Just over 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, the razor-sharp 18th-century novelist’s influence over popular culture shows no signs of waning. Earlier this year, the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister—not strictly an Austen adaptation, but based on Janice Hadlow’s book of the same name, which was in turn inspired by Pride and Prejudice—became a word-of-mouth sensation. And now, two more Regency romps are on their way: a new big-screen Sense and Sensibility from lauded indie director Georgia Oakley and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, and a Netflix-produced Pride and Prejudice series from Dolly Alderton, centered on Emma Corrin’s Elizabeth Bennet.
It begs the question: why? When filmmakers could be making something fresh and original, why are they still gravitating towards these centuries-old source materials? Well, the truth is, in a film and TV industry under increasing financial pressures and generally wary of taking risks on new ideas, a Jane Austen adaptation is still perceived as a safe bet—familiar IP, which producers will green light instantly. Why, then, haven’t audiences tired of it? The answer, I think, is because they’re just so much fun.
While comparable classics like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights usually inspire more somber retellings (Emerald Fennell’s wild interpretation notwithstanding), Austen’s work seems to exist in a kind of pastel-hued, pre-Victorian idyll. These leading ladies didn’t have to work as governesses or trawl across the Yorkshire moors—they had (or married into) grand estates, lounged in palatial parlors, attended country dances, and were primarily preoccupied with the issue of who they might or might not marry. If the gloomier, more brooding tomes from the mid-19th century had at least one foot in reality—in the drudgery of daily life, as we still experience it today—these novels deliberately did not. Lighter, frothier, and funnier, with a delightful satirical bent and a talent for skewering the expectations of polite society, Austen provided a sparklingly intelligent but also unashamedly entertaining form of escapism.
The best Austen adaptations lean fully into this carefree dreaminess: every single frame of Joe Wright’s Keira Knightley-led 2005 Pride and Prejudice is swoon-worthy, as are the delicious liberties taken by the 1995 BBC version of that same novel. (Austen’s Mr. Darcy did not, of course, take a dip in the lake, but I’m very grateful that Colin Firth did.) The same goes for Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet’s poetic, Ang Lee-helmed 1995 Sense and Sensibility, and the picture-perfect 1996 Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, from director Douglas McGrath—all visually ravishing and emotionally captivating, with stunning, stately home sets and extraordinary costuming, though a certain twee fustiness remains in the wardrobes of some of the ’90s adaptations.
Not so for the more recent takes on Austen: Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship from 2016, based on Lady Susan and starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny, is sumptuously outfitted and blisteringly funny; Autumn de Wilde’s Anya Taylor-Joy-fronted, ice cream-colored Emma from 2020 feels designed for the Instagram era; and Carrie Cracknell’s 2022 Persuasion sees Dakota Johnson delivering quips to camera with Fleabag-esque aplomb while wearing a rotation of looks nodding to Patti Smith and Debbie Harry. These quirkier, sharper, distinctly more contemporary reimaginings prove that Austen adaptations can, and do, change with the times, their aesthetics morphing as their crowd-pleasing core remains largely intact.
The two upcoming additions to this canon fall somewhere in between these two previous waves of Austen adaptations. They aren’t as carefully stylized as the previous offerings from the 2010s and 2020s, nor quite so traditional as the ’90s and aughts versions. Instead, they seem poised to have a new kind of looseness and naturalism, a certain tactility and connection with their pastoral environment. In the first teaser for Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma Corrin’s Lizzy perches on her roof and gazes at the sunset, runs her hand through the tall grass, dashes through puddles, and dances with Jack Lowden’s Darcy, inching tantalizingly close. Similarly, in the new Sense and Sensibility trailer, Esmé Creed-Miles’s Marianne Dashwood lays sprawled in a field, her hair wild and damp and her cotton dress half undone.
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