It is a truth universally acknowledged, though, that over the years just about everyone has taken a crack at Austen. Her novels have been translated into dozens of languages and apparently lose nothing in the process. More movies, plays and television programs have been drawn from her work than I can count -- a search for her at the Internet Movie Database yields enough links to keep one occupied for a week....My impression, though, is that "Pride and Prejudice," along with the rest of Austen's work, remains resolutely impervious to all this meddling. Somewhere along the way I surely saw the first of the many film adaptations, but when I reread the novel now I don't see Laurence Olivier as Fitzwilliam Darcy or Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet in the way that, say, Joan Fontaine is too firmly fixed in my imagination as Jane Eyre or (of course!) Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.
But the piece is illustrated with a publicity image from the version of Pride & Prejudice where Keira Knightly plays Elizabeth Bennet, which, as anyone with any sense of these things knows, is far from the best adaptation of the novel. If Yardley somehow managed to miss A&E's 1995 adaptation of the novel, he is deprived. It's perhaps the only cinematic or television adaptation of a work of literature where the faces of the actors deserve to float back into our minds as we read the novels where they originate. In part that's because the miniseries is long enough to give the actors time to fully inhabit the characters' lines and develop their interactions with each other. Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth create physicalities for Lizzy and Mr. Darcy that expand Austen's descriptions of them. Other than the wet-shirt-post-Pemberley-swim scene, the miniseries manages not to embroider Austen's work inappropriately either. So Jonathan Yardley should watch the miniseries. And the Post's art department should show some respect.