The BBC’s latest period drama, Miss Austen, based on the novel by Gill Hornby, has aroused the ire of the tabloid press for a glut of perceived historical inaccuracies. ‘Eagle-eyed viewers’ reportedly spotted a series of glaring errors, not least that the Regency-set serial features Victorian architecture and furniture, 1930s card games and an obviously modern Yale lock. They might have added that the serial stars the actress Keeley Hawes, who was not even born until 1976, and that it has the aggressively colour-graded palette and hyperactive cross-cutting of 21st-century television drama, with clear disregard for the fact that the medium had yet to be invented in Austen’s time.
Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice (1940). Photo: LMPC via Getty Images
There is something about the medium of television (and cinema, for that matter) that leads viewers to assume that fastidious realism is its natural state, perhaps because it comes to us in the same context as genuine reports from reality – news, documentaries, the latest goings-on from the Love Island. The unstated ideal for a period drama is that it should recreate the era so precisely that it might seem that the camera crew had travelled back in time. Yet such stipulations are rarely made of, for example, the theatre, where a straightforward change of setting as an artistic choice in entirely unremarkable; a version of Richard III, say, set in the 1930s raises few eyebrows. The 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, however, feels strangely wrongfooted – a frothy Quality Street confection seemingly set in the 1840s, it transforms Austen’s dry wit into a humour as broad as a crinoline skirt. But it’s not simply about fidelity to the text. The BBC’s 1995 adaptation of the same novel is still fondly regarded 30 years on for pinpointing the tone, with the correct Empire waistlines and understated Georgian neoclassicism, yet its most memorable scene involved the sight of Colin Firth in a wet shirt – an element of lacustrine titillation devised by scriptwriter Andrew Davies that had little to do with the original novel.
A pear-hung zipper in the TV series The Serpent Queen. Image: Starz
As well as such infelicities as anachronistic locks, period dramas abound in elements that seem irredeemably modern: performances loaded with proto-feminist sass; non-traditional casting schemes than are often more Benetton than Bennet sisters; Keira Knightley trudging through the mud to Netherfield without even a bonnet on her head. And then there’s the general tendency for the styles of the present day to impose themselves, often uninvited, on to the period in question. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ Orson Welles once remarked while watching a John Ford western, ‘how incapable even Ford – and all American directors are – of making women look in period? You can always tell which decade a costume picture was made in – the Twenties, the Thirties, the Forties or the Fifties – even if it’s supposed to be the 17th century.’ This is partially attributable, both in classic Hollywood and modern television, to directors being so immersed in what is considered glamorous at the time that they are almost oblivious to it, with hairstyles and make-up schemes that feel commonplace to a contemporary viewer but stand out immediately when they are no longer current. But it’s also often deliberate, a desire to close up the distance of years and make the past feel approachable. A carefully placed anachronism can emphasise this. And so the courtiers of Versailles in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette dance to post-punk pop, and try on satin court shoes alongside discarded Converse hi-tops; in the 2022 television serial The Serpent Queen, starring Samantha Morton as Catherine de Medici, a Tudor doublet is visibly fastened with a modern zip, a teardrop pearl dangling at the collar. These, clearly, are not careless mistakes but little Brechtian winks – you see, they seem to say, these people weren’t so unlike us after all!
Marlene Dietrich as Catherine ll and Sam Jaffe as Grand Duke Peter in the film The Scarlet Empress (1934), directed by Josef von Sternberg and produced by Paramount Pictures. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A contrasting approach, and perhaps a more rewarding one, is to use the production design to emphasise the unfamiliar and the strange, rather than to reassure. Austen’s world, after all, was stratified by social codes every bit as rigid and very nearly as alien as the feudal Japan seen in Shogun. The opening to the 1996 film version of Emma, with Gwyneth Paltrow, conveys her rather insular milieu with an opening shot of a globe revolving to reveal the Home Counties enlarged to continental size. Further afield, the English baroque of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract is at once carefully observed and cartoonishly exaggerated, with frilly cuffs trailing like ivy almost to ground level; the effect is close to science fiction in its sense of the strange. Even more theatrical, and even less hidebound by historical concerns, is Josef von Sternberg’s astonishingly strange 1934 biopic of Catherine the Great, The Scarlet Empress, in which Marlene Dietrich inhabits a cavernous Kremlin filled with grotesque statues that mock and surround her – a version of the 18th century based more in German Expressionism than pedantic textbooks. This, then, is the past as a truly foreign country – and, ultimately, much more artistically liberating than fussing over the details of a Yale lock.