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Jane Austen’s universe

The Eng­lish nov­el­ist Jane Austen died at the age of 41, leav­ing her last work, San­di­ton, un­fin­ished. More than 200 years have passed and this lit­tle known story by the au­thor of Pride and Prej­u­dice, Sense and Sen­si­bil­ity and Emma, is now on the screens to trans­port us to a uni­verse of stand­off­ish ladies, el­e­gant gen­tle­men, ex­quis­ite man­ners, per­fect dic­tion and dis­pro­por­tion­ate ro­man­ti­cism. The se­ries will not dis­ap­point the lovers of Austen’s uni­verse, al­though they will prob­a­bly miss the au­thor’s trade­mark witty di­a­logues, which have been re­placed by plots that are a lit­tle more dar­ing than she might have penned.

But the essence of the story is the same as al­ways. A hero­ine who comes across as a lit­tle naive but who has very clear ideas, and who will dis­cover the world and love and will not be sat­is­fied with the role that so­ci­ety has as­signed her. By a ran­dom ac­ci­dent, the life of this girl, Char­lotte, who lives with her fam­ily on a rural prop­erty, will take a rad­i­cal turn when the Parker cou­ple de­cides to wel­come her and take her to spend the sum­mer in San­di­ton, a coastal re­sort town in the south of Eng­land.

There, Tom Parker plans to build a res­i­den­tial area for af­flu­ent fam­i­lies and turn the town into a fash­ion­able sum­mer des­ti­na­tion. To do so, he needs the help of old Lady Den­ham, a bit­ter and un­friendly old woman who sees how her rel­a­tives are only in­ter­ested in her nam­ing them as her heirs. The Park­ers also hope to make San­di­ton fash­ion­able thanks to the con­tacts of Tom’s younger brother, Sid­ney. This gen­tle­man is a well-po­si­tioned but rather nasty man who clashes with Char­lotte, who im­me­di­ately takes a dis­like to him. But as we know, when it comes to Austen, the main char­ac­ter’s ini­tial feel­ings of re­jec­tion and sus­pi­cion quickly change, es­pe­cially when the hand­some Parker brother is de­scribed com­ing out of the water after a soak on a lonely beach.

The ro­man­tic ten­sion be­tween the two pro­tag­o­nists will go hand in hand with the prob­lems that the Park­ers will en­counter in car­ry­ing out their pro­ject. It should be noted that the few chap­ters that Austen left writ­ten are aired in the first episode of the se­ries, and this has al­lowed its cre­ator, An­drew Davis, the free­dom to in­tro­duce slightly more raunchy sto­ries, with love af­fairs and be­tray­als, than Austen would ever have in­cluded. How­ever, by keep­ing to the de­tails of the set­ting – dresses, hair­styles, dec­o­ra­tion... – San­di­ton per­fectly cap­tures the world and spirit of the fa­mous nov­el­ist.

It helps that Davis is an ex­pert on her work and he brought us a tele­vised ver­sion of Pride and Prej­u­dice in 1995, which turned the now-fa­mous Colin Firth into the iconic Mr. Darcy. Here he is re­placed by actor Theo James – fa­mous for the Di­ver­gent se­ries – but his char­ac­ter, un­like Darcy, does not bathe in a lake but on the beach. Maybe every gen­er­a­tion needs its own TV dose of Austen, and San­di­ton is the one for now. Yet, it re­mains to be seen whether it will be suc­cess­ful enough to be granted a sec­ond sea­son.

TV Se­ries

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