Film poster copyright Hallmark Channel.

Anyone who is a fan of Jane Austen, and Austen adaptations, has been pretty spoiled this February if they also like the Hallmark Channel. 

Confession: I enjoy the Hallmark Channel a lot. I have watched their previous Jane Austen forays (and there have been a few… watch for a future blog post, or two!) – particularly Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe – more than once, and have spent a lot of time with various predictable but cosy Hallmark romance movies playing in the background. 

And, this February, they did a crossover great for fans like me, presenting Loveuary (not sure about that as a portmanteau, but we will go with it) with Jane Austen. Every Saturday in February has brought viewers a new Jane Austen-themed movie, including, so far, Paging Mr. Darcy, Love & Jane, and, the subject of this blog post, An American in Austen. Tomorrow, Loveuary culminates in a period adaptation of Sense and Sensibility – which you can be assured I’ll be posting my thoughts on next week. 

Going into to Pride and Prejudice…

Back to An American in Austen. The movie follows Austen super fan, aspiring author, librarian and the titular American thirtysomething Harriet, who, though she is very happy with her boyfriend Ethan, still thinks no real man can measure up to Mr Darcy.

When Ethan proposes on their three year anniversary, Harriet doesn’t know what to say, goes out with her friends and wishes for Mr Darcy.

She closes her eyes in the back of a taxi, and then reopens them, finding herself in the back of a carriage bound for Longbourn – conveniently arriving in time for the start of the timeline of Pride and Prejudice.

Lost in Austen?

Now, if you have watched a lot of Austen adaptations, this premise might sound a little bit familiar. It is similar – but not exactly the same – as ITV’s 2009 Lost in Austen, a favourite of mine (you can hear me talking about it on Alice Procter’s Historical Friction podcast here), which lands a disillusioned thirtysomething British woman in Pride and Prejudice just in time for Netherfield Park being let at last. 

But, there are some crucial differences.

When Amanda Price – the heroine of Lost in Austen – arrives in the novel, nobody is expecting her, and she has to craft her own backstory and account for her own ‘out of time’ oddities. She also swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet, who takes on Amanda’s modern life in London.

When Harriet pulls up to Longbourn, the Bennet family come rushing out to greet the arrival of their American cousin. They are expecting her, and all of her confusion is put down to the long voyage across the Atlantic, as well as any quirks in her characters or expressions explained away by her being an American. Jane and Elizabeth become her friends and confidantes, with no characters leaving to novel to make space for this new arrival. 

Both Amanda and Harriet inevitably mess up Austen’s preordained storyline, both are similarly endearing, and expose elements of both the comedy and historical context to the novel by their ‘out of time’-ness. Yet, without giving any spoilers (if anything I include in this series is brand new and original, I will not include spoilers, and that is an ardent promise!), the endings are quite different.

Harriet becomes embraced into the Bennet fold, believing that everyone around her is an actor, and that she must play along. At a ball in Meryton, she meets Mr Darcy: haughty, and disparaging of Lizzy, she scolds him and – of course – draws his attention more than she intended.

It is here that the plot of Pride and Prejudice begins to go awry, and Harriet is left asking whether or not fiction is actually better than reality, and whether her favourite author will ever forgive her – crying aloud at one point, “I am destroying Jane Austen!”

Bennet sisters, corsets and poetry

There are a few things that do not quite work, but some of these may be me being pedantic. Firstly, there is the classic period drama scene of Harriet being laced into an uncomfortable prison of a corset, which I’m pretty sure is not the kind of undergarment Regency women would have worn, and also plays into tropes that dress historian Dr Serena Dyer has excellently written about in The Conversation. The empire line dresses are, however, very, very beautiful, and the costuming is sumptuous.

Secondly, the Bennet sisters, though endearing, often feel like stereotypes of the original characters: Jane is only pretty, Lydia is boy mad, Kitty seems like a spare part, Lizzy storms off from breakfast complaining about transactional marriage in a very blatant show of her being the designated feminist of the sisters. Mary is, for once, actually very pretty, and not that annoying, which was pleasantly unexpected but also quite confusing. 

Harriet, however, is very engaging. My favourite moments are when she calls out Mr Collins – “I can’t with you!” – and also Mr Darcy for reciting Byron under the pretension that it is his own work of poetry – “it’s very sweet… it’s very plagiarised…”.

Yes, that’s right! Mr Darcy recites poetry.

He is a comical imagining of the original, but, come to think of it, it works. Even the stereotyping of the Bennet sisters.

If Harriet is meant to be inserted as the one real person into the novel, it is fitting that all of the characters around her don’t seem quite real, or truly three-dimensional. Mr Darcy is dashing (he’s no 1995 Darcy, but I’m not sure anyone will ever measure up to 1995 Darcy in my book!) and has his own journey to go on, with Harriet’s appearance putting him out of kilter and Austen’s original storyline under threat.

A fun foray into Pride and Prejudice

Ultimately, I really did quite enjoy this film. It’s fun and the ending was actually quite unexpected, which I don’t think can be said often for either Hallmark or the romance genre (and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way – I am a fervent lover of an assured happy ending that you can count on being present!).

Eliza Bennett (what a perfect name to be in an Austen-themed film!) shone as Harriet, and I did enjoy Nicholas Bishop as Mr Darcy, if Mr Darcy had been confronted by a whirlwind of an American woman from the future. There were some lovely references to books loved by Austen, and there was even a great cameo from Sarah Ferguson as a Duchess invited to the ball at Netherfield. 

The filmmakers also did a great job to fit some of the major events of the novel, and condense it recognisably, into a film just under an hour and a half long. One of my main reasons for loving the six hour 1995 adaptation more than the 2005 film is that there is room for every thought, feel and word of Austen’s novel to shine because of the luxury of time.

I recommend indulging with this fun movie – because it is always fun to imagine yourself in a Jane Austen novel – and I can’t wait to see how Hallmark have tackled a full adaptation of an Austen novel when Sense and Sensibility airs tomorrow.