Jane Austen Now: Jemima and Hugh

Last night at supper a novelist friend said that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s one failure. The problem being that the reader falls in love with the Crawfords and simply can’t get on with the high moral tone of the “hero” and “heroine” Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price. They are too fine, too grave, hopelessly old-fashioned, no fun. We’d all rather flirt with the wit, the charm, the risqué sophistication and personal beauty of Henry and Mary Crawford, and, nowadays, none of us would fear the consequences.

Of course, part of me agrees with him. But when I reread Mansfield Park a few months ago, it reminded me of one contemporary, unsquare couple who not long ago were acting out the themes of the novel before the eyes of the press. (Who knows what was actually going on in their personal lives, but the public narrative, true or false, is a story in its own right.)

Say Fanny Price is Jemima Khan. Say Henry Crawford is Hugh Grant. She is a journalist, and something of an intellectual, despite her beauty and her beautiful clothes. Her columns in the press and her public protests in Parliament Square bespeak a character preoccupied with justice, goodness, adherence to the truth, to actual facts. Her public deportment, inviting as her face and figure may appear, is poised and self-contained. And her marriage was to a man of religion for whom she converted. She is a serious person.

You may object, But her father was a billionaire, her husband a great cricketer. And so they were. Her father, with his many and far flung attachments and entanglements, must have loved and ignored her by necessity just as Sir Thomas Bertram did his penniless niece Fanny. And her husband turned his sporting discipline into a commitment to public life so rigorous that it seems in the end to have excluded even his pretty Western wife, though she evidently remains loyal to many of his beliefs. She is a bluestocking, with an inner purity that matches Fanny’s. Okay, she loves a party, just as Fanny loved her ball.

Hugh Grant may have seemed like a challenge at first. Everybody wanted his undivided attention; nobody could get it. But perhaps like Fanny with Henry Crawford, Ms. Khan paid him no attention at all, and consequently he elbowed his way through all the flirts he’d helplessly attracted in order to get to her. By his own admission, she really got to him. Rumor had it that he was so in love he would give up acting. It was boring anyway compared to Jemima Khan. Henry Crawford was transformed.

But how was he to keep himself busy all day? Mr. Grant travelled. He read books. He started writing a novel (which he read only to her). But a day is long. A week is longer. Henry Crawford likes to stay entertained. Golf took up quite a lot of time, until he went to Dubai, hooked himself up with electrodes, and saw on a screen what his swing actually looked like. It was so ugly, he said, that he could never play golf again. t wasn’t important to him how far the swing made the ball fly, just how it looked. Clearly the man is born for show. We love him on the screen and that is where he is meant to be. So Mr. Grant made another movie, and another.

In my memory, the end of the Khan-Grant relationship was prophesied by those billboards depicting a bubbling romance between Drew and Hugh in Music and Lyrics. Fanny Price would not have been able to stand it. The man of her heart, super life size, pretending to fall for someone else. And I’ll bet Ms. Khan couldn’t stand it. It’s not about being insecure or unnaturally jealous. It’s her moral character: just like Fanny, she would have found it agonizingly indecorous, undignified, inappropriate. A public pretence of an emotion which in her own experience, as she has written in the press, has religious qualities.

The month after filming began, Mr. Grant acted out a public love scene with Ms. Khan - the famous balcony scene in Venice. As if kissing her billboard high at the end of countless camera lenses could obliterate the images he knew would soon be appearing of him with Ms. Barrymore. Fanny would have died of shame! But it can’t have had any effect on whatever images were in Ms. Khan’s own head; after all, being in the balcony scene, she couldn’t watch it. And one suspects she might not have liked it any more than Fanny. What she appeared to want was an authentic life, in private.

They’ve long since split, like Fanny and Henry. Over and over again, but, supposedly, finally for good. Presumably Ms. Khan will find herself an Edward Bertram (for all I know, she already has, but such a discovery would have to be tested by time). Meanwhile, the Maria Bertrams are happily ruining themselves over Mr. Grant everyday. Just check your tabloids. Nevertheless, it still gives the heart a twinge that he could never prove himself “good enough” for Ms. Khan. This is where Jane Austen had it right and Hollywood would probably pretend it’s otherwise and marry them off to one another anyway. Two things are for sure: Mansfield Park, far from being outdated, portrays two character types still very much alive in England. And if this blog turns into a movie, I’ll be rushing to buy my ticket to watch Hugh Grant play Hugh Grant.