When one reads Pride and Prejudice as a teen or a 20-something, it’s simple to get swept up in the romance. If you reread it in your mid-30s, though,
When one reads Pride and Prejudice as a teen or a 20-something, it’s simple to get swept up in the romance. If you reread it in your mid-30s, though, you may come to the same realization Alderton did: “Mrs. Bennet’s kind of the hero of the whole fucking thing.” Alderton thinks Elizabeth’s mother has never gotten the credit she deserves: “I really felt I’d like justice for Mrs. Bennet,” she says.
Mrs. Bennet needs to assist her daughters find husbands not because she’s in cahoots with the patriarchy or because she’s shallowly obsessed with appearances, but because it’s a critical economic imperative. Alderton wrote a poignant scene in which, during the show’s second episode, Mrs. Bennet explains this to her husband. “This is actually really serious, and you shouldn’t be laughing at me,” the showrunner says, paraphrasing the gist of her speech. “You should be recognizing how much I love my children.”
It’s a good monologue, made even better by its delivery from Olivia Colman. The Oscar winner was Alderton’s first and only choice for the role. “I wrote an unbelievably emotional love letter to Olivia, begging her to play Mrs. Bennet, because I knew that our Mrs. Bennet couldn’t be played by anyone else,” the showrunner says. No other actor, she says, has Colman’s ability to “ping-pong, in this really effortless and very genuine way, from very high comedy to very real emotional truth. And that’s really the magic of Austen.”
