Is the India-born Mira Nair a strange choice to adapt what some think is the best English novel of the nineteenth century? Not at all. She has an instinctive feel for the comic possibilities of marital alliances, as she showed in her wonderful Monsoon Wedding (2001). And she brings to the movie an awareness of the role India played in the English imagination; in the nineteenth century, hardly a well-born family lacked relatives serving or living in India, and wasn’t it Orwell who said the two nations deserved each other, because they shared the same love of eccentricity?
