Handy list of recent Jane Austen appropriation films with & without an intermediary post-text

Jane Bingley Collins in Lost in Austen — there is no intermediary text, this is rather a time-traveling mash-up

Dear friends and readers,

If you read this blog regularly, you know I am embarked on writing a paper on the importance of screenplays or shooting scripts in film study. I reiterate and demonstrate what has been shown before: that the persistence of so-called studies of an eponymous (intermediary post-text) or Jane Austen novel as underlying all Austen films ignores how a film is made and from what concrete sources (fully edited on-going film script and scenarios).

One problem I’ve been having is I no longer can link in a list of Austen films onto my website since my husband died without risks of all sorts and those I’ve been working on are precisely this new batch. So, as I’ve been using the latest appropriation films — films with screenplays or shooting scripts and without intermediary texts where the Austen novel lies at quite a distance from the film — I thought it would be useful to me to have one place to refer to, and perhaps others who might value my writing on Austen or other women-centered, woman-authored films. So here they are:

Longbourn: said to have a novel film in progress

Death Comes to Pemberley 1: A spoilt mini-series
Death Comes to Pemberley 2: Interwoven Threads
Death Comes to Pemberley 3: A story of self-recognition
(The Bletchley circle is connected to but not at all limited by this Austen mystery brutal-murder matter.)

Austenland: a film still in the draft stage?

The Jane Austen Book Club: Conversations about the novels
The Jane Austen Book Club: as free adaptation of all six novels

Other films with intermediary or post-texts a few of which I’ve briefer blogs, and the texts for, include Bridget Jones’s Diary (see Nurse Betsy) and The Edge of Reason, Stillman’s Last Days of Disco (scroll down, no published screenplay but a brilliant novelization worth while). E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (novel still not fully recognized as post-text to Northanger Abbey. Lakehouse (out of Persuasion) has an intermediary text in a Korean film.

See also (no intermediary text):

Lost in Austen 1: Pride and Prejudice: Dreaming the Austen Movies.
Lost in Austen 2: The harrowing of Amanda.
Lost in Austen 3: We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives.
Lost in Austen 4: “You don’t do guilt, do you?”
Ruby in Paradise: To ache is human (Emily Dickinson poetry)
Ruby in Paradise: Young Lady’s Entrance into the World
It is telling that in some readings of the Austen film canon that the intermediary text even is not insisted upon, but subjective reactions of the film critic about the underlying Austen novel.
From Prada to Nada: Sense and Sensibility
Aisha: Emma

Elaine Cassidy, as Lucy Honeycomb, recommended by a holiday friend — she learns to look into others around her and into her self …

For more on the above and other kinds of older film adaptations of Austen’s, post-text or related (friends and relatives) texts about Austen and her contemporary challenge, go to The Austen Film Miscellany on my website. The above links represent only those I’ve written about since 2009. The miscellany goes back to the 1990s.

Ellen