Netflix’s “Persuasion” Misses the Boat for Jane Austen Adaptations
The 2022 film is visually stunning but lacks the depth of the novel. Here’s why.
Please note that this piece contains some mild spoilers for a 200-year-old novel.
I recently finished reading Jane Austen’s last novel — what many consider to be her masterpiece. Persuasion was completed in 1816 and was, by Austen’s own account, “ready for publication,” but her death in 1817 preempted its release. It is her most reflective work: slow-moving, contemplative, focused on the inner life and repressed emotions of its subdued heroine. Though Austen’s trademark wit is on full display in her characterization of people like Sir Walter Elliot (“vanity was the beginning and end of [his] character”) and Mary Musgrove (“my sore-throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s”), she toned down her typical social satire in order to delve deeply into the heart of a woman who did not fit the mold of the fashionable literary heroine.
Ironic, then, that when Netflix undertook to film an adaptation of this novel, they should have changed this heroine into something more appealing to a contemporary audience, and left the woman Jane Austen created behind.
