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It is the scene most viewers remember from the 1995 television serialization of Pride and Prejudice, but Jane Austen never gave her readers Mr. Darcy emerging from a lake in clinging, dripping riding breeches and shirt. Welshman Andrew Davies did. His are the television adaptations of literary classics that have revealed rather more than appeared on the printed page. In doing so Davies has virtually cornered the market on the bonnets-and-bustles serials that TV programmers use to claim gravitas for their schedules.

This autumn Davies is monopolizing British airwaves with versions of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Sarah Waters' 1998 novel about lesbianism in Victorian England, Tipping the Velvet. The brouhaha over Tipping the Velvet started weeks before its Oct. 5 debut, with obscenity campaigners objecting to scenes of lesbian prostitution and women using sex toys. Davies defends the Waters book, saying it is "a brilliant pastiche of a 19th century novel. All I had to do was take it and arrange it into scenes."

Working on Tipping the Velvet, for a change Davies "almost had to soft-pedal on what was in the book." His usual approach is to discover sexual activity that may have escaped the notice of other readers. In reading Doctor Zhivago, for example, he found that Pasternak "says some extraordinary things ? that Lara was eager for knowledge, she wanted the middle-aged seducer Komarovsky to teach her everything. She was thrilled and excited by this new world of sensuality."

Critics tend to concentrate on the sexual content of Davies' adaptations while ignoring his ability to make the classics accessible and relevant. He tries to find a book's modern resonance, so when he adapted Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, he modeled the principal character, Augustus Melmotte, on the late Robert Maxwell, the notorious British publishing tycoon. In Daniel Deronda, he found, one of the novel's themes is "race and identity, and how important it is."

Though today Davies is chiefly known for costume drama adaptations, his vast output — radio, television and stage plays, children's books, novels and films — has brought him shelves of honors, including a 1991 Emmy and several British Film and Television Academy awards. Now in his mid-sixties, he decided to devote himself to writing full time only when he turned 50 and gave up his job teaching creative writing at Warwick University. "I thought that if I gave all my time to writing maybe I'd just find out what I could do," he says.

As Britain's best-known screenwriter, Davies no longer finds the time to write his own stories. The closest he has come recently is to rewrite Othello in a modern setting with the hero as London's first black police commissioner. He is enjoying one of his current projects, a film about Boudicca, the 1st century English queen who led her army against the Romans. With only the bare bones of her life story to work on, he says, "You could write what we know about her on one sheet of paper, so it's up to me to create the character."

Davies does occasionally emerge from historical drama — last year he wrote the screen adaptation of John le Carré's Tailor of Panama and co-scripted the chick-lit masterwork Bridget Jones's Diary. But his focus on literary classics should keep him busy — and audiences thrilled — for a long time to come.

Q&A: You want to make it feel to other people how the original feels to you.

TIME: How do you manage to catch the tone of a literary classic?
Davies: The main thing about adapting, and particularly about adapting something you really admire, is to make it feel to other people how the original feels to you. It's a bit like getting to know someone so well that you know what they are going to say next. It is learning the tune of somebody's voice, it might be the character's voice or the author's, so that after a while you can make up new things that people think are so real that they go searching through the book to find them.

TIME: Do fans of the books get upset when you invent scenes or dialogue?
Davies: Not very much. The Jane Austen Society, the Eliot people and the Trollope people have all been very kind. Even if they disagree with what I've done, they can always see why I've done it.

TIME: Your female characters are always very strongly written. Do you find women particularly sympathetic?
Davies: I've known a lot of strong women in my life, starting with my mother. I like women, I think I've got more women friends than men and I very much enjoy women's company. There are a lot of terrific women in classic fiction.

TIME: Wouldn't you like to write more of your own original work?
Davies: It's partly finding the time. I'm not sure I have anything that fresh to say. Anyway I have this great queue of adaptations, which I really enjoy.

• KATE NOBLE
• Award-winning writer Andrew Davies