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The series starts with a bit of background in Emma’s life. Whereas the book only touches on it lightly, we see Emma as a baby, then a toddler. Her mother died when she was young and her father - the late Michael Gambon is wonderful in the role - becomes very over-protective of his two daughters. By contrast, two other orphaned motherless children in the neighbourhood, Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, are sent away to live with relatives.
Isabella and Emma grow up in the large stately home known as Hartfield, where they lack nothing. Their governess, Anne Taylor (Jodhi May), lives with them and is treated more like a family member than a servant. In the book, she has just got married when the story opens; Isabella is already married to a family friend called John Knightley. In this mini-series, we see Emma predicting that Isabella and John will fall in love. We then see her introducing Anne to another family friend, Mr Weston, certain they are right for each other.
Emma is decidedly self-centred and strong-willed, but at twenty-one she’s very good at running the household and is devoted to her hypochondriac father. And although she doesn’t want to get married herself, she becomes convinced that she’s a natural matchmaker. Romola Garai is perfect in the role, in my opinion. She’s lively, and outgoing, but she can be outspoken. That she might sometimes be wrong, however, has not occurred to her.
Emma decides to make friends with a young woman called Harriet who attends a local school for orphans. It’s rumoured that Harriet is the illegitimate offspring of a nobleman, and Emma is modern enough to feel that Harriet should not be punished for her parents’ behaviour. Harriet is in love with a local farmer, but Emma feels that she’s made for higher things… in particular, the new and rather handsome clergyman, Mr Elton.
Apparently Jane Austen deliberately made Emma somewhat dislikable to her readers, and in a sense this mini-series veers away from that. Despite her faults, Emma has a great deal of charm and vivacity, and she can be very generous. Her neighbour Mr Knightley (brother of Isabella’s husband) has been her mentor for many years. He regularly criticises Emma for things she has done wrong or thoughtlessly, and on the whole she takes it well. Mr Knightley is played to perfection by Johnny Lee Miller.
It’s a bit of a comedy of misunderstandings; it’s also something of a coming-of-age story for Emma. She slowly becomes aware that she is fallible, and that sometimes people need to choose their own marriage partners. Love, she discovers, can’t be turned off and on, and needs to find its own path. She finds it hard to accept other people’s intuitions or instincts, convinced that she understands better than anyone.
I had wondered how the book, condensed into 90 minutes for the film, could be expanded to fill four full episodes of nearly an hour each. But it didn’t drag at all. I very much liked the extra parts at the beginning, showing Emma growing up. They were totally in keeping with the spirit of the book. There are one or two places where I felt that a shot of people smiling or laughing was perhaps a little too long, but it didn’t matter. There’s a ball, and a picnic, both of which are given a good amount of time: not so little that they seem rushed, but not so much that they drag out.
There’s some beautiful scenery, and many shots of people walking. There are a few extra scenes too, such as a snow-fight which I don’t recall from the book, which don’t feel at all out of place. I don’t recall the book in detail as it’s a while since I read it, but nothing struck me as out of place, and I couldn’t remember anything that was left out. It’s all set firmly in the correct era, the early part of the 19th century when it was written. The details of the sets and the costumes are superb - there are ‘extras’ on the DVDs giving insights into both.
The language, too, is that of Jane Austen. And yet.. the whole has an oddly up-to-date feeling to it, at the same time. Perhaps it’s that human nature really doesn’t change. Emma sometimes looks like a 21st century person in 19th century dress, as do others of the cast; but I think this was probably deliberate on the part of the series producers. Jane Austen, after all, did not write ‘historical’ fiction. She wrote contemporary novels, based on people she knew and situations that would have felt quite ordinary to her. Her characters are slightly caricatured, but very much alive, and that comes over in this mini-series.
All in all, we thought this a wonderful adaptation of ‘Emma’, one I would recommend very highly, although Austen purists might prefer a more traditional adaptation.
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