The way that this spring's slew of Jane Austen adaptations are being marketed, you'd be forgiven for thinking that all Austen ever wrote about was Love, and How to Find It. The poster for the film Becoming Jane, based on an early romance in Austen's own life, shows a spoony-looking James McAvoy nuzzling up to a doe-eyed Anne Hathaway. In ITV's forthcoming Northanger Abbey, meanwhile, girls with an indecent amount of heaving cleavage (well, it is scripted by Andrew Davies) find boys round every corner. The network's Persuasion, meanwhile, ends with a snog in the street between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth that doesn't reference Austen's text (how many kissing scenes do you recall in her novels?) so much as the final clinch in the film of Bridget Jones's Diary.
What all these one-note adaptations miss is that Austen's books are really not about love, but money. And it's not so much the fantasy fortune that goes with becoming mistress of Pemberley that concerns her as the pounds, shillings and pence of just getting by. Economic survival among the struggling middle classes is, as all those girls with low-cut gowns and young men in tight trousers soon discover, a difficult, even savage, business in which one wrong move can ruin your chances of a nice life.
Think what it would be like if, in the same week that your father dies, a cousin you hardly know insists that your house now belongs to him. Then imagine that he offers to marry you and even suggests that your sisters might like to stay. Faced with such a scenario in Pride and Prejudice, it's no wonder that Lizzy Bennet didn't want to wed Mr Collins; and no wonder Mrs Bennet was furious about it. Not only was Lizzy throwing away her chance of economic security, but she was depriving Mrs Bennet of the possibility of serving out her widowhood in her own home; Elizabeth wasn't a spirited heroine holding out for True Love, she was a selfish little baggage.
It is this sense of an economic abyss that so many modern adaptations miss. In Helen Fielding's witty updating, it is the terror of being left on the shelf rather than destitution that drives Bridget Jones. Her vision of being an elderly corpse eaten by alsatians speaks of loneliness, abandonment even, but not poverty (it costs a lot to keep alsatians and they need a big garden).
Austen's characters live in the kind of economic hell the Mail likes to suggest is the daily experience of today's middle classes. Persuasion opens with the genteel but impoverished Elliot family having to let out their family pile to a rough-cut admiral with lots of dosh. In Austen's world, banks fail and dodgy businessmen run off with the takings, plunging decent people into penury.
Everyone in Austen's world comes with a price tag that announces, in terms as clear as a livestock auction, just how much money is on offer and how much is expected in return. Thus a stonking great income of £5,000 a year is quite enough to wipe out body odour and the fact that no one in three counties can stand your screechy laugh. But with only a paltry £100 a year, you'd better have the kind of cleavage Andrew Davies dreams about.
Austen did not believe that love conquers all. The girls in her novels who get caught up in the sticky tendrils of romance - Lydia Bennet is the example par excellence - are rewarded with shabby, shadowy lives. Nor, though, was Austen exactly mercenary. She understood that a match made for money was a desolate business (think of General Tilney and his wife in Northanger Abbey). Austen's philosophy might be summed up as that of a canny pragmatist: don't marry for money, but marry where money is.
· Kathryn Hughes is the author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton kathryn.hughes@btinternet.com
