yet by no means inapt analogy to Jane Austen's art of representation is Shakespeare's — oddest, because she is so careful of limits, as classical as Ben Jonson in that regard, and Shakespeare transcends all limits…Like Shakespeare, she gives us figures, major and minor, utterly consistent each in his or her own mode of speech and being, and utterly different from one another.”

  — Harold Bloom

“When I was introduced to the novel at the age of fourteen, I read twenty pages and then besieged my stepmother's study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth . (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything. Pride and Prejudice suckers you. Amazingly — and I believe, uniquely — it goes on suckering you. Even now, as I open the book, I feel the same panic of unsatisfied expectation, despite five or six rereadings.”

—Martin Amis on Pride and Prejudice

“Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors — all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials.”

  — Martin Amis

“If Hamlet is the first son of English arts and letters, Elizabeth Bennet is the daughter most dear.”

—Laura Jacobs

“I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.”

—Jane Austen on her creation of Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice

“Here was woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra ; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never traveled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.”

  — Virginia Woolf

Jane Austen, the seventh of eight children, was born at Steventon Parsonage, Hampshire , England on December 16, 1775. She was educated, for the most part, by her minister father. She began writing as a girl, creating parodies and sketches for her family. She wrote Pride and Prejudice when she was 21, though it was not published until 1813. Until she was 26, she lived at the rectory, and then in 1801, the family moved to Bath in an effort to restore her father's health. When he died in 1805, they moved to Southhampton and then finally to Chawton, Hampshire in 1809. Jane Austen led a largely uneventful, serene and protected life, though she was acutely aware of all that went on around her. Her observations on the manners, mores and class distinctions of her time make up the predominant substance of her novels. On July 18, 1817, she quietly died, unmarried, at the age of 42.

Northanger Abbey

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Sanditon (her final unfinished novel)

“the greatest miracle of English literature”

—Reginald Farrar in the “Quarterly Review,” 1917, on Pride and Prejudice