I wonder what Jane Austen would make of all  the hoopla surrounding her work? I’m fairly sure she never envisaged Mr Darcy in a wet shirt, for a start. Not that I am lodging a personal objection: Colin Firth made just the same indelible impression on me as on so many others who watched the BBC’s excellent Pride and Prejudice in 1995. Yet, as critic John Mullan pointed out the other night on a very interesting edition of The Culture Show, Jane Austen didn’t need to put Mr Darcy in a wet shirt. She relied on the power of language, beautiful understated language, to suggest the depth of attraction between her hero and heroine. Yet, as Mullan also noted, television has to do these things differently, and the shirt business contributed a powerful visual image, reinforcing the reader’s or viewer’s impression. That production did it well, which is more than I can say for the later Keira Knightley version. Her Lizzie Bennett could have been the twin sister of the hoydenish Lydia — and the curious conclusion on a windswept moor made me wonder if I had stumbled on an Austen/Bronte hybrid – Wuthering Prejudice, perhaps? (While on the subject, I feel just as disappointed by the present Blandings offering. Wodehouse, like Jane Austen, was a master of the language. There is no need to reduce it to slapstick, or squander the talents of a fine cast by making it so. The language as written can carry it! The producers and writers might do well to look back at the wonderful Jeeves and Wooster, the words beautifully realised by Fry and Laurie.) Still, things are as they are, and returning to my first query, I can’t help wondering what Jane Austen would make of the massive industry in publishing alone, if she were writing to her sister Cassandra now? So, in a purely playful spirit of speculation, with no pretensions to anything approaching her mastery, I propose to imagine from time to time what I can only guess she might think…