Literally, the best kiss
Ruth Spencer stills her beating heart to reveal agency in the Regency world
Hearts, Mr Collins! Hearts! Is there anything more tantalising than watching two people yearning to have — but not actually having — a relationship? Every stolen glance loaded with unspoken longing. The impossible kiss: that’s real romance. I could watch hours of it. Six hours, to be exact. The same six hours, over and over.
The BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, released in 1995, is delicious agony. Save your passionate kisses, your frantic clinches, your bronzed Hollywood limbs clambering gymnastically toward ecstasy. Give me instead Fitzwilliam Darcy’s upper arm brushing the sleeve of Elizabeth Bennet’s pelisse as they turn to walk together down a country lane. Give me long, pensive stares out of windows, especially after a bath. Give me gracious mansions carved from ancient stone (not for romance, I just want one. With a lake, because ... reasons).
In the Regency world of Pride and Prejudice, even the most chaste touching is frowned upon. Dancing is a kind of formal hopping, and kissing is for after the bureaucracies of marriage, presumably once you’ve seen someone hop enough to know they’re The One. When Lizzie and Darcy realise their feelings for each other, they can’t fall into each other’s arms as the music swells. They can only yearn.
And as always when two people are negotiating an unexpressed tumult of emotion, the world goes on around them being ridiculous. We are not allowed to wallow in the sublime. Mary will insist on singing. The bored coachman (played by Auckland actor Andrew Grainger) falls in the horse trough. The universe doesn’t align to give love the reverence it deserves.
But an impossible kiss, the kiss not taken, creates a kind of sacred space outside the world: an invisible temple to the distilled essence of romance. Upper arms brushing lightly in a country lane. Hearts. A truth universally acknowledged.