Austen, forgive me for being so blind to your beauty.

Well I finally got my Pride & Prejudice fix satisfied. I just procured the new version with Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennet, which though more condensed than the BBC miniseries, is still quite lovely.
Keira is just so enchanting and I just love the empire waist garments. Soon I hope to have more time & space to practice my sewing, so that I can start making my own Austen wardrobe.
But the thing I love most about this new version of P & P is that the actors all look closer in age to the characters from the book, I mean don't get me wrong Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle are perfect together, but I do think that Matthew Macfadyen & Keira Knightly just have a more youthful quality about them. Or maybe it's just they are closer to my age versus the former.
At least they are closer in age to the characters than Emma Thompson & Kate Winslet were in Sense & Sensibility, which is still a wonderful movie, but I have never really seen Emma Thompson as a romantic lead. She just always seemed too matronly to me and the character was only suppose to be 19, while Kate Winslet was good in the role, but it wouldn't have hurt to have a teenage actress playing the part, since that overly romantic spirit that makes up Mary Ann's character does come from the inexperience of a teenager with little responsibility. I do think Emma Thompson did a wonderful job adapting the story, but I think she shouldn't have put herself as one of the sisters. Maybe that's just me.
Anywho, I still love the films. I mean how could one not love Austen's perfect storytelling? I am such a big fan of clever romantic comedies, I mean I know they all have that general boy meet girl formula, but that doesn't mean they aren't still great to watch and Austen is really the foundation of romantic comedies.
I can't believe it took me so long to discover her. I was in college when I started really watching the films, and it was just this last year that I started reading the books. I had such a bad experience with old English writers, especially Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, which was so tedious & frustrating.
I blame it on academia just sucking all the joy out of reading the classics or having you only read things so full of metaphorical symbolism that you just want to drink heavily to get your head straight again. So I just figured that Jane Austen would have the same tedious dry language & never really bothered with her.
That was until seeing the miniseries and being told it was so closely based off the book and loving the miniseries. So, thereby I just had to read the book to see how it compared and I was so impressed with the narrative style that I just had to start reading all her works. So now I'm in the process of reading Sense & Sensibility which still continues Austen's brilliant writing capability, I mean it's funny because she isn't portraying any real dramatic situations or complex plots, it's all just ordinary daily life. They are the grown up version of those trashy historical paperback romances that I use to read as adolescent.
So now that I got my costume romance fix, I should be good for at least another 6 months or so, though I am now starting to get an itch for some Anne of Green Gables romance.....aaah the sweet beauty of costumes, love, & rain.