Film, television and theatre
Numerous screen adaptations have contributed in popularising Pride and Prejudice.[57]
The first television adaptation of the novel, written by Michael Barry, was produced in 1938 by the BBC. It is a lost television broadcast.[57] Some of the notable film versions include the 1940 Academy Award-winning film, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier[58] (based in part on Helen Jerome's 1935 stage adaptation) and that of 2005, starring Keira Knightley (an Oscar-nominated performance) and Matthew Macfadyen.[59] Television versions include two by the BBC: a 1980 version starring Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul and a 1995 version, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.
A stage version created by Helen Jerome premiered at the Music Box Theatre in New York in 1935, starring Adrianne Allen and Colin Keith-Johnston, and opened at the St James's Theatre in London in 1936, starring Celia Johnson and Hugh Williams. First Impressions was a 1959 Broadway musical version starring Polly Bergen, Farley Granger, and Hermione Gingold.[60] In 1995, a musical concept album was written by Bernard J. Taylor, with Claire Moore in the role of Elizabeth Bennet and Peter Karrie in the role of Mr Darcy.[61] A new stage production, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, The New Musical, was presented in concert on 21 October 2008 in Rochester, New York, with Colin Donnell as Darcy.[62] The Swedish composer Daniel Nelson based his 2011 opera Stolthet och fördom on Pride and Prejudice.[63] Works inspired by the book include Bride and Prejudice and Trishna (1985 Hindi TV series).
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – which premiered on a dedicated YouTube channel on 9 April 2012,[64] and concluded on 28 March 2013[65] – is an Emmy award-winning web-series[66] which recounts the story via vlogs recorded primarily by the Bennet sisters.[67][68] It was created by Hank Green and Bernie Su.[69]
In 2018, part of the storyline of the Brazilian soap opera "Orgulho e Paixão", aired on TV Globo, was inspired by the book. The soap opera was also inspired by other works of Jane Austen. It features actors, Nathalia Dill, Thiago Lacerda, Agatha Moreira, Rodrigo Simas, Gabriela Duarte, Marcelo Faria, Alessandra Negrini, and Natália do Vale.[70]
Fire Island is a movie written by Joel Kim Booster that reimagines Pride and Prejudice as a gay drama set on the quintessential gay vacation destination of Fire Island. Booster describes the movie "as an unapologetic and modern twist on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice."[71] The movie was released in June 2022 and features a main cast of Asian-American actors.
Literature
The novel has inspired a number of other works that are not direct adaptations. Books inspired by Pride and Prejudice include the following:
- Mr Darcy's Daughters and The Exploits and Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy by Elizabeth Aston
- Darcy's Story (a best seller) and Dialogue with Darcy by Janet Aylmer
- Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued and An Unequal Marriage: Or Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later by Emma Tennant
- The Book of Ruth by Helen Baker
- Jane Austen Ruined My Life and Mr Darcy Broke My Heart by Beth Pattillo
- Precipitation – A Continuation of Miss Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Helen Baker
- Searching for Pemberley by Mary Simonsen
- Mr Darcy Takes a Wife and its sequel Darcy & Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley by Linda Berdoll
In Gwyn Cready's comedic romance novel, Seducing Mr Darcy, the heroine lands in Pride and Prejudice by way of magic massage, has a fling with Darcy and unknowingly changes the rest of the story.[72]
Abigail Reynolds is the author of seven Regency-set variations on Pride and Prejudice. Her Pemberley Variations series includes Mr Darcy's Obsession, To Conquer Mr Darcy, What Would Mr Darcy Do and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World. Her modern adaptation, The Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice, is set on Cape Cod.[73]
Bella Breen is the author of nine variations on Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice and Poison, Four Months to Wed, Forced to Marry and The Rescue of Elizabeth Bennet.[74]
Helen Fielding's 1996 novel Bridget Jones's Diary is also based on Pride and Prejudice; the feature film of Fielding's work, released in 2001, stars Colin Firth, who had played Mr Darcy in the successful 1990s TV adaptation.
In March 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes Austen's work and mashes it up with zombie hordes, cannibalism, ninja and ultraviolent mayhem.[75] In March 2010, Quirk Books published a prequel by Steve Hockensmith that deals with Elizabeth Bennet's early days as a zombie hunter, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.[76] The 2016 film of Grahame-Smith's adaptation was released starring Lily James, Sam Riley and Matt Smith.
In 2011, author Mitzi Szereto expanded on the novel in Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts, a historical sex parody that parallels the original plot and writing style of Jane Austen.
Marvel has also published their take on this classic by releasing a short comic series of five issues that stays true to the original storyline. The first issue was published on 1 April 2009 and was written by Nancy Hajeski.[77] It was published as a graphic novel in 2010 with artwork by Hugo Petrus.
Pamela Aidan is the author of a trilogy of books telling the story of Pride and Prejudice from Mr Darcy's point of view: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman. The books are An Assembly Such as This,[78] Duty and Desire[79] and These Three Remain.[80]
Detective novel author P. D. James has written a book titled Death Comes to Pemberley, which is a murder mystery set six years after Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage.[81]
Sandra Lerner's sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Second Impressions, develops the story and imagined what might have happened to the original novel's characters. It is written in the style of Austen after extensive research into the period and language and published in 2011 under the pen name of Ava Farmer.[82]
Jo Baker's bestselling 2013 novel Longbourn imagines the lives of the servants of Pride and Prejudice.[83] A cinematic adaptation of Longbourn was due to start filming in late 2018, directed by Sharon Maguire, who also directed Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones's Baby, screenplay by Jessica Swale, produced by Random House Films and StudioCanal.[84] The novel was also adapted for radio, appearing on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime, abridged by Sara Davies and read by Sophie Thompson. It was first broadcast in May 2014; and again on Radio 4 Extra in September 2018.[85]
In the novel Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld sets the characters of Pride and Prejudice in modern-day Cincinnati, where the Bennet parents, erstwhile Cincinnati social climbers, have fallen on hard times. Elizabeth, a successful and independent New York journalist, and her single older sister Jane must intervene to salvage the family's financial situation and get their unemployed adult sisters to move out of the house and onward in life. In the process they encounter Chip Bingley, a young doctor and reluctant reality TV celebrity, and his medical school classmate, Fitzwilliam Darcy, a cynical neurosurgeon.[86][87]
Pride and Prejudice has also inspired works of scientific writing. In 2010, scientists named a pheromone identified in male mouse urine darcin,[88] after Mr Darcy, because it strongly attracted females. In 2016, a scientific paper published in the Journal of Inherited Metabolic Disease speculated that Mrs Bennet may have been a carrier of a rare genetic disease, explaining why the Bennets didn't have any sons, and why some of the Bennet sisters are so silly.[89]
In summer 2014, Udon Entertainment's Manga Classics line published a manga adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.[90]
