Squalor not "realistic" Austen

Rating: 1/10 (17 January 2006)

There are many, including prominent professional critics, who commend this adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" for its "realistic" portrayal of dirt, unkempt clothes and hair, farm animals wallowing in the living room, etc. In fact, it is not only historically unauthentic, it is false to Jane Austen. There were no such scenes of squalor included in the novel. To the contrary, Austen wrote a passage in which Elizabeth Bennet sets out on a long walk after a rain storm to visit her ailing sister, during which she soils the hem of her skirt with mud. This slight soiling results in a small amount of embarrassment for Elizabeth, who tries to let down her outer garment to hide it, and a great amount of derision behind her back by two nasty female residents of the house she is visiting. Had dirt and shabbiness been the norm in households like Elizabeth's at the time depicted, it is unlikely a little mud on the edge of a skirt would have attracted anyone's notice or rude commentary, and these events in the book would have made no sense. The fact that Austen wrote such a scene and had the characters behave as they do indicates that cleanliness and neatness of dress were normal and expected at that place and time, among that class of people.