Debates over which screen version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the best get very ugly very fast. When told Netflix’s upcoming Pride and Prejudice would feature Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden as the “first ginger Darcy,” one Janeite friend of mine snapped, “I hope they make him dye his hair.” I told her I couldn’t disagree more. I’m not sure whether we’re still on speaking terms.
Disagreements such as ours seem to have reached a boiling point this year as the famous film and TV versions of Pride and Prejudice—from 1940, 1995, and 2005—celebrate their anniversaries alongside Austen’s 250th birthday. Most agree that Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier (stars of the 1940 MGM version) were outdone by the BBC’s Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in 1995. Yet it’s by no means a settled question whether Ehle and Firth were supplanted by Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in Joe Wright’s 2005 film.
These debates have been humorously branded as “the Darcy Wars” in Janeite circles, as if the Elizabeths were mere supporting actors. That’s not only a disservice to Austen’s heroine but to the wild history of Austen on-screen. Our arguments over the Elizabeths could have been—should have been—so much more colorful. We get a vivid sense of what’s been lost with just one little-known piece of Hollywood history.
Audiences were almost treated to a musical Pride and Prejudice starring Judy Garland. MGM didn’t just toy with the idea of remaking its big-budget 1940 comedy into a big-budget musical in 1947—it went a good way down the yellow brick road of scripting, casting, and finding a composer.
From the very first, the planned film was imagined as a vehicle for Garland. Her new husband, Vincente Minnelli, was tapped as director. Handsome Peter Lawford was cast as Mr. Darcy. Lawford, although then MGM’s most desired leading man, couldn’t possibly have overshadowed Garland on-screen, either in singing voice or riveting charisma.
The first composer attached to the project was Cole Porter. He was eventually replaced by the up-and-coming Rodgers and Hammerstein. These names may sound very promising, but the project faced bizarre twists and turns. For one, Garland declared the film would not really be a musical. She told columnist Hedda Hopper it would be a regular film with just a few songs. (Garland was perhaps mistaken or overruled.)
With baby Liza in tow, Minnelli and Garland moved to England to begin filming. But rumors soon began to circulate that Garland either wouldn’t or couldn’t master a British accent. Rather than cancel the project, the studio made a bold and wacky pivot: MGM declared it was changing the musical’s setting to Boston, making the filming of the picture in England totally unnecessary. Reports then informed the public that the fictional setting had been shifted once again, from Boston to Philadelphia. A plan to film it all on a Hollywood set followed.
Film buffs may know this much of Garland’s history, but it’s gone long unnoticed that an early draft of the Pride and Prejudice musical’s screenplay survives in the Special Collections at U.S.C.’s Cinematic Arts Library. That unpublished script, by screenwriter Sally Benson, though retaining some of Austen’s dialogue, made eyebrow-raising changes beyond the Philadelphia setting. Benson’s blunt and funny Elizabeth is directly declared to be an “emancipated” woman. She’s once called too intelligent for a girl—a line at which she bristles. Yet however enlightened Benson imagined her version of Austen’s character to be, the script reads now as rather wide of its intended mark.
In the opening scenes of this American Pride and Prejudice musical, democracy is celebrated, dogs roam freely on dirty streets, and pigs root in the gutters in the fictional small town of Meryton, Pennsylvania. The Bennets’ large home, Longbourn, is surrounded by cornfields. Scrappy Elizabeth haggles with a horse salesman. Elizabeth and Jane sing about their worries that, with no men to marry in their backwater hamlet, they may be “dying on the vine.”
Englishmen Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy, on their arrival to the United States, sing a duet on horseback about enjoying the Philadelphia nightlife. Mr. Collins (also English) gets a terrific comic song about the joyless duties of his future wife. Yet the script demonstrates an unsettling obsession with female thinness. One planned scene has the five American Bennet sisters report to the family barn to be weighed by their exacting mother before heading off to the ball.
In recent years, Austen scholars have rightly lamented a long film history of overwhelmingly white casts and a lack of screen stories about Regency-era people of color. But Benson’s script may lead some of us to conclude we ought to have been careful what we were wishing for. In this script, Lady Catherine de Bourgh travels from England to the United States to oversee the rice plantations she owns in Georgia, intending to convert the enslaved people forced to work on them to the Church of England.
The subject of race wasn’t only relegated to white characters’ backstories. In an early scene in Meryton, “rough, hardy” white children dress up as Native Americans to play a brutal game of cowboys and Indians. A climactic scene in Philadelphia involves a group of Christmas mummers, some described as in blackface. (That detail is, sadly, historically accurate.) Darcy and Bingley were supposed to have jumped out of this group of street performers to serenade their love interests.
Black actors were also poised to be cast. The script calls for a scene in which free Black men and women sing a song in vernacular about selling coal and food on the streets of Philadelphia. Their labor is then visually contrasted with Elizabeth and Jane’s, shown inside an urban mansion arranging flowers and tea service.
For reasons unknown, MGM moved Garland to a different musical—Annie Get Your Gun—where she struggled on set, was suspended, and replaced. She faced what would become well-known challenges with addiction and mental health. In the end, MGM’s Pride and Prejudice musical was never made. If it had been, we’d probably still be singing its songs.
Of course, that may not have done film audiences or Austen’s legacy any favors, especially if we recall the problematic lyrics of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and South Pacific (1949). Seen in more sanguine terms, though, this Pride and Prejudice musical may have paved the way for Austen-inspired films set outside of England that featured more racially diverse casts, long before Clueless (1995) and Bride & Prejudice (2004). Garland’s performance, if it had been up to her usual inimitable standard, could have changed the trajectory of Elizabeth Bennet in popular culture.
It seems the long run of Pride and Prejudice films and audiences over-focused on Darcy may now be coming to an end. The upcoming Netflix series recently made headlines—and raised hackles—when it was revealed that it wouldn’t include a reprise of Colin Firth’s wet-white-shirt moment, in part because the scene objectifies men. Netflix also announced that it cast as Elizabeth the wonderful actor Emma Corrin, who is non-binary.
Maybe the Darcy wars are heading to a détente? We’re certainly overdue for an Elizabeth actor who outshines Darcy’s in the public consciousness to create iconic moments for the heroine on-screen. If that happens—once that happens—it may go some distance toward making up for our newly realized loss in never having had Judy Garland’s take on Austen’s powerhouse protagonist.
Devoney Looser is a professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of several books, including The Making of Jane Austen and Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
