Adapting Jane Austen

Cailey Hall

Hall, a scholar of English literature, wrote her senior thesis on Austen fandom, and as a graduate student received a prestigious fellowship to study at Chawton House - neighboring the author's final residence at Chawton Cottage, and now home to Austen exhibits. Hall has designed and taught multiple Austen courses, including "Austenland: Jane Austen's Lives and Afterlives" and the current class, "Jane Austen: Then and Now."

Mariana Souza, a senior English major in Hall's class this quarter, explained how historical context and secondary sources provided in class helped Souza gain a richer understanding of an author she already loved, and confirmed for her that Austen was more than "just a novel writer."

"She was a bold social commentator," Souza said. Through Hall's class, "We not only get to learn about the novels alone, but also about Austen's world. Understanding her childhood, family history and place in society helps put many of her composition choices into context, making it easier to understand why each story is the way that it is."

Souza developed a modern take on "Pride and Prejudice" for her final project, choosing a college campus for the first meeting of the protagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, at a dance.

"We've been discussing adaptations all quarter, and how they do or don't do justice to their source material," she said. "A good adaptation excels at translating the themes and messages of a work, not necessarily replicating it scene by scene."

That means digging into Austen's works to understand why her writing still inspires readers - and writers - a quarter of a millennium after her birth. Adaptations abound, from the book-faithful BBC "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries with Colin Firth, to blockbuster Emma updates like "Clueless," alternate perspectives like Jo Baker's novel "Longbourn" and modernized retellings like Curtis Sittenfeld's "Eligible." This year alone saw the miniseries "Miss Austen" and the movie "Jane Austen Wrecked My Life" hit the screen, and the announcement of an upcoming "Pride and Prejudice" Netflix miniseries and a new "Sense and Sensibility" movie - to name only a few of the abundant Austen-adjacent works in 2025.

"What makes Austen resonate is that she's an incredibly careful observer with an astute ability to reflect or criticize," Hall said. "I ask my students for the beginnings of what they would pitch as an Austen adaptation because it makes them think about how to analyze Austen's critical and careful readings of her world, and how to translate those readings into different times, places and cultures."

Hall's class spent two to three weeks each closely reading "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Persuasion," ending each unit with an in-depth comparison of the novel to some of its film adaptations. On the day the class reviewed scenes from "Fire Island" and the 2005 "Pride and Prejudice," about 40 students crowded into the small lecture room, taking diligent handwritten notes and offering up observations of the select scenes Hall showed.

One student noted how "Fire Island" calls attention to class in multiple ways, explicitly calling attention to the characters' overlapping status markers, including wealth, race and looks.

"Without this scene, we would have been paying attention to the money and might not have understood the role of race in this community," the young woman said.

When was Jane Austen born?

Austen was born on Dec. 16, 1775, in the small English village of Steventon.

How old would Jane Austen be in 2025?

2025 marks 250 years since Austen's birth.

When did Jane Austen die?

Austen died at the age of 41 on July 18, 1817.

What was Jane Austen diagnosed with?

Austen fell ill in early 1816, and in May 1817 her family brought her to Winchester, England for treatment. Insufficient information remains for a diagnosis, but biographers and doctors in the mid-1900s suggested Addison's disease or possibly Hodgkin's lymphoma as matching her known symptoms.

Where is Jane Austen buried?

Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, England, about 17 miles from her final home, Chawton Cottage, and about 90 miles southeast of London. An Austen pilgrimage is more likely to include a visit to Chawton Cottage and Chawton House's Austen exhibits, or to Bath, another city in England where Austen lived and where significant scenes from "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" take place.

What novels did Jane Austen write?

Austen completed six novels in her lifetime: "Pride and Prejudice," "Emma," "Sense and Sensibility," "Persuasion," "Northanger Abbey" and "Mansfield Park." Her unfinished novels include "Sanditon" and "The Watsons," and her early writings include "Lady Susan" and "Love and Freindship" (Austen's original spelling).

What is Jane Austen's most popular book?

"Pride and Prejudice" is generally considered Austen's most popular novel. A Guardian article in 2017 noted that it had sold more than 20 million copies, and there have been countless book, movie and TV adaptations.

What is Jane Austen's darkest book?

"Mansfield Park" takes a more serious tone than Austen's other novels, and makes the most direct and critical references to the rich characters' wealth coming from the slave trade.

Why did Cassandra destroy Jane Austen's letters?

Few of Austen's letters survived, and it is believed that her sister Cassandra burned most of the author's personal letters. Theories include that Cassandra wished to protect her sister's privacy and reputation among her family, and potentially her readers.

Did Jane Austen ever fall in love or get engaged?

When Austen was 20, she wrote to her sister Cassandra about her flirtation with an Irish lawyer named Tom Lefroy, and her regret that he would soon leave the country. At the age of 26, while visiting family friends a few miles from her childhood home in Steventon, she was engaged for less than a day to the eldest son, 21-year-old Harris Bigg-Wither. Little is known about why she accepted or why she broke it off the next morning, though theories include that she accepted because his large inheritance would have meant her comparatively poor family would be cared for, and withdrew to avoid marrying without love.

Who inherited Jane Austen's money?

Jane Austen left almost all of her money (slightly over 1,000 British pounds) to her sister, Cassandra. About half of the money that she left to Cassandra came from the money Austen made from her novels.