A look under the bonnet: why our fascination with the Regency era endures

Whether it’s the new Persuasion adaptation or the counterfactuals of Bridgerton and, er, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we just can’t seem to shake Jane Austen’s world of dances and drawing rooms The Regency, that narrow slice of history between 1811 and 1820, occupies a vastly disproportionate place in the British, and increasingly the global, imaginarium. Those nine years – when the future George IV reigned as prince regent owing to his father’s incapacity – have recently birthed a second series of the frothily preposterous Netflix series Bridgerton; a second series of Sanditon, based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel; and a new film version of Persuasion, with Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot. The “Regency romance” literary genre, a bottomless well of Austenesque love stories, has produced a summer bestseller this year in Sophie Irwin’s A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting. Another, Suzanne Allain’s Mr Malcolm’s List, has been adapted into a film starring Freida Pinto, also out this summer. You may think that the general favourite of Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice, would be owed a rest from adaptation after Greer Garson, Jennifer Ehle then Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet; after the zombie version; PD James’s crime version; the Bollywood version; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones version; the gay podcast version; the hilarious Scottish stage version (Pride and Prejudice* [*Sort of], a West End hit that’s returning home to Edinburgh this autumn). But no: The Netherfield Girls, a new Netflix series, is due to be released later this year, with teen comedy star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan the latest actor to tackle Elizabeth. That Austen’s novels endlessly generate fresh versions, though, is not a sign that her adapters have nothing new to say – quite the reverse. The Regency has become, according to Jenny Davidson, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Reading Jane Austen, “a blank space where you can wrestle with whatever you want”. Continue reading...
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