For Fans of Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice gets the readers, but Persuasion gets the second-reads. Written in the final months of Austen's life, it is the one where the wit goes quiet and the feeling comes through undisguised. Anne Elliot is Austen's only heroine who made the wrong choice and has lived with it. Captain Wentworth's letter, written in real time during a conversation about whether a woman could outlove a man, is the most purely romantic scene in English prose. The 2022 Netflix film fumbled it badly, which is instructive: Persuasion works precisely because Austen does not over-explain it.

Amy Heckerling's 1995 transplant of Emma to a Beverly Hills high school works not because it's clever casting but because it understands the novel's engine: a heroine who believes she is helping others while being comprehensively blind to her own feelings. Cher Horowitz is as self-deceived as Emma Woodhouse, and the comedy of her gradual education is identical in structure. Clueless also preserved something stuffy period adaptations often lose: Austen's genuine affection for her heroine, even when she is wrong.

Readers who finish the six novels and need somewhere to go often try Dickens or Trollope, which is fine but not quite right. The closer heir is George Eliot. Middlemarch has Austen's sociological precision and her dry comedy of manners, but it extends both into darker, more explicitly political territory. Dorothea Brooke and Lydgate are making the same calculation as any Austen heroine (marry or not, and for what?), except Eliot is unsparing about the material consequences. Start with Middlemarch, then go back to The Mill on the Floss.

Every decade produces a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation, and every decade the 1995 BBC miniseries reasserts itself as the correct version. What Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle found in that six-episode format was something cinema rarely manages: the time to let the relationship cool, then warm, then cool again, at Austen's actual rhythm. The 2005 film with Keira Knightley is beautiful and earns its defenders. But the BBC version is what happens when you trust the book.