The Jane Austen Movie Club: An Analysis of Modern Jane Austen Film Adaptations

Abstract

When the first epic motion picture, The Birth of a Nation, was released in 1915, Jane Austen had been dead for almost one hundred years, and the quaint stories of her regency girls trying to find husbands seemed to be far from most filmmakers minds. Austen wouldn’t make her way to the big screen for another twenty-five years, with Robert Z. Leonard’s 1940 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and her characters wouldn’t make it into the modern world for much longer. Yet in the last couple of decades, Austen has gone through a resurgence in the world of film, thanks in no small part to one particular genre: the modern movie adaptation. The last twenty years have seen Jane Austen characters all over the world – from the streets of Beverly Hills to the beaches in India – reimagined and rewritten to work in the modern day. While some of these adaptations have been more successful than others, they ultimately help to illuminate her genius, and show both her great foresight and her ability to construct timeless characters and plots. Modern adaptations of Jane Austen have all helped to prove that the stories of Austen do not grow old with time, and that her universality as a writer still shines through just as brightly almost two hundred years after her death.