Jane Austen's work is so good it's adaptation-proof – a TV producer just needs to get out of the way

We had already found surprising comfort in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with its familiar bonnets and bons mots, but then it happened. I need not say what, only that my friend fell off the sofa and I shrieked, both our hearts instantly mended (we still wonder at the miracle).

Then, at the office the next day, it was clear we were by no means alone. With one wet white shirt and a ton of screen-leaping lust, Jane Austen became properly, memorably hot.

If that was a singularly steamy moment in the history of Austen adaptations on screen, she has never failed to bubble. Since the BBC’s first effort in 1938, there have been at least seven TV series and two films of Pride and Prejudice alone. This year, the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, we’re promised another, big-budget Netflix offering to star Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden.

We’ve already had a peek into the novelist’s own life with the BBC drama Miss Austen exploring the bond between Jane and sister Cassandra, and why the latter burned all the letters of the former – still a literary mystery worthy of any Austen novel.

Why do film and TV-makers continually return to the work of this one early 19th-century scribe? She wasn’t alone in breaking ground as a woman novelist of her time. Elizabeth Gaskell set her romantic plots against a background of economic and industrial realism; George Eliot’s all-seeing eye on religion, politics and social outsiders offered a scope to match Dickens; the Brontë sisters were poetic, passionate and unbridled.

But it’s Austen who invariably gets yet another screen outing, no doubt because all her courtly and courtship rituals – letters left on trays, hats removed in doorways, visits to country piles with forays to Bath or Portsmouth – make her works very straightforward to transpose.

Austen’s is a deceptively small world with every scene already beautifully described as if for staging and her witty dialogue is adaptation-proof. All a TV producer has to do is get out of the way. More money? Simply more crinoline.

A small world does not mean small minds, however, and one great satisfaction of reading, and watching, Austen is discovering her radical ideas sneaking centre-stage.

A new three-part BBC documentary does an absorbing job of demonstrating how intermingled were her life and work: a widowed female relative who could do whatever she wanted inspired Austen’s first great character Lady Susan, and her support for the abolition of slavery moved to the page with a mansion built on its profits in Mansfield Park.

The programme also charts Austen’s evolution: from the wit of Pride and Prejudice and her legendary opener about the truth universally acknowledged... to the warmth of Persuasion, when Anne Elliot claims for all women the privilege of “loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone”.

Her characterisation is timeless – whenever I see a virtue signaller rubbing their hands on social media, I think of the Dashwoods’ brother in Sense and Sensibility, happily convincing himself that keeping the family money is the only generous thing to do.

Significantly, the programme also goes some way to answering my question “Why Austen?” by spelling out her defining rebellion. Only by rejecting an offer of marriage without love and rendering herself financially perilous was she able to dodge a 19th-century woman’s lot, and thus become its greatest ever chronicler. It was a triumph, and a paradox worthy of only one pen.

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Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius airs on Monday 26th May at 9pm on BBC Two and iPlayer.

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