“Jane Austen: A Woman for the ’90s,” says the Everyman’s Library ad in Publishers Weekly. “She’s sensible, she’s persuasive, she’s proud. And she’s the hottest film property since E. M. Forster.”
Nineteen ninety-five is a bumper year for Austenites. A film of Sense and Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson, is slated to appear this autumn. The BBC is putting out a new version of Pride and Prejudice and has collaborated with Sony in an ungraceful adaptation of Persuasion (in their attempts to purify the movie of Hollywood sheen and give it an air of naturalism, the producers of Persuasion have too zealously ripped away the romantic gauze: the distressing results are an unappealing Anne Elliot, a pockmarked Captain Wentworth, a greasy-locked Benwick, and a slovenly-looking Lady Russell). And, in the season’s most offbeat film adaptation, Austen’s meddling heroine Emma Woodhouse has been charmingly resurrected as a dizzy Beverly Hills babe in the new teenage movie Clueless.
It is heartening to see that the works of Jane Austen live on in the mainstream of our culture. She is indeed a woman for the Nineties and for every decade. Though her books are almost two hundred years old, they gleam with an immediate freshness that no previous or subsequent novelist has quite achieved. They are entirely free, for example, of the lumbering contrivances and verbosity of her major predecessors, Fielding and Richardson; the novels of her successful contemporaries, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and even Walter Scott,
