10 great Jane Austen adaptations

The popular idea of Jane Austen today, 250 years since the author’s birth, is vastly different to what it was even 40 years ago. Before the 1990s, only Pride and Prejudice had made it to big-screen Hollywood, with a smattering of faithful period adaptations filling Sunday teatime slots on the BBC in the second half of the 20th century. 

Nowadays an Austen adaptation can mean anything – it can be a Bollywood musical like Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) or even a supernatural horror à la the bizarre Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016). However, this list considers the conventions of what has become the traditional Austen adaptation, and the ongoing attempt to grasp the elusive idea of literary faithfulness.

Austen’s works gained renewed popular attention with the financial reliability of period dramas and adaptations of classic novels in the 1990s, dominated by director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant during a movement referred to as heritage cinema. Since then, with such opulence deemed fusty and tired, filmmakers have attempted to rework the classics for a Gen-Z audience, delivering Frankesteinian projects such as Netflix’s Bridgerton, which marries modern music and vernacular with a Regency setting. 

The adaptations detailed here range from a devout commitment to Austen’s written word to loose plays with her themes, but all of which rank among the most successful takes on her legacy. Together, they represent the modern image of a literary icon who continues to inspire film and television, albeit with a distinctly new flavour.

Director: Robert Z. Leonard

The first adaptation of Austen’s most popular novel, published in 1813, was a BBC television version written by Michael Barry and produced in 1938. Since that transmission is now lost, the earliest version available is a big-budget 1940 MGM production directed by Robert Z. Leonard from a 1935 stage version penned by Helen Jerome. Her adaptation turned Mr Darcy into the heartthrob film and television audiences have come to expect, including directions in her script to drive forward the attraction between his character and Elizabeth Bennet. 

Leonard’s film version, with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin, based on Jerome’s script, cast Laurence Olivier as Darcy and Greer Garson as Lizzie, rendered with all the stuffy aloofness of the original characters. It is a mostly faithful period piece, although the buffoonish Mr Collins is a librarian rather than a clergyman in this version, as the censorious Hays Code prevented the film from mocking men of the cloth.

Director: Giles Foster

During the 1970s and 80s, meticulously faithful miniseries adapted from classic works of English literature were popular on the BBC. As the era of the single play changed with the transition from Play for Today to Screen Two, the BBC began to make television film adaptations of novels, such as Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac in 1986. That film’s director, Giles Foster, returned to Screen Two in 1987 with a feature-length version of Austen’s 1817 novel Northanger Abbey, trimmed down for the format by Maggie Wadey. 

It stars Katherine Schlesinger as Catherine Morland and Peter Firth as Henry Tilney, with an esteemed supporting cast of British acting talent including Googie Withers. Featuring beautiful costumes and location shooting in Bath, the film is significant in the transition from Austen’s place on the small screen towards the big screen into the 1990s, and asserted the BBC’s intention to rival the heritage dramas of Channel 4 and Merchant Ivory.

Director: Roger Michell

Austen’s 1817 novel Persuasion became the basis of a second Screen Two feature film in 1995, adapted by Nick Dear. The film was directed by Roger Michell, who had directed Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia for BBC2 in 1993 and went on to helm such prestige British films as Notting Hill (1999). 

Amanda Root (who had also been sized up by Emma Thompson for the same year’s Sense and Sensibility) takes centre stage as Anne Elliot, and Ciarán Hinds portrayed her love interest, Captain Wentworth. By contrast with the polished heritage cinema popular in the 1990s, Michell gives the film a more authentic, darker flavour, with no makeup, candlelit rooms, worn costumes, and gloomy seaside weather in Lyme Regis. As with many Screen Two productions, the film was broadcast on BBC2 but released in American cinemas by Sony Pictures Classics, triggering a resurgence of popularity of Austen in Hollywood. It is a more mature novel than Austen’s other works, and is rendered in far superior style to the more recent Netflix version starring Dakota Johnson.

Director: Amy Heckerling

No film better illustrates the Hollywood appeal of Austen than Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, a very loose take on the 1815 novel Emma, which translates the narcissistic matchmaking habits of its protagonist from Regency England to 90s Beverly Hills. It is a superior rendering of Austen’s story to Douglas McGrath’s Oscar-baiting take on the novel released in 1996, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma Woodhouse and Toni Collette as Harriet Smith. 

Alicia Silverstone makes for a suitably infuriating Emma, rendered as Cher Horowitz, and Brittany Murphy is a beautifully played stand-in for Harriet as Tai Frasier. It is best approached as a tongue-in-cheek take on Austen, although much of the film’s delight is in spotting parallels between the original story and the characters Heckerling creates. There is certainly a connection between Emma’s privileged existence and that of Cher, and the romantic and social trappings of a wealthy white teenage girl’s rose-tinted world.

Director: Simon Langton

Master novel adapter Andrew Davies exquisitely adapted Emma in 1996 for ITV starring Kate Beckinsale, having first turned his hand to Austen with this finest adaptation of all. Forever the quintessential version of Pride and Prejudice, the six-part series directed by Simon Langton stars a glowing Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and an iconic Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, whose sodden white shirt is one of the most enduring images of the 1990s heritage era. 

The series directly inspired Helen Fielding to write Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), the film version of which was co-adapted by Davies, and even makes an appearance as Existential Crisis Barbie’s comfort watch in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie (2023). It is a faithful and lavish adaptation, featuring a remarkable ensemble cast including Alison Steadman, Julia Sawalha and Anna Chancellor. Like the 1940 film version, the narrative is focused on the hidden romance between Lizzie and Darcy, subtly played across the extended runtime into a truly satisfying conclusion.

Director: Ang Lee

The third great Austen adaptation of 1995 was a big-budget production of Austen’s first novel, published in 1811. The screenplay was penned by Emma Thompson, who by this time was synonymous with heritage film, having received accolades for her performances in such literary films as Howards End (1992), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and The Remains of the Day (1993). 

Thompson spent five years adapting the book and plays Elinor Dashwood with an exquisite deftness alongside Kate Winslet as her younger sister Marianne. Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman are suitably roguish as their respective suitors, with a supporting cast of British stalwarts too long to list. In contrast with previous adaptations, the film was directed by Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, who was not familiar with Austen and spoke little English. However, Lee responded well to Austen’s humour and brings Thompson’s screenplay to life with the light, effervescent touch required for the tone of the novel.

Director: Patricia Rozema

The 1999 version of Mansfield Park, written and directed by Patricia Rozema, departed from the traditional mode of faithful adaptation that had dominated British filmmaking. Most significantly, the film takes great interest in Austen’s own life and voice in the novel, a trend followed later by such biographical works as Becoming Jane (2007), starring Anne Hathaway. Gone are the conventions of heritage cinema, and in its place Rozema grapples with themes of gender and colonialism, rendering the story as a critique of slavery more explicitly than Austen herself engages with the subject. 

Rozema also exaggerates what she reads as a lesbian interest in Fanny Price from Mary Crawford, drawing attention to their physical contact and longing gaze. Frances O’Connor is a more rounded Fanny than Austen’s heroine, and certainly placed in a more modern context than there is textual basis for.

Director: Joe Wright

The sexualisation of Austen is a contentious point, and is handled best through subtle gesture and performance. Perhaps the finest example is Joe Wright’s direction of Pride & Prejudice, adapted by Deborah Moggach, which slightly alters the novel’s period setting to return to Michell’s vision for a muddier, unclean vision of Austen’s world. The direction walks a line between the tradition of heritage filmmaking and a more mainstream, youthful appeal, casting Keira Knightley – fresh from the Pirates of the Caribbean films – as Elizabeth Bennet and the then-unknown Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy. 

The greatest assets of this adaptation over the 1995 version are in its production, especially the sun-dappled cinematography of Roman Osin and the luscious score by Dario Marianelli featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano. It is a far less stagey and aloof version than its 1940 predecessor, regenerating the appeal of Austen for the 21st century.

Director: Whit Stillman

With all of Austen’s other novels having been adapted several times over, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a refreshing adaptation of her epistolary novel Lady Susan, written circa 1794. Austen’s influence is present throughout Stillman’s filmography, especially in his debut Metropolitan (1990), which observes in similar style the Yuppie elite culture of New York youths. 

Having previously played Emma Woodhouse in the 1996 Emma, Kate Beckinsale takes on the role of the widowed Lady Susan Vernon on her quest to find matches for herself and her daughter in order to renew their fortunes. It is a more mature narrative than some of Austen’s other works, and bears the distinct comic voice of Stillman’s wit. The film stars an imperious Chloë Sevigny as Alicia Johnson, and features a supporting cast including Stephen Fry, James Fleet and Jemma Redgrave, giving it a transatlantic flavour typical of modern Austen adaptations.

Director: Autumn de Wilde

Austen adaptations have moved away from a stale commitment to authenticity towards light-hearted quirkiness. One of the more successful attempts at this tone is Autumn de Wilde’s direction of Emma., sensitively adapted by New Zealand author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton. Amid candy-coloured production design, Anya Taylor-Joy gives Miss Woodhouse a raunchy, Fleabag-esque wink-to-camera persona that remains endearing in spite of her selfish behaviour. Mia Goth is perhaps cinema’s finest Harriet Smith, exhibiting a wonderful repartee with Emma, supported by such talents as Bill Nighy, Johnny Flynn, Josh O’Connor and Miranda Hart. 

De Wilde’s film captures the comedy of Austen’s writing effectively, not least in the delightfully bouncy score by Isobel Waller-Bridge. Whether such an approach to Austen may now be dated, as Netflix attempts to capitalise on the appeal of Bridgerton in its adaptations, remains to be seen.