I can’t believe I missed this adaptation, since I have pretty much every other one in existence, but there it is. I’m only just discovering it now. Northanger Abbey is one of the least adapted of Jane Austen’s complete novels, and it’s easy to see why. The heroine, Catherine Morland, is a seventeen year old ingenue whose dull country life has been enlivened by much avid reading of Gothic novels. As a result, she sees melodrama everywhere and is pretty silly as a result. She’s not really a heroine that modern readers can root for (unlike spirited Elizabeth Bennet, or steadfast and sensible Anne Elliott, for example). She doesn’t even have Emma’s get-up-and-go. She’s more of a Fanny Price, only without the intelligence and moral compass. And of course the Gothic novel, which this is a pastiche of, is somewhat out of fashion these days.

On the other hand, it has one of the most charming heroes. Henry Tilney has the great virtue of being faithfully in love with the heroine throughout the book, and is uniformly kind to her. In the 2007 version, the script gives Henry a delicious sense of humour, which makes him perfectly easy to see as a romantic hero. In this version, his lines, while slightly quirky, are much heavier and it sometimes felt as if he were actually poking fun at innocent Catherine. I’m not sure how much of this is lifted from the book, but if I’d been her, I might have been a bit miffed at him and not fallen for him quite so much.

In a 90 minute adaptation, a lot of nuance has to be left by the wayside, and so it is here. The Thorpes, in particular, get very short shrift, and their machinations to detach Catherine from the Tilneys and keep her to themselves are dealt with in cavalier fashion. Isabella is portrayed as the worst and most obvious kind of avaricious minx, with no room for the subtlety of the situation at all. She’s engaged to Catherine’s brother, and the next thing we see is her making up outrageously to Captain Tilney. Five minutes later the engagement is off. So it’s all a bit rushed.

In compensation, the Northanger Abbey scenes are well drawn, especially the confrontation between Catherine and Henry in his mother’s room. I liked Robert Hardy at General Tilney (has Robert Hardy ever underperformed? I can’t remember a time, and he does bumbling fool, as in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility, just as well as menacing patriarch, as here). I also liked that Eleanor Tilney, an easy role to airbrush out, is here given room to breath. The actress conveys very well the dutiful daughter, rather afraid of her father but also determined to go her own way. The Allens and the Morlands both do well with the limited scope of their roles.

Some niggles. Henry is here not a clergyman, but a gentleman of independent means with his own estate. I understand that modern audiences would not appreciate that a clergyman has a solid position in society and may well be comfortably off, even if not exactly wealthy, since the church was not a vocation in Regency times, more of a sensible career for younger sons. The movie also skates over the insult to Catherine of sending her home, quite alone, on the common stage, an unthinkable thing to do at the time. I suspect that the scriptwriters perhaps were not quite familiar with these nuances. They also made Catherine something of an heiress, giving her the same four hundred a year that her brother would have had if he had married Isabella Thorpe. I’m not familiar enough with the book to know whether that’s canonical or a fabrication, but it seems an excessive amount for a daughter in such a large family.

I have to say I enjoyed this a lot. There was nothing that struck me as completely wrong, the acting, costumes, script and settings (actual Bath!) were lovely, and my only grumble was that Henry was so quirky that I wasn’t entirely sure if he was being complimentary or insulting to Catherine. And she had the sort of blank expression that I’m sure was supposed to be innocent bewilderment, but would in certain parts of the UK be described as gormless. But a good adaptation, overall.

For some reason, I never wrote a review of this when I first watched it (probably I was too annoyed at the ending), but now that I’ve watched it twice, I’m no better pleased with it. It takes the fragment that Jane Austen wrote and spins it into a yarn that encompasses all the essentials of modern TV drama – sex, money, ambition, greed, selfishness, high action, pretty costumes and some very good looking actors. Oh, and a smattering of racism and the obligatory denunciation of slavery. There is precisely one decent character in the whole production (I don’t count heroine Charlotte; she’s a dope). The word that springs to mind is sordid.

The basic plot is straight from Jane Austen – Tom Parker is obsessed with promoting his seaside home of Sanditon as England’s best resort. He’s supported financially by Lady Denham, who is obsessed with money. She has several relatives, Sir Edward Denham, Miss Denham and poor relation Clara Brereton, who are also obsessed with money – specifically Lady Denham’s, which they all want a share of. Heiress Miss Lambe is another target for the money-obsessed. There are also several members of the Parker family, namely brother Sydney, the indolent man-about-town and rather uninspiring hero, and hypochondriacs Arthur and Diana. Charlotte Heywood is the country innocent dropped into racy Sanditon, who immediately gets the hots for sophisticated Sydney.

So far, this is straight from the early chapters that Jane Austen wrote. But the TV show introduces another layer of society, one that never featured at all in any of Austen’s completed works, except as brief walk-on parts. Because Sanditon is still under construction, we get the builders, and an alternative suitor for Charlotte in nice Mr Stringer, the foreman with ambitions to be an architect. And the script-writers couldn’t resist another money-related situation – the workers haven’t been paid for weeks and are getting stroppy about it. Tom Parker keeps promising more men and money, but he just can’t afford it. This strikes me as odd, because labourer’s wages were peanuts in those days. A labourer would have made perhaps ten shillings (half of a pound) a week. If there were fifty men, which seems unlikely, that’s a cost of twenty five pounds a week, something that Parker could have found by selling a vase or two from his house. It was the stone frontages and marble fireplaces that cost the earth in housebuilding in those days. Besides, labourers couldn’t afford to work for nothing – they had families to feed, and without money each week they starved. They’d have been off the first week there was no pay.

But I digress. I’ve mentioned already that there is only one decent character in the production, and I’ll come to him in a minute. The rest are all either fools (Tom Parker, Arthur and Diana) or nasty (Lady Denham, Sir Edward, Miss Denham, Clara Brereton) or silly (Charlotte, Miss Lambe). I’m going to put Sydney in the nasty category, because he’s unforgivably rude to Charlotte in the early episodes, he flip-flops about between grudgingly admiring her and yelling at her, and then betrays her horribly at the end. But what about that nice Mr Stringer, yearning soulfully after Charlotte? He’s pretty silly, because when he’s offered the chance of an architecture apprenticeship (did they do that in those days? I guess they did), he turns it down for stupidly sentimental reasons.

So, to the one decent character. Sydney brings some friends to Sanditon to support his brother’s endeavour. One of them is an amusing drunk, and hallelujah for some humour. The other is Lord Babbington, rich, titled, single and smitten instantly with the disdainful Miss Denham. He spends the whole series chasing her with single-minded and unreserved devotion, and is an utter delight. It may be that he only strikes me that way because everyone else is so relentlessly awful, but whatever. I liked him, and I cheered when he finally got his girl.

But the rest of it? No. The costumes are OK (I particularly liked Lady Denham’s old-fashioned styles), but as with all modern productions now, the hero is trendily unshaven, and Charlotte goes around with her hair down most of the time. I get that she’s supposed to be unsophisticated, but it’s plain wrong. A girl put her hair up when she came out into society, and it never came down again outside the bedchamber. There’s a carriage chase scene which is hysterically funny (as in so bad it’s funny). There’s a fair amount of gratuitous nudity but that’s expected these days. The music at the balls was just weird, but I suppose they were making some point or other. I don’t quite see the purpose in pretending to do Jane Austen, and then throwing out half the historical details (unless you do it in style, a la Bridgerton).

And the ending is an abomination. I watched it in the UK before it reached the US, and I actually warned my American friends not to watch the final episode with anything breakable in their hands, because it would inevitably be thrown at the TV. To repeat – the ending is an ABOMINATION. Worse than Lost, which is saying something. So not one for traditionalists, and be prepared to imagine your own ending.