Program Title
Pride and Prejudice

Based On
The novel by Jane Austen

Adapted By
Fay Weldon

Number of Episodes:
5

Description
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. When Mr. Bingley comes to live in the neighborhood, Mrs. Bennett considers him the rightful property of one of her five unmarried daughters...


Original broadcast date
1980-10-26

Cast	Characters
Elizabeth Garvie	Elizabeth Bennet
David Rintoul	Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy
Moray Watson	Mr. Bennet
Priscilla Morgan	Mrs. Bennet
Sabina Franklyn	Jane Bennet
Irene Richard
Osmund Bullock	Mr. Bingley
Marsha Fitzalan	Caroline Bingley
Natalie Ogle	Lydia Bennet
Tessa Peake-Jones	Mary Bennet
Peter Howell	Sir William Lucas
Elizabeth Stewart	Lady Lucas
Clare Higgins	Kitty Bennet
Judy Parfitt	Lady Catherine de Bourgh

Credits

Producer: Jonathan Powell
Director: Cyril Coke

Intro
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a dramatization in five parts of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I don't suppose there's another classic that has had so many adaptations and revivals: stage, movies. From this continuous exposure it's easy to get the notion that she is and always has been a classic of English literature, but it's not so. She led a very secluded life, wrote for the amusement for herself and her family, and all six of her novels were not put out, published, until the last few years of her life.

Now, Jane Austen was born in 1775, the daughter of a country clergyman, a rector. It was a very private family. They had no ambitions to society or public life. She had visited in Bath; she lived there for a time. And she lived briefly with her brother in London. Her two brothers were sailors, involved in naval battles with the French. And one of them became an Admiral of the Fleet. But he was the only member of the family who could claim even to be a public figure. Another thing that kept her unknown was her contentment with her spinster's domestic life in the country. She once wrote, Three or four country families--is the thing to work on. And as far as she was concerned they represented a microcosm of the human family.

Now, she had read widely in her father's library, Greek and Latin classics. She read French easily, a little Italian. And being an eighteenth-century girl she read voraciously the early and bawdy novels which a later clergyman, a Victorian, would have locked up from his daughters: Smollett, Sterne, Fielding, Richardson. And she admired them. But they were not for her--not to imitate. She was content just to stay in the country, and to play the piano. She was an expert needlewoman, wrote letters, went to dances, flirted a good deal, but mainly just sat back and observed the fusses and follies of the people around her. And in the process she invented quite new form: a short, exquisite satirical novel.

Pride and Prejudice was written when she was twenty, twenty-one. She kept it on ice for fifteen years, rewrote it, and then it came out to what she called a vast success.--1500 copies--in a population of Sixteen or seventeen million. Well, it's time to watch and hear this wickedly observant young woman put before us the Bennet family.





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