7 - Filming romance: Persuasion

Summary

Early in John Schlesinger's film version of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (1994), the heroine declares that when she is fifty-three, she means to write a novel “as good as Persuasion”; after all, says Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale), she and Jane Austen have much in common: neither can “endure a mess.” This is a richly intertextual moment, for not only does Flora Poste go on to enact the interventionist practices of Emma (rather than Anne Elliot's tendency to “listen patiently, soften every grievance” [46]), but Beckinsale goes on to play Emma in the Diarmuid Lawrence film (1996).

Moreover, much of the comedy in the film derives from Flora's appalling attempts at novelistic prose, which imitate and torture the writing of D. H. Lawrence (“From the stubborn interwoven strata of his subconscious …”). Flora Poste, we realize, can never approach her dream of writing like Jane Austen, but she manages quite well as a character who could have been written by Austen. This complex set of effects is available, of course, only to a certain kind of spectator, one who is familiar with Austen's novels and who also frequents “high-culture” popularizations of British novels. The pleasures of intertextual readings are, however, complicated by an inevitable sense of disappointment, as no interpretation can exactly match the reader's own imagined version of Austen's text.