Darcy need not apply
Alert Janeites Lisa and Cinthia sent us an article about Imogen Poots, who plays Fanny Knight in Miss Austen Regrets. She is very pretty, and very young. 
“The corsets virtually cut off your breasts. I can’t imagine how women ever lived in those clothes,” she grimaces.
Because they actually fit, unlike your rented ones, dear.
She wasn’t an Austen devotee (’I'd read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility’), yet she quickly grasped the perennial Austen conundrum – should a girl marry for love or money?
In Miss Austen Regrets, the recurring advice Jane gives to Fanny is that she must marry for love.
“It’s something we take for granted today – that we can earn our own living and marry whom we like,” Imogen says. “But it was a harsh world then because women were reliant on men for their status.”
I wonder if Imogen has fallen in love herself, but she is evasive on the subject of boyfriends. “I’m too young,” she says, laughing. “I’ve done what Fanny does – met someone, thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m in love!’ and had those intense times where nothing else matters.”
“I think that happens constantly when you’re young because there will always be someone older and wiser to look up to,” she adds. “But I don’t believe in Mr Darcy. Men like him only exist in fiction.”
Men who do their jobs well, and take care of those they love, and fall so hard for a woman that they change themselves for her? One hopes they aren’t just in fiction.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
They aren’t.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Does anyone know the air date for this (in the UK)? I can’t find it anywhere…