Going over to the dark side?

British screenwriter Andrew Davies turned eighty-nine last month, but he’s not slowing down. Quite the reverse.

Over the past six weeks, Davies—the author of four well-known TV adaptations of Austen novels, including the BBC’s iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice--has begun talking publicly about his next projects. Apparently, he’s working on three new Austen spinoffs—and hoo boy, they sound like doozies. Next to this stuff, Mr. Darcy’s wet shirt practically qualifies as abject faithfulness to the original.  

The least controversial-sounding of the three is an adaptation of The Watsons, the novel Austen seems to have begun and then abandoned during her Bath years. Although it’s a promising beginning, Austen wrote only about 17,500 words of the story, which revolves around a family of unmarried sisters living in genteel near-poverty with their clergyman father.

As Davies cheerfully put it in an interview with the London Times last month, “There’s only enough for a first episode, but we can make up the rest.” He did the same thing to Austen's other fragment, Sanditon--with decidedly mixed results--so why not The Watsons?

Davies’ second project—a Mansfield Park that takes place partly in Antigua, where Sir Thomas Bertram keeps a secret biracial family on the slave plantation whose earnings undergird his upper-crust English life—will be “a wonderful, radical adaptation,” Davies promised during the same interview. “I’m amazed nobody’s thought of it before.”

His happy sense of his own originality will probably not be shared by anyone who has paid a smidgen of attention to the conversation around Mansfield Park over the past, oh, three decades or so, during which scholars analyzed the novel’s allusions to slavery, and a feature film--Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation--foregrounded the Antigua context. But if Davies promises to give us a Fanny Price who resembles Austen’s timid-but-indomitable heroine, rather than a feisty proto-Austen with cleavage worthy of a St. Pauli Girl, I’ll watch. (Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll watch no matter what.)

But Davies’ not-so-unfamiliar approach to Mansfield Park pales next to the full-on fanfic he seems ready to embrace in his new take on Emma, a summary of which allegedly “drew gasps of shock” from the audience at a recent UK literary festival. This story, Davies promised, will center on Jane Fairfax, giving us a dissolute and unfaithful Frank Churchill, an Emma Woodhouse dead in childbirth not long after her wedding, and a bereft Mr. Knightley who finds happiness with the widowed Jane.

I’m skeptical about the likelihood that Davies’ proposed Mansfield Park and Emma 2.0 will ever get made: The Jane Austen brand—not to be confused with the actual novels--is all about happy endings, as the folks behind the first season of Sanditon learned to their cost. All this talk of death, darkness, and dysfunction is not On Brand, even if it leaps from the pen of the revered Davies.

But bless his heart, as they say down South. We should all keep so busy in retirement.