The title of this essay refers to the hours I spent searching the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice for the above-referenced bum, a derriere I was convinced I had seen in viewings past. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. No such shot exists; what I was remembering was an amalgamation of several scenes in which Darcy, as played by Colin Firth, should have been naked. Firth himself reported that, in one scene at least, he would have bared all had the BBC allowed the original screenplay to be filmed unrevised. Instead, when Firth’s Darcy dives into a lake to cool his passion for Elizabeth Bennet, he does it clothed. That scene, which is not in the novel, helped ignite “Darcy-mania,” an obsession so potent that it has itself become the subject of novels and films. No such response greeted the 1995 adaptations of Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility or Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park. Compared to these films, the 1995 adaptation of Austen’s third novel is libido on toast. Drawing over eleven million viewers in Britain alone, the mini-series raises a question: how does one translate the erotic energy in Austen’s novels to screen?

To some, the question might seem preposterous; one might as well ask how to transform iron to gold. Charlotte Brontë found little ardor in Austen’s novels. Writing to George Henry Lewes, she describes Pride and Prejudice as a “carefully cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but . . . no open country, no bonny beck.” To W. S. Williams, she declares that the “Passions” were unknown to Austen, who was “a complete and most sensible lady, but a rather incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman.” Notwithstanding her genius, Bronte seems, in regard to Jane Austen, to have been a bit narrow-minded and insensible herself. Passion is present in Austen’s novels, but it is not expressed in the teeth-gnashing, head-banging mode of a Rochester or Heathcliff. Her characters rarely—if ever—voice the depth and intensity of their desires. And that is what makes her novels so sexy. The erotic energy in Austen’s novels requires repression; it is generated in the gaps between what the protagonists feel and what they can say or do about it given the social mores with which they live.