Austen on Screen
Two centuries of novels, one century of adaptations: from Olivier's 1940 Darcy to Netflix's 2026 series. Every entry compares the screen version against the book — the thing IMDb can't tell you.
2026 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (2026)
Netflix's Pride and Prejudice (2026) is a six-episode limited series written by Dolly Alderton and directed by Euros Lyn, starring Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet and Jack Lowden as Mr. Darcy, with Olivia Colman and Rufus Sewell as the Bennet parents. Netflix has described it as a faithful, classic adaptation rather than a modernized retelling, due Autumn 2026.
2025 · tv
Miss Austen (2025)
Miss Austen (2025), a four-part PBS Masterpiece adaptation of Gill Hornby's novel, makes Cassandra Austen — not Jane — its central figure, with Keeley Hawes and Synnøve Karlsen playing Cassandra at different ages opposite Patsy Ferran's Jane. It reimagines the real, still-debated mystery of why Cassandra burned most of her sister's letters.
2022 · film · from Persuasion
Persuasion (2022)
Netflix's Persuasion (2022), directed by Carrie Cracknell, stars Dakota Johnson as a deliberately contemporary, fourth-wall-breaking Anne Elliot, with Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Wentworth. Its Fleabag-inflected tone and modernized dialogue made it Netflix's most-discussed Austen release — and its most divisive among Janeites.
2020 · film · from Emma
Emma. (2020)
Autumn de Wilde's stylized 2020 Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn with a screenplay by novelist Eleanor Catton, traded the genre's usual soft pastoral look for saturated color and precise production design, earning two Oscar nominations and generally favorable reviews.
2019 · tv · from Sanditon
Sanditon (2019–2023)
Sanditon (2019–2023), adapted by Andrew Davies for ITV and PBS Masterpiece, takes Austen's eleven unfinished chapters and invents an entirely original three-season continuation — including a first-season ending that departs sharply from anything Austen left behind.
2016 · film · from Lady Susan
Love & Friendship (2016)
Love & Friendship (2016), Whit Stillman's adaptation of Austen's early epistolary novella Lady Susan, stars Kate Beckinsale as the scheming widow — charming, calculating, and entirely unrepentant. Released to strong reviews and modest box office, it remains the only major screen adaptation of any of Austen's early or unfinished works.
2016 · film · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), directed by Burr Steers from Seth Grahame-Smith's mashup novel, keeps Austen's characters and courtship plot intact but arms the Bennet sisters as zombie-hunting warriors in a Regency England overrun by the undead — a genre-mashup adaptation that grossed little at the box office but retained a cult following.
2009 · tv · from Emma
Emma (2009)
The BBC's 2009 Emma, a four-part miniseries written by Sandy Welch and starring Romola Garai opposite Jonny Lee Miller, is widely regarded as the most thorough television treatment of the novel — long enough to dramatize nearly every subplot, and often ranked as the best-loved screen Emma among Austen readers.
2008 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Lost in Austen (2008)
Lost in Austen (2008), a 4-part ITV series written by Guy Andrews, sends modern Londoner Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) through a bathroom portal to swap places with Elizabeth Bennet — who vanishes into 21st-century London — and follows Amanda as she scrambles to keep Pride and Prejudice's plot from falling apart around her.
2008 · tv · from Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (2008)
Andrew Davies's 2008 BBC One Sense and Sensibility, directed by John Alexander and starring Hattie Morahan and Charity Wakefield as the Dashwood sisters, restores scenes the 1995 film had to cut — Willoughby's seduction of Eliza, Brandon's duel — for a three-episode serial that opens on material Austen only implies.
2007 · film
Becoming Jane (2007)
Becoming Jane (2007) dramatizes the young Jane Austen's brief real-life flirtation with Irish law student Thomas Langlois Lefroy, with Anne Hathaway as Austen and James McAvoy as Lefroy. The most widely seen Austen biopic, it treats a documented but thinly recorded episode as the emotional key to her entire body of work.
2007 · tv · from Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park (2007)
ITV's 2007 Mansfield Park, part of the network's Jane Austen Season, casts Billie Piper — then best known from Doctor Who — as a livelier, more visibly emotional Fanny Price, with Blake Ritson as Edmund and a pre-fame Hayley Atwell as Mary Crawford. Its brisk 90-minute runtime compresses Austen's longest novel considerably.
2007 · tv
Miss Austen Regrets (2007)
Miss Austen Regrets (2007), written by Gwyneth Hughes and starring Olivia Williams, is often called a companion piece to Becoming Jane — but it covers her later years rather than youthful romance, framed through her niece Fanny Knight's letters asking Aunt Jane for marriage advice she can't quite give with a straight face.
2007 · tv · from Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (2007)
ITV's 2007 Northanger Abbey, adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Jon Jones, stars Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland and JJ Feild as Henry Tilney. Made for ITV's Jane Austen Season, it leans into the novel's Gothic parody with genuinely eerie dream-sequence flourishes.
2007 · tv · from Persuasion
Persuasion (2007)
ITV's 2007 Persuasion, part of the network's Jane Austen Season, stars Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot and Rupert Penry-Jones as Captain Wentworth. A BAFTA-nominated TV movie, it leans on Hawkins's expressive, occasionally fourth-wall-breaking performance to carry Anne's inner life.
2005 · film · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005) stars Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in a romantic, painterly retelling shot on real English locations. Nominated for four Academy Awards, it remains the definitive big-screen version for a generation of viewers and returned to theaters for its 20th anniversary in 2025.
2004 · film · from Pride and Prejudice
Bride & Prejudice (2004)
Bride & Prejudice (2004), Gurinder Chadha's Bollywood-style musical, moves Pride and Prejudice to Amritsar and re-stages it as a song-and-dance cross-cultural romance between Aishwarya Rai's Lalita Bakshi and Martin Henderson's American hotel heir Will Darcy — loose on plot detail, but structurally faithful to the novel's shape.
2002 · documentary
The Real Jane Austen (2002)
The Real Jane Austen (2002) is a documentary blending expert interviews, location filming at Chawton and Bath, and dramatized readings from Austen's surviving letters to reconstruct her biography from the primary record rather than romantic speculation.
1999 · film · from Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park (1999)
Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (1999) stars Frances O'Connor as a more outspoken, writerly Fanny Price and Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund. The film is the most interpretive of the major Austen adaptations, folding in Austen's own letters and juvenilia and confronting the Bertram family fortune's ties to West Indian slavery — subtext the novel keeps offstage.
1996 · film · from Emma
Emma (1996)
Douglas McGrath's Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow, was the first of three Emma adaptations released within a year of each other in the mid-1990s — a sunny, comic take that made the novel newly popular for a decade before Clueless-style modernizations followed.
1996 · tv · from Emma
Emma (1996, ITV)
Not to be confused with the same year's Gwyneth Paltrow film, this ITV television Emma stars Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong, adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence — a darker, more class-conscious reading of the novel made for British television just months apart from its theatrical rival.
1995 · film · from Emma
Clueless (1995)
Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) relocates Emma to a Beverly Hills high school, with Alicia Silverstone as matchmaking teenager Cher Horowitz and Paul Rudd as her exasperated ex-stepbrother Josh. Widely regarded as one of the sharpest, funniest literary modernizations ever made, and a genuine work of social satire in its own right.
1995 · film · from Persuasion
Persuasion (1995)
Roger Michell's Persuasion (1995), adapted by Nick Dear, stars Amanda Root in her feature debut as Anne Elliot and Ciarán Hinds as Captain Wentworth. Made for BBC Screen Two and released theatrically in the US, it is widely considered the most emotionally exact screen version of Austen's last completed novel.
1995 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1995)
The BBC's 1995 Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Andrew Davies and starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, is widely considered the most faithful screen version of the novel — six hour-long episodes with room the 1940 and 2005 films don't have, and the source of the famous "wet shirt" lake scene.
1995 · film · from Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), scripted by and starring Emma Thompson, won her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. With Kate Winslet as Marianne and Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon, it remains the benchmark adaptation of Austen's first published novel.
1987 · tv · from Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey (1987)
This 1987 made-for-television Northanger Abbey, directed by Giles Foster from Maggie Wadey's screenplay, stars Katharine Schlesinger as Catherine Morland and Peter Firth as Henry Tilney. Broadcast on the BBC and A&E and filmed partly at Bodiam Castle, it takes a considerably darker, more overtly Gothic approach than the novel's gentle parody.
1983 · tv · from Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park (1983)
The BBC's 1983 Mansfield Park, adapted by Ken Taylor and directed by David Giles, was the first screen version of the novel. Sylvestra Le Touzel plays Fanny Price and Nicholas Farrell plays Edmund Bertram, across six hour-long episodes that give the story room the later, shorter films don't have.
1981 · tv · from Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (1981)
The BBC's second Sense and Sensibility, a seven-episode 1981 serial adapted by Alexander Baron and Denis Constanduros and directed by Rodney Bennett, starred Irene Richard as Elinor and Tracey Childs as Marianne. Reviews have long been mixed on Richard's notably restrained Elinor.
1980 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1980)
Directed by Cyril Coke and scripted by Fay Weldon, this BBC2/ABC co-production stars Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul and is frequently cited by Austen readers as closer to the novel's own dry irony than the more overtly romantic 1995 and 2005 versions — five episodes that keep the story centered on Elizabeth rather than Darcy.
1972 · tv · from Emma
Emma (1972)
The BBC's 1972 Emma, starring Doran Godwin and John Carson, is the earliest surviving screen version of the novel — a six-part, roughly four-hour serial that had the studio-bound running time to dramatize the book's subplots in far more detail than any later film could manage.
1971 · tv · from Persuasion
Persuasion (1971)
Granada Television's 1971 Persuasion, adapted by Julian Mitchell and directed by Howard Baker, is the earliest surviving screen version of Austen's last completed novel. Ann Firbank plays Anne Elliot opposite Bryan Marshall's Captain Wentworth across five episodes for ITV, in a plainer, more measured register than later versions.
1971 · tv · from Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (1971)
The BBC's first Sense and Sensibility serial, a four-episode 1971 production written by Denis Constanduros and directed by David Giles, starred Joanna David and Ciaran Madden as Elinor and Marianne, with Patricia Routledge as Mrs. Jennings. Little-remembered today, it predates every other screen version by nearly a quarter century.
1967 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1967)
Directed by Joan Craft for BBC One and starring Celia Bannerman and Lewis Fiander, this six-episode 1967 serial holds a genuine "first": after three consecutive lost BBC productions in 1938, 1952, and 1958, it is the earliest television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice — and of any Austen novel — that survives complete today.
1958 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1958)
The BBC's third Pride and Prejudice reused Cedric Wallis's 1952 script with an entirely new cast, led by Jane Downs and Alan Badel. The six-episode serial began broadcast on 24 January 1958; like its two predecessors, every episode was later junked and none survives.
1952 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1952)
The BBC's second Pride and Prejudice, a six-part series scripted by Cedric Wallis, began broadcast live on 2 February 1952 with Daphne Slater as Elizabeth and a pre-fame Peter Cushing as Darcy. Like the 1938 version, it was performed and transmitted live with no recording made, and no episode survives today.
1940 · film · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
MGM's 1940 Pride and Prejudice, starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, was the first major screen adaptation of the novel — a glossy, comic Hollywood take that moves the story's costumes into the 1830s and softens Lady Catherine into a matchmaker rather than an obstacle.
1938 · tv · from Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1938)
The BBC's 1938 Pride and Prejudice, adapted and directed by Michael Barry and broadcast live twice from Alexandra Palace with Curigwen Lewis and Andrew Osborn as Elizabeth and Darcy, was the first-ever Austen adaptation on television. No recording exists — pre-videotape live TV left nothing behind but the script and press notices.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Jane Austen adaptation?
The 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) top most critics’ lists, with Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice the favorite of a younger generation. Our ranked guide compares them scene by scene.
Is there a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation?
Yes — Netflix is releasing a new limited series starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden. It arrives alongside a wider 2026 wave marking Austen’s 250th birthday, including new Sense and Sensibility and Clueless projects — see our full 2026 tracker in the adaptations guide above.