Pride and Prejudice

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My daughter brought home with her the six-episode mini-series 1996 version of Pride and Prejudice. She and I have watched it over the last several days, and I enjoyed it very much.

The language. The happy endings. The costumes. The landscapes. The interiors. The mise-en-scene. (One certainly hopes they were accurate with the costuming, houses, street scenes, interiors, etc! Pretty, regardless, but how much more interesting if accurate!!!)

The plot -- majorly contrived. :-)

It's necessary to mention an overwhelming "WOW!! am I glad I did not live then." Yikes. Women SO impossibly constrained. Oppressed. Limited. Scary!!!!!!!!! And then there's the whole servant thing...... Not to mention wearing dresses all the time (part of that constrained and limited thing!)...... UPDATE: it has been quite reasonably pointed out to me that it is a fine thing to CHOOSE to wear dresses all the time. My objection, very poorly stated above, was meant to be to gender-based requirements for (or restrictions against!) wearing dresses.



If you enjoy good dialog, and intelligent (if full-of-blind-spots!) characters, and can tolerate a lot of air-headed characters (along with a genuine villain or two), or if you can get by on eye-candy alone, this is fun and well worth the time.

I know I missed a lot the first time through; I want to watch it again and catch more nuances.

Only in the last episode did I notice the tailoring on the back of many of the coats. It was very different from anything I've seen before. Now I'm wondering what other such details I was oblivious to.............

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