STEPHEN MATCHETT 

Still waiting for the climax in endless Austen remakes

OH good, another screen version of Pride and Prejudice is on the way. This one stars Keira Knightley, famous for her ability to look alluring, whatever century she is supposed to be in.

And about time too. After all we have not had a screen version of the novel since 1995, when the BBC gave us Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet, in a performance which put the P back into Prim. There are women who have worn out DVDs looking longingly at Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. He was the one who plunged into the pond at Pemberley. Apparently washing at least once a summer was the way Regency girls knew a chap was a gentleman. (The other Mr Darcy played by Firth, the one in the Bridget Jones books and films, is a lawyer -- which is not the same thing as a gentleman at all, no matter how much he bathes.) 

The damp Darcy is the worst diabetes-inducing sugar-hit. Apart of course, from all the other adaptations of Jane Austen. As well as the modern P&P I, and now II, there have been recent screen versions of Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Mansfield Park. There is Bride and Prejudice, an Indian adaptation of the prissy P book. And then there was Clueless, in which Emma Woodhouse somehow found herself in the school from Beverly Hills 90210. 

It was an excellent translation, faithfully using great lines from the book, including "She had been often, like, remiss, her conscience, like, told her so; remiss, perhaps, more in thought, duh, than fact; and oh-my-God, scornful, ungracious dude." 

It seems the world cannot get enough of Austen films, which move so slowly that time actually stops. Or perhaps it only seems like that for everybody whose partner keeps making them watch sodding Mr Darcy jump in that bloody pond. 

But what is amazing is that women, and let's face it - reading Jane is not a taste many blokes acquire - never notice what is missing from Austen's regency romances. 

Like dirt. Everybody in Austen is spotless and seems to smell like roses. And this is all meant to have occurred in an age when a bloke having a swim makes for a big scene. While the Bennet sisters (well perhaps not Lydia) were of spotless character, nothing else would have been whiter than white at Longbourne. 

Or work. None of the Bennet girls would have laboured in an iron lung. Not only did they have to sponge off their old dad but they would have been bored witless. There are only so many times in a day a young woman can play Chopsticks on the pianoforte without a sister or two attacking her with an axe. 

The possibility that servants might dream of doing more than toiling for a pittance, as well as wagering on which sister would get to the axe first, never seems to occur to anyone. 

And that dull thunder in the distance might have been the weather. Unless of course it was the Napoleonic Wars. 

Austen's imaginings were to the reality of late Hanoverian England as Disneyland is to south central Los Angeles. 

But none of this stops sales. The trailer of the new P&P looks much like the last one. (Except perhaps for the way Ms Knightely appears as if she got lost on the way to the set of Love Actually). But this will not stop legions of ladies seeing it, and lip synching all the dialogue. 

This arsenal of Austen probably explains why it is now chic to ask sheilas out by writing to their fathers and enclosing your bank statement. 

And it undoubtedly accounts for the world-wide wig shortage, and why there is more muslin in the movies than anybody could ask their maid to poke a stick at. 

There are now Austen detective novels. Twenty years back there was even a novel of Jane's Australian connection. 

It seems new ways to tell Austen's tales will never end. 

For (and I bet you saw this one coming) it is a truth universally acknowledged that a film producer in possession of a good fortune is not in want of a wife who loves Austen.