All Things Pride and Prejudice

 So after a month of voting Susannah Harker comes out on top the best Jane Bennet with 75% of the votes. This result can perhaps be interpreted as another proof that the 1995 BBC mini-series is the best adaptation of Jane Austen's immortal masterpiece so far.
  It has to be noted however that a lion's share of the credit for this result must go to Susannah Harker who managed brilliantly to highlight all the defining qualities of her character; Jane Bennet is kind to and trusting in everyone, which includes even the worst 'villains' who lie to her face; she can justify and identify with just about anyone, even people who hurt her personally. At the same time, being the eldest sister in the family, she never shirked the responsibilities and obligations that come with this status. And Susannah Harker carried it all off with finesse. It's a well deserved victory.
  A few words about our runner-up, Rosamund Pike, it has to be said that perhaps it wasn't entirely her fault that her portrayal of Jane Bennet ended up being a bit off the mark (in one scene in the 2005 movie Rosamund Pike's Jane Bennet even comes across as selfish, one trait that's totally uncharacteristic of the Jane Bennet we find in the book). Rosamund played the part written in the script and as far as that screen-adapted Jane Bennet is concerned, Rosamund was quite adequate. It's just that the adapted version was so different from the book. And once again we inevitably arrive at the same conclusion, namely that the 1995 mini-series is a much more faithful and better adaptation than the 2005 film.
Congrats to Susannah Harker.

    As for the other participants of our little poll, Antoinette Cellier and Maureen O'Sullivan probably stood no chance of having even a single vote cast for either of them; 1938 an 1940 is such hopelessly dim and distant past by today's standards that perhaps only a select few of Internet users will have heard of those two early adaptations and apparently none of these select few have voted in our poll. I personally tried watching the 1940 version and I wasn't impressed at all. Maybe it's because the way movies were made in the UK back then (or was it still Great Britain) was so alien to what we've been conditioned to expect by Hollywood or maybe the film is just plain lame. Either way I wasn't able to watch it to the end. Shame on me.




   As for the 1980 series, I've seen it, from start to finish and I must say Sabina Franklyn does a very decent job; her Jane Bennet is definitely more faithful to the book than the 2005 version, however in my opinion she's not quite as good as Susannah Harker in the 1995 mini-series, so now I guess you know who I voted for.