Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy were introduced more than 200 years ago.
The timeless couple from “Pride and Prejudice” (who still carry name recognition on par with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce) are part of a fresh narrative called “Austen’s Pride.”
The musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous novel comes to the Ferguson Center for the Performing Arts in Newport News on Saturday and Sunday.
Hundreds of events globally recognize the author who was born 250 years ago this December, a woman credited as being the first female novelist. Her devout following of “Janeites” and “Austenites” treasures characters they consider friends, along with the witty dialogue and storylines that resonate today just as they did in the 19th century.
“She is the one novelist you can’t say anything bad about; people get worked up if you do,” said Rachel Gevlin, an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, who will spend this academic year serving as one of two invited traveling lecturers for the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA).
Eighty-two regional groups comprise the society, which invites its members to contribute to its 250 reasons why Austen is adored. In a virtual tribute book, readers speak of her as family. They reflect on the humor that helps us grow our own moral characters and credit her writing for bettering their own lives. Writes one contributor, “There is always something new to discover in her novels, a detail you never noticed before, a small mark of her perspicacity and intelligence, even if you are rereading them for the hundredth time!”
Another fan notes how she depicts how “groupthink in a room can go from right to wrong, without anyone noticing the change.”
Austen fans, Gevlin said, “know her characters like they were just in their living rooms. She has so many characters that are there just to annoy the heroine. They’re not bad people. They talk too much, or they’re really fixated on getting their daughters married or they’re always complaining about being sick.”
Who in their life doesn’t know a Mrs. Jennings from “Sense and Sensibility,” a woman unable to resist sticking her nose in another’s business? It’s easy to giggle at English aristocrat Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who embodies the title “Pride & Prejudice” in her snobbish treatment of others as a matriarch with no self-awareness.
“She’s really the earliest novelist who we still read for pleasure,” Gevlin said. “A lot of that has to do with the way she uses characterization and dialogue.”
Kim Wheatley regards Austen as the creator of the rom-com. The William & Mary English professor frequently teaches an Austen class filled with students inspired to learn more about the author born in 1775, who initially wrote anonymously. She never married, though she was engaged — for one night to a tactless family friend. She reneged the next morning.
The draw of Austen’s novels, Wheatley said, comes from how “appealing and relatable the heroines are and the way they find their agency within the incredible constraints they have,” the individual quest for happiness versus the social norms of family and community.
The iconic enemies-to-lovers plots that conclude with fairytale endings never get old, Wheatley said, though, like Gevlin, she names “Mansfield Park” as her favorite.
Often considered Austen’s darkest book, “Mansfield Park” chronicles timid heroine Fanny Price, tracing her growth from the time she was 10 to adulthood. Most readers infer Austen’s philosophy on the slave trade and women’s rights make "Mansfield Park" her most complex book.
“It’s more profound and feels more realistic to me than the others,” Wheatley said.
While Austen is often considered an early feminist, little is known about the intentionality in her writing, Gevlin said.
“She doesn’t say anything explicitly political in her novels, but she does consistently portray certain qualities specifically around greed and abuse of power, both of which are often attributed to male characters as less desirable qualities.”
The Ferguson Center production is the continuation of numerous Austen adaptations on screen and stage, a phenomenon that ramped up in the mid-1990s, and “has been on a roll ever since,” Wheatley said. Austen is the main character of “Austen’s Pride,” which opens with her receiving a letter from her publisher after writing “Sense and Sensibility,” prompting her to revise one of her early works that evolves into “Pride and Prejudice.”
The production is a happy homecoming for Bruce Bronstein, executive director of the Ferguson Center at Christopher Newport University. In September 2019, he received a call from CNU alumna Alex Maars, who was raising money as an associate producer for “Austen’s Pride.” That coincided with the university revving up its New Musical Lab, an incubation space for shows under development.
The lab hosted a mini workshop and a backer’s audition that featured CNU students performing alongside the New York cast of “Austen’s Pride.”
“It was a great success — the cast shone, the producers made their pitch and the project gained early support,” Bronstein said. “That gathering was the beginning of what has now become a six-year relationship with ‘Austen’s Pride.’
“Unlike our typical one-night engagements of touring revivals, this is a rare chance for our community to experience a pre-Broadway production,” Bronstein said.
Visit the fergusoncenter.org for tickets and more information.
