2/2 ... is Okay and not that great. They mess up a lot of the charaters to add *drama* and take out what is subtle a good about the book. The costumes in the mini series are also a huge dissapointment to me: Elizabeth is allways in the same shade of teal! And she papered her drawing room in the same colour? Why would anyone do that?---

Having a convicted murderer as a brother-in-law would definitely have had doors slamming shut in Darcy’s face in Society, but the real victim of those circumstances would be Georgiana, as well as the Darcy generations to come. Darcy himself is already married to the person he loves and secure in his fortune--even Wickham’s potential conviction and execution could not deprive Darcy of what he already possesses. It’s really more the dependents in the Darcy family who would ‘suffer’ as a result of any scandal. (I say suffer...they’re all still rich as fuck, nobody’s going to the workhouse, it’s just that they probably won’t get vouchers to Almack’s.) The accusation is still pretty scandalous in itself, but toffs turned up in court all the time on all sorts of charges and mostly got off and went about their lives with little more than a spicy story following them around. (Not that Darcy would be pleased about this, but it’s better than a conviction and a hanging.) There’s always going to be social hardliners who just wash their hands of the whole Darcy clan on the basis of that messiness, but it certainly would be a great deal worse if Wickham were to hang for it.

I haven’t seen the miniseries in a long while, but it’s not like it’s an eight-parter or anything so it wasn’t difficult to sit through to the end, as I recall. I’m still going to try to finish the book for my book-club (of one) readthrough, because I do like P.D. James, but I can already say that this isn’t her best work. THAT BEING SAID, and I think I’ve said this before--she had a very difficult task ahead of her, and I think she’s doing her best. She couldn’t just invent the murderer as an obvious newcomer, and it had to be a character with a certain amount of name-recognition from the P&P core cast, somehow reformed into someone capable of villainy--and not a character so widely liked that there’s a great outcry at what she’s done. (I’d’ve maybe tried making it Mary, myself, but I know a lot of people like to make Mary the overlooked woobie who is actually very clever and understated and done wrong by a shallow and superficial society, so there’d definitely be those who would be upset with me for making her go the full Lizzie Borden.)

Stylistically, I love a murder mystery. I love Jane Austen. I really, really, really want this to WORK. I’ll reserve judgement on the book until I finish it, but for all her cachet I’m not sure if P.D. James was the woman to do it. She’s great, but she does not seem entirely comfortable writing in a historical setting, and bound by the constraints of her source material. The elements that appear in her other novels are very strong--she excels at setting a scene and crafting a mystery--but the characterization can sometimes be stretched thin and the prose wobbles from time to time.

This rather makes the way Miss Taylor is treated unusual doesn't it? We certainly get the impression that she was treated very much as part of the family.

Yes, I get the impression that Miss Taylor is kind of the best-case scenario of a governess so beloved that her place of employment becomes her de facto home, indefinitely, until she is made secure by making a good marriage.