If any of you have been watching the BBC's recent dramatisation of "Cranford" it might be of some little interest to you to know that I have been watching it too. With great delight - not least because it has suggested that there is still a fondness for that sort of thing, which is also, to a certain modest extent, my sort of thing...
That wasn't actually what I wanted to tell you though. What I actually wanted to tell you was that in watching Francesca Annis's splendid portrayal of Lady Ludlow, it began to seem to me that here was the face and manner I had always somehow had in mind for my own Lady Macauley!
So, if it would please you to be able to envisage her at all, that is what I believe she would have looked like, and that her demeanour......
I shall be back later to end the story on a happier note. In the meantime, I can tell you that they have buried the poor old lady in the cold ground of the little churchyard where Jack has lain these almost thirty years - and are now gone down to Flory, where they mean to try to celebrate their first Christmas without her. In the spring, they will go to Tuscany.....
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14 comments:
Ah, you're still here Bea :)
Yes, I love Cranford although I've haven't seen much of it - shall have to get the complete set from the library one day.
So the cast will be off to Tuscany in the spring, hmm, I wonder what that will bring...!
I too am a big Cranford fan, and definitely see a link with I Beatrice, same beautiful writing and sensiblities!
Glad we are agreed on Cranford Anon - now, all I have to do is bring you round to Henry James!
Well, not REALLY here, Merry - just couldn't resist the Francesca Annis link.
I seem to remember reading somewhere once, that Leonardo (da Vinci, not di Caprio) was terribly delayed with the painting of the Last Supper, because he spent so many weeks wandering the streets of Florence looking for the face of Judas Iscariot....
So you see I'm in excellent, if rather over-illustrious company!
I'm afraid I haven't been following Cranford beatrice. The trailors made it look too much like Desperate Housewives in bonnets but perhaps I have been missing out. I find it hard to get into such victoriana when translated to the screen and taken away from the original prose. Francesca Annis is superb however. I hadn't quite cottoned on that she was in it.
I thought your last chapter was terrific. A bit of a shock though...
If looking for faces keeps you here Bea, keep looking!
Who would best represent Beatrice herself? Judi Dench perhaps?
Intriguing thought Rilly! Is it possible that 'Desperate Housewives' will be seen as a kind of Cranford in years to come?
No, not Judi Dench, Merry...
The earlier Beatrice (the one originally portrayed in the third person) was a biggish hearty-ish sort of Englishwoman - you know the sort, backbone of the British Empire and all that!
But I don't believe the first-person narrating one was a bit like that. So who would represent her, I wonder? Can't think of anyone at present, but will keep looking....
Had I been Dickens of course, I'd have told you precisely what she looked like - right down to the mole on her left cheek, and the colour of her buttons!
But somehow, my characters are never quite as sharply defined (even in my own mind) as that.
We don't get Cranford here - sob!!
But I have found the DVD's available on Amazon; will be a little present to me for 2008, I think.
I wonder if it's the new one though, Debio? Don't quite see how it can be - since the final episode has only just gone out, here.
Nothing would surprise me with Amazon, mind - but anyway, just to be sure, look for Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Francesca Annis, among others. in the cast list...
I haven't, I must confess, watched Cranford (in fact the only things I ever get to see are Star Trek re-runs and Bergerac) but I did read it a long time ago and I've always visualised your characters as being somewhat 'out of time' (and none the worse for it, I should add).
It's funny that, OM - my characters being 'out of time', that is... I had never meant them to be so. Of a past generation perhaps, since so am I. (I would never DREAM of trying to tackle the modern young, for example! Well not any of them above the age of my grand-daughter, which is six.)
I think it stems from my early days in London as a private nurse, when the only people I came in contact with were ancient Russian princesses, or stately English dowagers and forsaken maiden ladies, living in mansion flats in Hyde Park, or Kensington Square, or Knightsbridge...
And they all had little toy dogs, I seem to remember - whom it was my fate to walk out with in the mornings, in exclusive garden squares! There was an unspeakable little chi... (sorry, spelling defeats me! Mexican miniature dog with proportions not unlike those of a rat?), for example - which I was required to escort every morning into the garden of Eaton Square. Not my best-loved function of all time, I can tell you!
So I guess my notions of Englishness must have been indelibly coloured by that rather weird early experience...
Not that the Cranford type of English dowager or maiden lady is not still alive and well, and living on a village green not many miles from me today, mind you...
Thanks for the info; have just checked and that is, indeed, the cast.
Will order in the New Year - currently stressed about the Christmas deliveries; not yet arrived as I didn't factor Eid into the equation - everything closed here until Saturday, apart from the shops!
Amazon never ceases to amaze me Debio! I don't know how they managed to get hold of Cranford so soon, but am very glad for you that they did. Perhaps it's only films that are denied DVD release for a longish preliminary period?
There are two other films in a similar genre that I have recently bought through Amazon, and that I think you might enjoy. (If you haven't already seen them, that is?)
One is "Tea with Mussolini", set deliciously in Florence and San Gimignano, and with a cast including Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and CHER! It's a Fellini film, based on his own wartime experiences as a boy in Florence - an absolute charmer, which I am able to watch over and over again!
The other one is "My House in Umbria" - again with a villa, and an Umbrian landscape to die for! A little more off-beat perhaps; but with a cast including Maggie Smith, and the excellent Timothy Spall - and Ronnie Barker surprisingly good in a straight role....
I think you'd enjoy them both - I simply adored them!
Merry Christmas - and think of us shivering in a prolonged frost! (Lovely bright days though, so who's complaining?)
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