People like Pabzum and a number of other pro-Gina correspondents got it exactly right, in my opinion. It also seems to me that in P&P (the book) the characters earn one another’s love or contempt at a pace that we, who live now, find thrilling since it takes its time filling our jaded modern hearts with longing. But it’s also one of the qualities that make it too morally complex for a two-hour movie. Plot also comes out of character in Austen, and in this sense P&P rises above the other great and immortal love stories of the last two hundred years—Jane Eyre and The Age of Innocence—both extraordinary novels but both also somewhat handicapped by the fact that they occasionally rely on some of the conveniences of melodrama.

Whereas Austen doesn’t need tricks or melodrama or their useful corruptions, she has too uncompromising and passionate an intelligence. And why, in P&P (the movie) has the luscious KK been cast as Elizabeth? In the novel, Jane Bennett is the sweet and beautiful and dutiful daughter, while Elizabeth Bennett, who is the less physically dazzling, is the one with the dazzling mind and the subtle heart. Therefore she earns and is awarded the prize of Mr. Darcy who—and I think we can all agree on this—is a much much better prize than the sweet but intellectually limited prize Jane Bennett wins when she gets Mr. Bingley.

I have read the letters. I am annoyed at how many of the letters supporting Fattore's view are from people who have not seen the movie or have not read the book. How can you judge it without direct knowledge? Is that how insular the Austen fan culture has become, that people won't even venture outside of an circle of ignorance to judge a movie, or any piece of art, on its own terms?

I am also wondering why people who haven't seen the movie would so readily accept Fattore's view when there is a critical mass of positive reaction to the film from almost every hardened film critic who has seen it. Even Anthony Lane, of Brontefication fame, conceded that it had its charm.

I am not saying you have to love the movie. I am just saying you have to see it before spouting off some nonsense about how you somehow [i]intuited[/i], through the power of the universe and a one-minute preview, the quality of the movie. The previews aren't good. The movie is.

I hope there aren't many Jane Austen fans like Ms. Fattore who can be thrown off the scent of great adaptation by one scene on a moor. Ms. Fattore makes a false distinction that where Austen inserted wit into her novel, she didn't also want love -- Austen's genius is greater than that, and she can, and does, have both in the book as well as in this new movie.

First, I am wondering where Ms. Fattore and other Austen fans get the idea that this movie is a bodice-ripper. There are no bodices ripped, and the witty verbal fencing between Elizabeth and Darcy is all very much there in the movie.

Ms. Fattore seems to consider "love" a dirty word when it comes to Austen, and yet in the book Mr. Darcy does tell Elizabeth he loves her, and she too comes to love him. There is emotion in Austen, deep emotion-- her characters are passionate, emotional people, and their wit is used in the service of expressing their emotions. If it's pure witty wordplay you want, untethered to any notion of love, perhaps the movie you would enjoy is "Ridicule," not "Pride & Prejudice."

To answer two of Ms. Fattore's outstanding questions, "Why in God's name do all the people stop dancing when Mr. Darcy walks into the room? or Tell me again why Lady Catherine is paying a social call in the middle of the night."

Well, all of the people stop dancing because they are fairly provincial country folk and are dazzled by the exquisitely well-groomed, well-dressed trio -- Darcy, Bingley and Caroline Bingley -- who walk into the room with their grand clothing and stylish air. If you notice, the ball is held at a local pub -- hardly a glamorous place. The people attending are simple. Imagine, if you will, sending three rich New Yorkers to a Midwestern hoedown, and you'll get an idea of the contrast in economic and social circumstances among the Bingleys, Darcys, and the unglamorous folk of Herefordshire.

As to why Lady Catherine is calling in the middle of the night, she's actually calling very early in the morning. That is in keeping with the book's description that she "called too early in the morning for visitors." Perhaps the director punched it up by having the family in their nightclothes, but that makes sense since a modern audience would not recognize the morning clothes of that time to be inappropriate for visitors.

As for the Madame Pompadour hairdo on Lady Catherine, it's actually not a pompadour hairdo, but more of a Gainsborough-era style. It makes sense if you keep in mind that the movie has been set when Jane Austen wrote the book, not when it was published. Austen wrote it in 1797, when soldiers still wore tricorn hats, gentlemen occasionally wore powdered and curled wigs, and the fashion of the day was for corsets that pushed up the bosom to make it very visible and very ample (a style you see on Mrs. Bennet). The reigning debate centered around nature vs. order. Yet English society at that time was lusty and lively --- the King himself was mad (as Stephanie Zacharek noted in her eagle-eyed review of the movie here on Salon.com)

Most of Ms. Fattore's objections to the movie --which I know are not hers alone, but shared by other diehard Austen fans -- seem to trace back to a misunderstanding of the historical context of the book.

One thing the movie does brilliantly is represent the socieconomic subtext of the book, which creates the divide between Elizabeth and Darcy. In the novel, when Elizabeth is getting prepared to reject Darcy's first offer of marriage, she is at first flattered by the attentions of such "a grand man." Her aunt and uncle also say, "these great men are never at home." Darcy's family appears to be of noble blood -- somewhere in his recent bloodline there seems to be an earl -- and he lives in a stately home. Elizabeth, in contrast, lives on a house connected to a working farm. This key socieconomic divide is one that the movie addresses better than any other film version of P and P -- both previous versions seem to indicate that Elizabeth is almost as rich as Darcy!

Ms. Fattore's expectations of the book seem to be based on some sort of witty drawing-room comedy ideal, where love is banished to a closet under the stairs -- she objects to the so-called Brontefication of Austen, but she seems to want a cinematic Jane Austen who is more like Oscar Wilde: rich people in well-decorated drawing rooms spewing out witty proverbs and feeling nothing more passionate than physical hunger for sandwiches or tea. Nothing could be further from the lively, middle-class, provincial world Austen wrote about. In the book Pride and Prejudice, there are mentions of pigs getting out of the garden, and horses not being available to take Jane to Netherfield because they were needed on the farm. These were people who lived close to the earth, who depended on it for their food and livelihood, and the movie communicates that with its many outdoor scenes, Elizabeth's constant walking, and the frequent appearances of farm animals.

Consider Austen's letter to the Prince Regent's librarian in 1816, when the librarian suggested Jane Austen might write about a rich, noble family. Her reply:

"I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in."

Jane Austen was witty, but she also had a bent for the real and practical circumstances of her character's lives and the society she lived in. Just as it would be wrong to push her into the box of bodice-ripping romance, it's wrong to trap her in the box labeled wit.