SOURCE: Troost, Linda and Sayre Greenfield. “Introduction: Watching Ourselves Watching.” In Jane Austen in Hollywood, edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, pp. 1-11. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

In the following essay, first published in 1998, Troost and Greenfield present an overview of several adaptations of Jane Austen's works for film and television.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of Jane Austen adaptations. Between 1970 and 1986, seven feature-length films or television miniseries, all British, were produced based on Austen novels; in the years 1995 and 1996, however, six additional adaptations appeared, half of them originating in Hollywood and the rest influenced by it.

The boom started in the United Kingdom in September 1995 with the “wet-T-shirt-Darcy” Pride and Prejudice miniseries written by Andrew Davies, and crossed the Atlantic in December with the opening of Emma Thompson's high-profile adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The success of both these productions lifted the...