Postfeminist Austen: By Women, for Women, about Women

In the ITV television serial Lost in Austen (Dan Zeff, UK, 2008, ITV), Amanda Price, whose favourite book is Pride and Prejudice (which she knows so well that ‘the words just say themselves’) finds a door in her bathroom that opens into the Bennett’s house, allowing Elizabeth Bennett into the contemporary world and Amanda into the world of the Bennett sisters, Darcy, and Wickham. It might seem that the world of Pride and Prejudice has become a magical place like Narnia, but it is Amanda who is enchanted, as Elizabeth says to her, ‘it is your need that opens the door’. With a healthy dose of postmodern irony, the serial presents Amanda’s need to escape her life as great: she deals with difficult customers in her job at a bank; her mother pressures her to marry her laddish boyfriend who cheated on her; and she would rather stay in her flat reading her favourite novel than go out with her friends or meet her boyfriend for a date. She explains her obsession with Pride and Prejudice to her mother, declaring ‘I love the manners and the language and the courtesy’. Amanda’s presence in place of Elizabeth dramatically alters the plot of the novel and several characters’ destinies. She tries desperately to be the devoted and knowledgeable reader that she is by attempting to stem these changes and force events to follow the novel’s narrative that she knows so well.