Kaira_Marston

"I must confess, my dear, that the merest mention of that man's name is in fact enough to season my tapioca pudding with the sour-scented salt of your candle's darkest light." As my title suggests, Bridgerton's dialogue sounds like an over-the-top parody written by a trio of drunken lit students for a laugh. It constantly feels like the writers are taking the piss, safe in the knowledge that their target audience thinks Austen was a cryogenically-frozen secret agent from the 1960s. When it tries to sound poetic, it too often sounds mawkish ("If you desire the sun and the moon all you have to do is go out and shoot at the sky") or just plain nonsensical ("Darkness is our candle now"). George Orwell termed the latter 'writing without thinking'. When it strains to mimic Austen's mannerly dialogue, it frequently trips into tautology ("She is my *personal* special guest") or cliche ("There is nothing quite like the sweet-scented smell of success"; "You are the bane of my existence and the object of all my desires"). Emulating Austen's graceful cadence and euphonious scansion is hard, and too often the writers throw in 'filler' words, rather than anything nuanced or meaningful, to accentuate it ("Most marriages of the ton are, in fact, mere matters of business, my dear"