As a natural journalist— a writer engaged by the connections between the phenomena of today and the long-term patterns of human insight and undertaking — I often wonder if I ought to regret never having been paid to do what comes naturally. Then I encounter the work of a professional and realize that this is not what comes naturally to me at all. Only yesterday, in the new New Yorker (June 23, 2025), I chanced upon a jarring instance. On one of the two “Goings On” pages — two! I remember when the “Goings on About Town” section ran for five times that length — there’s an item in which Alexandra Schwartz “shares her three favorite movie adaptations” in honor of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, entitled “Pick Three.”
These are Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (based on Emma) and Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park. Of one thing we can be sure: these would not have been the novelist’s choices had she been able to read the screenplays during her lifetime.
Schwartz quickly puts her finger on the problem with Pride & Prejudice: “The movie’s tone can seem more Brontë than Austen.” Need more be said? My one memory of the adaptation is of mud, especially the mud in the stable yard at Longbourn. It’s a very brown film — “sparkling” not, curiously, a word that comes to mind. The novel itself makes do with the soiled hem of a dress.
“As entertainment, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 classic “Clueless” is unsurpassable,” Schwartz enthuses. What’s that supposed to mean — that bit about entertainment? Is it meant to imply a rather different formulation, such as, say, “A boring, period-costume retread…”? Clueless is a very clever picture, and it goes about as far as Emma can be taken into the lifestyle depravities of a contemporary Los Angeles suburb. But the toxic self-regard of Mrs Elton and the pathos of Miss Bates find no match in it. Gemini says so.
Mansfield Park is also a very clever picture, but that has nothing to do with Schwarts’s claim, provoked by a regrettable tic of today’s journalism, that it exposes “the brutal basis of the social system.” Denunciations of slavery were not far to seek in the literature of Austen’s day, but they were quite rightly not looked for in fiction. The wit of Rozema’s rethink lies in its replacement of the novel’s obstinately virtuous but otherwise pallid and shy heroine with a figure based on Austen herself. It is difficult to imagine how an adaptation could be made without some such alteration. But this is obviously not what the writer had in mind. A better birthday pick, I think, would have been Roger Mitchell’s Persuasion.