It’s January 2021 and Bridgerton-fever has struck the world. Netflix’s biggest series ever, Bridgerton was watched by 82 million households within the first 28 days of its release. Clearly, while the pandemic looms large, there is no better distraction than feathers, dances and faux-nineteenth-century gossip.
Historical costume dramas hold a very special place in my heart. All of those years spent escaping to a lost world of Mr Darcy and £10,000 a year played an embarrassingly large part in my decision to do a history degree. There’s something comforting about their rituals of politeness, something charming about domestic drawing-room drama, something intensely romantic about two people gradually falling in love, one dance at a time, until they get married and have lots of babies in a lavish Georgian mansion.
Of course, one reason it’s so romantic is because it’s so romanticised. In our modern age of Love Island and Tinder, the trash of twenty-first-century dating seems to sharply contrast the handwritten declarations of love so abundant in historical fiction. The prospect of a fairy-tale happily ever after is somewhat spoilt by the fact that a modern marriage is almost as likely to end in divorce as death. The idea of a land where aubergine emojis are replaced by poetic odes is intoxicating.
Realistically, though, not everyone in the early nineteenth century could boast a love-story worthy of Austen. Most people could only dream of a life of leisure, let alone one in which you catch the eye of the local millionaire-equivalent and end up living in Pemberley. You were more likely to observe from the servants’ quarters than experience that lifestyle first-hand, and more likely to end up married to a factoryworker than the Duke of Hastings – not helped by the fact that the dukedom of Hastings never actually existed.
Even those reading Austen were a fairly select few. The privilege of spending long periods of time sitting and reading for leisure was unattainable for the majority who had to work – industrial or domestic – but young, unmarried, middle-class women had not much better to do. While evenings might be spent husband-hunting, during the day they could spend time developing accomplishments, entertaining friends and reading.
This kind of rich-man-meets-genteel-woman story was escapism for those women. Reliant on finding a financially secure, respectable, kind husband to spend the rest of their lives with, they could find in Austen the security of a sort of perfect-case-scenario, except with more scandal and gossip. Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and Austen’s other heroines find matches with rich, handsome men who they’re actually in love with, and also have moments of power where they snub rude social superiors or turn down matches that don’t meet their romantic expectations; they don’t have to compromise anything. It’s not realistic, and I think that’s why we would far rather spend a few hours in the shoes of Elizabeth Bennet than poor Charlotte Lucas (a character defined by compromise: she had to marry the slimy Mr Collins to avoid becoming an old spinster).
So far, I’ve been talking about Austen and Bridgerton as if they’re the same, but they’re really not. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Love and Friendship were all written in late-Georgian England. These books are excellently crafted: the characters are as complex as they are ridiculous, the heroines are both witty and flawed, the plots exciting, the language authentic and yet relatively easy to read—they’re just great books and, I’ll say it again, they were written in the period. Any adaptations therefore have to pay attention to history in order to do these stories justice.
To convincingly mimic the 1810s, a film or series needs empire waistlines, bonnets, silly little curls around the forehead, horse-drawn carriages, top-hats and boobs pushed up so high by ‘corsets’ (technically, ‘stays’) that women breathe upwards rather than outwards. When a character walks into a room, everyone needs to stand up and bow or curtsy. People should address each other by Mr, Miss or Mrs *Surname*, their conversations should be punctuated by polite enquiries after their families’ health, and there needs to be at least two scenes at a ball. In other words, there are certain tropes that define a Regency drama.
That said, historical romantic dramas have recently been moving further away from drawing-room accuracy towards more experimental cinematography. The classic 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, is acutely historically accurate and loyal to the original text, whereas the 2005 film with Keira Knightley and Matthew Mcfadyen takes a few more artistic liberties. Elizabeth Bennet’s curls in the earlier version become a wispy fringe on Keira Knightly; a drawing room proposal scene is transported outside to the pouring rain and set alive with sexual tension; instead of getting engaged on a family walk in a top-hat and bonnet, Mr Darcy and Miss Bennet walk towards each other in a state of relative undress through a misty meadow at sunrise.
Adaptations as recent as Emma and Little Women have taken even greater artistic liberties. The 2020 film Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, is utterly brilliant. The colours of the dresses and wallpaper are shockingly vibrant; Emma’s hair has been styled into tight forehead-corkscrews with anachronistic curling irons; various little moments appear that were certainly not in the novel, like Emma’s nosebleed or Mr Knightley flopping on the floor in exasperation. Added details, like church seating arrangements, highlight the eccentricities of the era. It’s how Jane Austen should be enjoyed: with over-the-top characters, comical scrapes and awkward social interactions. This film is genuinely hilarious.
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, on the other hand, pays little attention to historical detail. To be fair, this one is a bit of an outlier: it’s by Louisa May Alcott rather than Austen, so it’s set about fifty years later and in America. The story follows the lives of four sisters who spend their time darning stockings and dying of scarlet fever, rather than buying new ribbons for the Meryton ball. Regardless, Little Women had huge success at the box office in 2019 as a modern film based on an iconic nineteenth-century novel. The filmmaking is masterful, refusing even to tell the story in chronological order, and the costumes are riddled with inaccuracies: Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wears masculine clothes and there is a frankly disappointing absence of bonnets that would have been completely unacceptable in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Jo and Amy (Florence Pugh) both have feminist speeches about the societal, economic and emotional pressures on women to marry. At the end of the film, the audience is made aware of Alcott’s own story as a parallel is drawn between Jo, publishing her book, and Alcott, who had to give Jo a satisfying romantic ending so that Little Women could be published. It’s very meta and very clever.
Historical inaccuracies do not always detract from these films; sometimes they add to them. I love the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice because it’s such an authentic retelling of an already brilliant romance, but the changes made to the 2005 film add another level of romanticism that make you feel like you’re the one standing on a rock in the Peak District with swirling violins and a biting wind billowing through your skirts. Emma feels fresh, young, self-aware, modern and funny; the luminous yellow only adds to the ridiculousness of this Austenite world. The inaccuracies in Little Women, I’ll admit, do irritate me (almost as much as Emma Watson’s terrible American accent) but in the grand scheme of things, they’re unimportant because it’s a great film.
Bridgerton doesn’t even pretend to be accurate. It’s based on a series of novels written by Julia Quinn in the early 2000s and follows the scandals of families in London as they go to balls, get married, and share gossip with the Queen. The gowns are heavily and anachronistically embroidered in colourful satin and polyester—not even the classic Regency silhouette is left untouched. The Queen and ladies of the court wear wigs and dresses that would have looked outdated in the later decades of the eighteenth century, so to put them on the most fashionable members of nineteenth-century society is laughable. Characters spend more time at orgies than at church; all the women wear obvious makeup; the roads have visible yellow lines on them; the ballroom scenes are set to Ariana Grande music and it’s somehow okay for a duke to take his fiancée to a boxing match. Meanwhile, the plot is like smutty Austen fanfiction. It should be terrible.
Yet it works. The inaccuracies are (mostly) deliberate, so you’re not really meant to believe that this is the actual Regency era, and the story is really entertaining. Bridgerton brings all of the glitz and froufrou of a Pemberley ball, with the romance and sexual tension of *that* proposal scene, the visual excitement of Emma, and the feminism of Little Women. It’s indulgent, it’s fantastical, it’s a little bit trashy, and it’s really good television. Austen was always meant to be romantic escapism; Bridgerton does that splendidly. I spent the first week of summer lockdown binge-watching everything remotely to do with Pride and Prejudice: the 1995 BBC version, the 2005 film, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (hysterical), Lost in Austen, Becoming Jane, and even Bridget Jones. It seems fitting that the third lockdown has involved rather a lot of Bridgerton.
Harriet's Histories 
I really enjoyed your insightful comparisons and explanations of these costume dramas, Ms Willmoth. As you say, historical inaccuracy need not condemn a piece of thoroughly entertaining television.
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