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Masterpieces and mysteries

As for the new Sense and Sensibility, the “not-final” copy I saw opens with an orange-lit (hellfire?) seduction scene that few will recognize as that of Willoughby (Dominic Cooper) and Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza. (The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the production’s New Year’s Day debut on the BBC, called this prologue “horribly misconceived.”) Hattie Morahan is an Austen-like Elinor, generous and patient; Charity Wakefield has the right look for Marianne but is feminist forward, with lines like “I think you don’t understand how I feel”; Margaret (Lucy Boynton) is Hollywood-cute, and far more prominent than she is in the novel; Mrs. Dashwood (Janet McTeer) suffers from Perfect Mother Syndrome. The men — Dan Stevens as Edward, David Morrissey as Colonel Brandon, Dominic Cooper as Willoughby — are acceptable if not manly. The duel Colonel Brandon fights with Willoughby is now over Marianne rather than Eliza, and it’s a swashbuckling affair with swords rather than pistols. And I haven’t seen so many passionate waves crashing on Britain’s south coast since Poldark. The idea behind most recent Austen adaptations (including the 2005 Prideand Prejudice) seems to be that Jane’s old-fashioned sensibility needs to be updated to suit modern tastes. The irony is that it’s her old-fashioned sensibility that made her popular in the first place.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: As Elinor Dashwood, Hattie Morahan can hold her own with distinguished predecessors Irene Richard and Emma Thompson.

In these novels, there’s a little of both. In Carrie Bebris’s “Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mystery” series, which she began in 2004, we get everybody’s favorite Austen couple as Nick and Nora Charles without Asta or the cocktail shaker. In Pride and Prescience, Caroline Bingley trumps the dual weddings of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet by getting herself engaged to Mr. Frederick Parrish, a rich American. That’s when the incidents start up: Caroline is found prowling the London streets at night, her horse bolts in Rotten Row, she’s discovered on her kitchen floor with two knife wounds. In Suspense and Sensibility, the Darcys take Kitty Bennet to London for the Season and she becomes engaged to Henry Dashwood, whom you may remember from the opening of Sense and Sensibility as the four-year-old son of John and Fanny Dashwood. (In Bebris’s Austen world, Sense and Sensibility is set in the mid 1790s and Pride and Prejudice some 15 years later.) But then Henry begins to re-enact The Rake’s Progress and Elizabeth — these are really “Mrs. Darcy” mysteries — must discover why. In North by Northanger, the Darcys journey to Bath, and when Captain Frederick Tilney espies their names in the Pump Room book, he invites them to Northanger Abbey, where a storm fit to delight the imagination of Catherine Morland rages and there are echoes of Hitchcock’s film.