SICK OF JANE AUSTEN YET?

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

WHERE WOULD LATE 20TH CENtury pop culture be without Jane Austen, literature's first great chronicler of the young, the idle and the sardonic--not to mention the romantically addled? Without Austen's fine-boned fiction we might never have had an Ethan Hawke, a Whit Stillman or an NBC Thursday-night lineup.

As you, gentle reader, are no doubt aware, we are in the midst of an Austen revival, with movie versions of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion currently in theaters and an Emma on the way (and already in video stores in the tarty guise of Clueless). Next on the list is Pride and Prejudice, Austen's wittiest tribute to hanging out and hooking up. It airs as a six-hour adaptation for TV on the Arts & Entertainment cable network over three consecutive nights beginning this Sunday (8 p.m. EST).

Lavish and piquant as a mini-series should be, this co-production of A&E and the BBC never misses a note of Austen's arch comic tone, following her narrative faithfully as the Bennet family sets about finding wealthy husbands for its five unattached daughters. Production values are first rate, with gardens and parlors so meticulously observed they could make Merchant and Ivory give up and turn to Die Hard sequels. And yet, amid the tastefulness, sexual tension lurks. Colin Firth plays Mr. Darcy, the romantic lead, as though he were a creation of the Brontes rather than the ironic, detached Austen. This Darcy is a man consumed by his passion for Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle), the novel's brilliant, voluble heroine. His eyes are piercing, and he cannot take them off her, in one scene ogling her from his bathroom window after languishing in a warm tub. Fortunately, despite one or two other such moments--not to mention an opening-credits sequence in which the camera pans over crinkled-up satin--this Pride and Prejudice never quite veers into Sidney Sheldon territory.

In fact, the filmmakers keep the focus on themes that must have made the book seem subversive when it was first published 183 years ago. For underlying Austen's comedy of manners is a sometimes grim drama about preserving a life-style in a world in which a woman's economic status was dependent on the brilliance of her marriage. The Bennet girls travel in polite society, but they are not as well off as the company they are trying to keep, a point they are not allowed to forget, thanks to the endless derision of people like the snobbish Miss Bingley, played with amusing bite by Anna Chancellor.

Of course, class limitations still play an active role in courtship games. At times, watching this Pride and Prejudice is not unlike reading the wedding pages of the Sunday New York Times, always a banquet of telling socioeconomic detail (alma maters, parents' occupations). You remember that most people travel in small orbits and that the chauffeur's daughter doesn't marry Harrison Ford. That's Austen: romantic comedy with a bracing slap of social truth.

--By Ginia Bellafante