A new hero for Austen to take on pride and prejudice
Andrew Davies makes a hero of the black heiress who never saw the light of day in unfinished novel
BENEATH Jane Austen’s apparently frothy love stories and intrigues lay a serious critique of society. Now a TV adaptation highlights to what extent the writer was grappling with very real changes in 18th century Britain.
A black character in her novel Sanditon – even then reflecting Britain’s troubled relationship with its empire – is central to Andrew Davies’s serialisation starting on ITV today at 9pm.
Sanditon n was one of three Austen en books published posthumously osthumously but unlike ke Northanger Abbey y and Persuasion it was never completed. Austen put down her pen on March 18, 1817, writing the date in n the manuscript. She he died four months later. ter. She began writing Sanditon, anditon, initially titled The Brothers, in January 1817 but t only got as far as the ninth page age of chapter 12.
She describes cribes a character called Miss s Lambe, “a young West Indian n of large fortune, in delicate health,” who is “about seventeen, enteen, half mulatto, chilly and tender”.
However, r, readers of the unfinished shed manuscript, while ile aware of Miss Lambe’s e’s inevitable introduction on to society in the seaside side resort of Sanditon, never get to meet her. Davies not only brings rings her there, he makes her the hero of the period drama. .
He believes eves Austen is unlikely to have met a black k socialite in her time, as “it would have been about” had she done so. But he added: “There were black people in society and you’ve got examples, that film Belle, and there is a black heiress in Vanity Fair … obviously Jane Austen thought, let’s include one in my novel. “I have no idea really what she was going to do with Miss Lambe or that she was going to find love with any of the gentlemen on offer.”
For Davies, exploring the possibility of the character’s arc was an exciting prospect, especially to write about a “country that is changing, a kind of hero that didn’t fit the traditional Jane Austen thing … how would she be received, how would she feel about being plunged into this very provincial set of all-white people?” Miss Lambe, played in the TV drama byCrystalClarke, an American actress, is introduced trod in the first episod sode. She has a complex relationship with Sanditon’s gentry, appeased with her inherent fortune but unable to overlook her heritage.
““She is a West Indian heiress with a large fortune and that changes ch the game. Obviously she is going to encounte counter a lot of prejudice, but the th fact that she has so much muc money is going to make her an eligible match,” Davies told Radio 4’s Front Row. “The community she is coming into has probably never seen a black person before. It is a little fishing village. She is somebody entirely new and is obviously going to encounter a lot of prejudice.” Rose Williams, who plays the central role of Charlotte Heyward, said Miss Lambe was her favourite character, her presence “educating” Sanditon and “relieving them of their ignorance”.
‘I have no idea really what she was going to do with Miss Lambe or that she was going to find love with any of the gentlemen on offer’