In this one-off special, Lydia Wilson stars as our heroine, wispy and genteel Emily Fox-Seton, a well educated but penniless woman who grew up hoping she would marry for love, but has come to realise that her priority must be survival. Fine featured but at pains never to look pretty or attract attention, Emily works for Lady Maria Byrne (Joanna Lumley), a domineering, acerbic older woman who lives in a very smart house on the other side of town. During her daily duties as a lady’s companion, Emily comes into contact with her employer’s wealthy widower nephew, Lord James Walderhurst (Linus Roache). Weary of Lady Maria’s relentless match making, Walderhurst cuts a rather distant figure, but he treats Emily with a great deal more respect and kindness than his aunt.
When Walderhurst realises that a favour he asked of her has lost Emily her position he is mortified. It occurs to him that the two of them could come to a practical if unromantic agreement – marriage. He admires the fact she is dedicated and hard-working and appreciates her undemanding nature which he imagines would not impact too much on the life he has chosen. He realises that he can offer her a secure home and a true independence born out of his wealth. He and Emily aren’t in love, but he clearly hopes that one day affection may blossom. Emily is shocked and sad to give up her hopes of marrying for love but without other means of support her situation is such that she has little option and she finds herself accepting.
Like the book, the drama begins as a Victorian fairytale, duping us into a false sense of familiarity. There are costumes. There is a stately country house. There is a grapefruit-faced housekeeper and a butler who looks like the wrong answer in a game of Guess Who? There are overly accented scullery maids a-titterin' an' a-gossipin' under marshmallowy bonnets. There is a string-heavy score that becomes aroused at times of narrative stress and positively tumescent at the sight of a poorly secured cravat. There is sexual repression and an over-buffed blunderbuss. Life in the marital mansion passes in a series of stifled yawns and half-hearted gropes by gaslight. There are dinner table longuers and lingering shots of Emily looking pained at a writing desk. It's all unervingly reminiscent of one of those Catherine Cookson miniseries in which some rustic mimsy in a Great Uncle Bulgaria shawl blithers on about "duty" and "a woman's place" before banging a blacksmith on a tor. It's not exactly a bouncing jalopy of woo-hoo, notes Sarah Dempster.
Until this point, our full attention rests on the demure petty concerns of social rivalry, but things become more complicated when Emily befriends Walderhurst’s wildly handsome young relative Alec Osborne (James d’Arcy) and his exotic Indian wife (Hasina Haque), who turn out to be very dark characters. They seem very much in love, which is the converse of Emily and Walderhurst’s still unformed relationship, and Emily is fascinated by their passion. Significantly, Walderhurst intensely dislikes his nephew and his frequent requests for money. Osborn is Walderhurst’s sole heir as long as he and Emily remain childless and Emily realises belatedly that Walderhurst’s sudden proposal was hastened by the family’s concerns about Alec’s marriage to Hester.
When Walderhust joins his regiment in India, Emily is left alone, unaware of the bitter dangers and social implications that came with defending a huge fortune. Things start to Happen. There is malaria and an imperilled dray horse. Joanna Lumley glides on, realises she's too likable to convince as a bitchy matriarch, and glides off again. The suspense mounts. There is an abandoned cottage and the line "There's going to be a storm", followed by a storm. And there is, unfortunately, an elderly Indian servant, Ameerah, whose every appearance is accompanied by a "mysterious" Indian flute motif, presumably to ensure we don't suddenly mistake her for a strippergram or member of Union J. Cue an uncomfortable "beware the exotics" subtext which, when combined with references to unpleasant rumblings in the colonies, threatens to turn the whole thing into It Ain't Half Hot Ma'am. But never mind. The past is a foreign country; they do things racistly there.
Screenwriter Katie Brooke explains: "Emily Fox-Seton and Lord Walderhurst marry each other for the wrong reasons. It is a business arrangement, not a love match, although they both feel more for each other than they let on. They are insecure in their relationship and this is a weakness to be exploited. Enter two wonderful villains, Alec and Hester Osborn. On one level they have what Emily and Walderhurst don’t have: unbounded confidence in each others’ love, and outspoken passion for each other. But they don’t have one thing: money. As Walderhurst’s heir, Alec decides it is time to step into his cousin’s shoes."
Ultimately, Burnett asks, must fame and fortune come at the expense of the purity and kindness that our heroine embodies? As the big hand creeps towards denouement o'clock, you start to realise that not only is what you think couldn't possibly happen because it's too silly happening, it is happening with a face so straight it's almost heroic. All of which makes for an unapologetically old-fashioned, beautifully shot, thunderingly unsubtle melodrama that falls somewhere between diverting twaddle and humourless hoopla. Etiquette decrees that we call it Frownton Abbey before apologising profusely and leaving in the nearest barouche.
The Making of a Lady represents a resurrection of the author’s now little-known adult fiction, so frequently overshadowed by the cosy works of Victorian moralism- The Secret Garden- for which she has become synonymous. Getting this story onto the screen has been something of a personal journey for executive producer Stevie Lee, the driving force behind the novel’s revivification. After a new edition of the book was put out by Persephone, the publishers of neglected fiction, Lee was given it to read by a friend while she was undergoing chemotherapy in hospital. "It was a fantastically good distracting read," she says. "It’s so rare to find a story where you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next. At base it is a tale about money and greed. It’s just gripping, and I loved it from the heart."
Director Richard Curson Smith says what he particularly likes about the story is the way it gradually shape-shifts. "It’s not a Wilkie Collins gothic horror, or a romance," he explains. "The strange smashing together of these two worlds is what creates the tension, the dread." The drama was filmed on a modest budget of £1.2 million in just four weeks. Filming took the production to three stately homes; including Jacobean Cheshire mansion Dorfold Hall, which represents the Walderhurst’s country pile. It comes as no surprise when d’Arcy – fresh from filming lavish Hollywood blockbuster Cloud Atlas with Tom Hanks, and a Hitchcock biopic with Antony Hopkins – reveals that there has been something of a "Dunkirk spirit" on the set.
According to Curson Smith, though, managing the tight budget has been nothing compared to the challenge of blending costume drama and psychological horror. He calls his hybrid "a cross between Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, and Rosemary’s Baby". How did he achieve it? With careful manipulation of the camera so that, as in the novel, we only see the world through Emily’s eyes and "never quite know what’s real and what she’s imagining. It is about a girl being immersed in a world she doesn’t understand, and we go on that journey with her."
The fact that two plot threads, one a romance, the other a thriller, are woven together through the film, resulted in the creation of a strange dichotomy on set. D’Arcy channelled childhood trauma to get inside the head of villainous Alec, whom he describes as "a sick puppy… but quite good at badminton". In the other camp, Roache says playing the part of Victorian gentleman Walderhurst had been "delicate, like fine lace work". He says he accepted the job because he loved the romance. "For me, it’s about two people who are getting married for different pragmatic reasons," he says. "It’s so unusual, so human, and so delicately written."
When interviewed by the Telegraph earlier in the year, Roache had just finished filming the "awkward" first lovemaking scene with Lydia Wilson, which both actors think is a pivotal moment for their characters. "Women have changed their relationship to their bodies since then," says Wilson, who spoke to a movement coach to help her create Emily. "She encouraged me to think about Emily’s sexuality as this absolute mystery to her. All her movement flows out of her guardedness. When she does have sex with her new husband, it’s this huge game-changing thing."
Both Wilson and Curson Smith agree that Emily, Burnett’s rather pale heroine, may be the reason the story dropped out of fashion. "Jane Austen’s heroines are witty and concerned with image," thinks Wilson. "Emily doesn’t have any of the commodities that make someone successful in the modern world. She’s not exactly a little sex bomb [in the book]. She’s more like a lovely kind cow with big eyes." In this respect, at least, she is the antithesis of Wilson herself. The 28-year-old, who studied at Queens' College, sleepily padded into the consciousness of the television watching world as William Boyd's Monday, the tousled teen temptress with a penchant for nude fridge raids, in the 2010 adaption of Any Human Heart. It turned out her character was 16 and had run away from home on the West Coast to live in Greenwich Village and jump on the beatnik bandwagon. "My mum's from Greenwich Village and grew up at the same time, so it was a delicious part to research," says Wilson. "She told me about living in this almost childlike state of bohemianism, walking around the house naked."
Raised in Queen’s Park, in Kilburn, north-west London by her advertising exec father and American mum (an ex-model turned philosophy teacher), Wilson decided she wanted to be an actress at the age of five. "I still wonder why – and it lay dormant for a long time because I was a quiet kid." Eventually she secured a minor role in the highly-regarded adaptation of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about human clones bred to be organ donors. "I have one line," she giggles of her scene as an ill-fated replica being looked after by Carey Mulligan on her deathbed. 'Dude, I’ve got one eye and no stomach! It’s funny because they say act with your gut or, on film, use your eyes, and I have neither! Carey sniffed out straight away that it was my first job – she was super-cool. I guess it’s kind of funny to die as your first job, it’s like a fucked-up kind of birth."
As a Cambridge English graduate Wilson says she "wolfed down' Burnett’s novel before tackling arguably the biggest role of career. She wanted to be as faithful as possible to Burnett’s Emily. Although the script has admittedly taken some licence with her character, the production has at least been faithful to Burnett’s writing in at least one vital arena: the wardrobe. The author, said to have been disappointed with her first husband, once complained to her friend, "he does not know the vital importance of the difference between white satin and tulle, and cream-coloured brocade'. In the books, her descriptions of clothes, sometimes pages long, are bordering on the fetishistic. So it seems only right that Wilson should have had a staggering 42 costume changes for 100 minutes of drama. She talks extensively about her "top 10 outfits" including "a cream suit that has a gorgeous little cravat around her neck, a huge hat, and a garnet-coloured rope that does it up at the front…" So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself for a new entry in a distinctive genre, the obsessively detailed costume horror.
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