Pride and promiscuity: Jane Austen’s sex secrets
Twenty-five years ago this month Colin Firth’s wet shirt turned Jane Austen adaptations on their head. But was the world’s primmest author a lot naughtier than we realised?
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It’s 25 years this month since Colin Firth got the world’s women hot and bothered as Mr Darcy in the BBC series of Pride And Prejudice. The image of him emerging from a lake with a dripping and see-through wet shirt clinging to his chest began a Darcy mania that hasn’t abated since.
And while the scene seems tame today, it started a trend for Austen adaptations to get sexier and sexier, with last year’s Sanditon series featuring sex scenes and full frontals, and the big-screen version of Emma featuring a nude Mr Knightley.
But was it Colin and his soggy cotton that ruffled us up, or was sex, in fact, always lost in Austen?
The answer is a bit of both, according to historians. We may have come to view Jane Austen as the ultimate portrait artist of polite society, all heaving bosoms and repressed emotions, but she was far from innocent, says British historian Lucy Worsley.
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Worsley, who wrote the biography Jane Austen at Home, says the author, although never married, was much more aware of sex than people today realise.
“She knew more than many people realise about what was considered at the time to be deviant sex,” Worsley writes. And although she almost certainly had not had sex herself, it didn’t mean other women around her were so chaste.
“Women lower down the social scene might very often have sex before marriage, it’s been estimated that one third of brides went to the altar pregnant and if you were in the aristocracy then they took affairs pretty lightly,” Worsley says.
In fact, one of Jane’s early attempts at a novel — the unfinished Lady Susan, gives a totally different perspective to the writer. Thought to have been written when she was about 20, the tale follows the widow Lady Susan, who ruthlessly works her way through lovers, while trying to marry off her daughter.
Strong, abrasive, manipulative and sexually aggressive, this is a heroine unlike any of the innocent young women Austen would become famous for creating.
“Lady Susan’s character is more extreme than we expect from Jane Austen,” author Margaret Drabble writes in an introduction to the story, calling her “a self-declared and unashamed adulteress”.
She explains that Austen wrote at a turning point for British morals – at the tail-end of 18th century openness and the start of 19th century prudishness.
“Lady Susan is an 18th century work,” she says. “There are adulterers, rakes and illegitimate babies in the later novels but we do not see them close-up and the most violent events take place offstage.”
Many of her novels did have sex scandals in them — including Lydia Bennet running away with George Wickham in Pride And Prejudice, Henry Crawford committing adultery with Maria Rushworth in Mansfield Park, Harriet Smith’s probable illegitimacy in Emma and the seduction and ruin of the two Elizas in Sense And Sensibility.
With this in mind, perhaps it makes it less shocking that our on-screen adaptations have evolved into something a little more explicit.
Andrew Davies, who penned the 1995 Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation — still seen as the definitive version all these years later — maintained sex was always in Austen.
“Jane Austen had always been done as rather staid social comedy. Sue Birtwhistle, who produced it, and I were saying that ‘this book is really all about sex and money — the driving engine of the plot is Darcy’s desire for Elizabeth and the snag is that she’s unsuitable,’ so it’s like the selfish gene is triumphing in that his desire won’t be denied,” he told The Boar.
A prolific screenwriter, Davies’ credits also include Emma, Vanity Fair, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bleak House, Northanger Abbey, Sense And Sensibility, War & Peace, House Of Cards, and most recently A Suitable Boy.
He returned to Austen last year for Sanditon, the series based on her final, unfinished, novel.
He took the 11 existing chapters and not so much ran with them but sprinted into the horizon, penning plots such as the hero Sidney Parker emerging from the sea naked and giving innocent Charlotte Heyward a quick education, as well as sex scenes.
“Of course, these things did go on in Regency times. We all know that. It’s just that people didn’t speak of them, and Austen chose not to write them into the foreground,” Davies told News.
It’s a notion director Autumn de Wilde agrees with, as she also sexed up this year’s big-screen adaptation of Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse and Johnny Flynn as Mr Knightley.
It included what has become the obligatory male nudity, this time the slow undressing of Mr Knightley.
Taylor-Joy told News Corp Australia: “It was something that Autumn really wanted – in our first conversation, that was always there. We have so much of the male gaze in films. She really wanted to employ the female gaze, just to contrast.
“Johnny was a really good sport about it because for the first time, he was one of two guys in a room full of women. Luckily, he is a wonderful man and he was up for it.”
Two hundred years later, you get the feeling Lady Susan, and Austen, would approve.