Mia Goth’s eyes look naked. In every image, no matter how many times this face is reproduced, the vulnerability startles. Doe-eyed, doll-eyed, fair brows, hardly any visible lashes, she is sweetness in a rancid world and, in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma, my favorite Harriet. She may deviate from some of the specifics of the Harriet that Jane Austen writes in Emma. Her eyes are brown, whereas Harriet’s are blue. Goth is not plump, but she is soft. It’s through Harriet that Austen writes the soulfulness that undercuts her story’s satire. This is what Goth delivers—Harriet’s “flutter of spirits.”

Being a Regency-era gentleman’s “natural child,” Harriet never had the privilege of innocence. Not knowing whose daughter she is, she has had to be okay with the unknown—a foil to Emma’s need to be in control. Goth shares a likeness with Brittany Murphy, whose Tai is Harriet’s proxy in Clueless. Both actresses are bubbly, blissful, but present to the universe’s darkness—it’s not the same as being naive, even if the qualities are sometimes confused. While there’s no bloodshed in de Wilde’s costume drama, Goth brings something from her scream queen résumé: her ability to edge between purity and madness. She plays Harriet with an openness to the intensity of desire and an appreciation of its absurdity

There’s a tabloid soap opera that Goth’s casting conjures, her real-life entanglements mirroring an Austenian plot tailor-made for TMZ. In 2018, seventeen months before the Emma remake’s release, when Goth was promoting a film with Robert Pattinson, their respective exes Shia LaBeouf and FKA twigs were in the news for being photographed together. “Awkward,” reported People. LaBeouf and FKA twigs eventually broke up (there’s an ongoing lawsuit about his alleged abuse of her), and LaBeouf and Goth got back together. Today, they’re married. Like Harriet, maybe Goth could have played her hand differently and landed a better match. Harriet wedded a farmer, Goth a canceled movie star. On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won—but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all.

—Whitney Mallett

We will never be free from Pride and Prejudice. Its tale of class-traversing romance has remained so ardently with us that Darcy and Elizabeth’s love has become the blueprint of a type of romantic narrative itself. For over two centuries, every weird, pretty brunette in art and literature (her beauty always orthogonal to her braininess) who has received great romantic providence has been a daughter of Lizzie Bennet. We would have no horny One Direction fan fiction without Pride and Prejudice; there would be no Fifty Shades of Grey, most definitely no Twilight; it’s likely that brunettes would possess none of the cultural purchase we enjoy now had Jane Austen never given it to us.

We certainly wouldn’t have Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bollywood adaptation of the 1813 novel and perhaps my favorite thing to come out of Austen’s infinitely elastic multiverse. Much of its success is owed to Aishwarya Rai, whose perspicacious Lalita Bakshi (the movie’s Lizzie Bennet) is perhaps a woman of greater beauty than Austen intended. In the book, Lizzie is a little plain; her “fine eyes,” as Darcy puts it, are her primary attraction. Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable were it not for the racial difference that Chadha’s adaptation introduces into it. It doesn’t matter that Rai is Bollywood’s Bellucci with limpid green eyes, nor that her brown hair is dyed a curious auburnish shade in the movie—she’s not white, and Darcy is, so her generational beauty is still relegated to the status of subaltern brunette.

Casting Rai is just one way Bride and Prejudice manages to adapt Austen’s political inquiries around pride and prejudice into an Indian context and market it back to an Anglophone audience as a Bollywood musical, a form that is, in many ways, the dialectical opposite of Austen’s nineteenth-century British novel. Chadha’s film explodes the plot of Pride and Prejudice’s into a jubilant smorgasbord of song and dance, and expounds upon its core concept—the uneasy path romantic love charts through social structures—by portraying a romance that surmounts not only class difference, but also modern iterations of colonialism. When Darcy shares his plans to purchase a hotel in Goa, Lalita bristles, shouting, “I thought we’d gotten rid of imperialists like you!” “I’m not British—I’m American,” responds Darcy, the ignoramus. “Exactly!” Lali responds. Chadha’s ushering Austen into 2004 also produces other succulent details—grainy photos of McMansions peered at on flip-phone screens, a Burberry bikini with matching visor, rimless glasses. Astute brunettes rejoice: As Bride and Prejudice demonstrates, the Austenian blueprint is versatile enough to celebrate Lizzie Bennets across all epochs of history, in either of the earth’s hemispheres. Her ingenious formula is one that is—forgive me—tried and dexterous.

—Arielle Isack

There have been, by my count, nine screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the author’s final and posthumously published 1817 novel. The most recent and maybe worst attempt to retell the story of Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth—two old people in their late twenties who are brought back together seven years following the dissolution of their engagement—is Netflix’s 2022 production starring Dakota Johnson, whose serviceable performance does not spare this film from the vulgar polyester taint of our Temu sensibilities. I notice that whenever people decide that they want to update something from the past so that it appeals to the contemporary eye, they talk about the “timeless” qualities of the source material. But this particular production seems to roil with the time traveler’s horror. There is something incredibly 2022 about director Carrie Cracknell’s take on Austen’s Regency era story of regret, restraint, and eventual reunion, relying as it does on a number of conventions more redolent of TikTok than literary canon. Would Anne Elliot eavesdrop on her would-be lover while peeing against a tree? Would she swill red wine or directly address her audience or throw her dignity to the wind with soliloquies about how much it sucks when the boy you like won’t sit next to you at a dance? Maybe, but not in public! Straddling the distance between an episode of Lizzie McGuire and an expensively produced luxury fragrance ad, this film is the Pet Sematary of Austen-inspired cinema. By Anne’s seventeenth fourth-wall shattering complaint, I thought Stephen King’s words had a lot of wisdom about what it means to believe things from the past are suited to the present; sometimes, this film seems to prove, dead is indeed better.

—Alissa Bennett