British novelist and Austen critic Fay Weldon was more faithful to Austen’s text when she wrote the screenplay for the 1979 BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. Directed by Cyril Coke and filmed in the English countryside, this version features Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul. Coke devotes considerable energy in this nearly four-hour production to capturing the manners, costumes, and styles of Regency England.

Director Simon Langton’s 1995 miniseries for BBC and A&E television has eclipsed the 1979 version in popularity. Andrew Davies adapted the novel for this four-and-a-half-hour production. Much of the subtlety of Austen’s narrative, lost in the stripped-down 1940 film, emerges in this version, the most faithful to date. Jennifer Ehle stars as Elizabeth, and Colin Firth plays Darcy; the two are particularly expressive, wordlessly conveying complex, shifting emotions and capable of dark wit. This version spends more time on the parallel romance of Jane and Bingley, played by Susannah Harker and Crispin Bonham-Carter. The period is captured magnificently, with authentic dances, music, costumes, manners, and scenery. Filmed on location in the Derbyshire countryside and featuring a mansion reliably resembling Pemberley, this three-part adaptation delivers a near-perfect picture of Jane Austen’s world and society.

Real-life Janeites have populated the world of letters since the publication of Austen’s novels. The brilliant novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is preeminent among later writers who explored nuances of personality as their characters played out their roles in society. At the end of the twentieth century, several novels imitating Austen’s were published, though reviewers and critics generally dismiss these books, which are written to satisfy the appetite among Austen’s more ardent worshipers for anything relating to her and her work. Among these fictions are sequels to Pride and Prejudice by Emma Tennant (Pemberley) and Julia Barrett (Presumption: An Entertainment), both published in 1993.

Bridget Jones’s Diary, a 1996 novel by Helen Fielding, describes a year in the life of a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet. Like Austen’s heroine, Bridget Jones falls first for a charming scoundrel but ends up with a man she had initially misjudged, who, like Austen’s hero, is spectacularly wealthy, owns a splendid manor house, and is named Darcy. At one point, Bridget watches the BBC/A&E version of Pride and Prejudice and compares her Mr. Darcy to Austen’s. She later tells her boss, a television producer, that they should interview the stars, Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, about their off-screen romance. (The film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire, also features Colin Firth, this time in the role of Bridget’s Darcy.) In Fielding’s novelistic sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2000), Bridget does the interview with Firth in Italy and cannot suppress the urge to ask him about his sexy role in the TV miniseries.