In for a penny. . .

Penny Ashton is a New Zealand actor and comedian who has created two Jane Austen-inspired shows: the one-woman Promise & Promiscuity, and the improvised musical Austen Found. Ashton seems to be a true fan. Which made me sigh all the more when I ran across a Q&A that she did recently with a Wellington newspaper.

“What is it about Jane Austen that brings you back to her worlds and her characters?” the interviewer asked. “Firstly, Jane Austen is hilarious,” Ashton answered, correctly. “Why wouldn’t you come back to a writer who has such lines as this Mr. Collins clanger; ‘And what excellent boiled potatoes. It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.’ ”

Well, here’s one reason why: Because that line was not written by Jane Austen, but by Deborah Moggach, the screenwriter of the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, the words “potato,” “vegetable,” and “exemplary” never appear anywhere in Austen’s novel.

I have no problem with movie quotes—hey, we’ll always have Paris—and Moggach’s screenplay is frequently clever. (Here, she turns a bit of Austenian third-person paraphrase --“The dinner too, in its turn, was highly admired; and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins, the excellence of its cookery was owing”—into dialogue.) The potato line, as performed by the excellent Tom Hollander, is indeed very funny.

But movie quotes are not the same as book quotes, and it is dispiriting to watch as the boundaries between fact and sloppy approximations thereof erode still further. As a self-proclaimed Austen fan, Ashton should know better.

But it’s hard to fault her when Google’s AI is doing its best to muddy the waters. Fresh off its work at promulgating the falsehood that Jane Austen served in the military, here is the AI insisting that the potato quote was written by Austen, and citing its use on mugs, T-shirts, and Pinterest boards as supporting evidence:

And now the AI's prediction machine will be able to add Ashton’s interview to its sourcing. Grr.