Three Jane Austen adaptations to stream on Netflix right now
How often do you find yourself screaming, “Bring back yearning”? A little more often than you thought, right? Well, we call it the Jane Austen effect. Come on, you have to agree that you either had an Austen phase or you’re still in it. And if you say you never had one, you probably were watching Sesame Street when the world was going gaga about Pride & Prejudice.
That’s because Jane Austen did not write romances; she wrote duels with dinner parties and restraint, and people absolutely losing their minds over a missed glance. This is the woman who gave us men writing letters because they physically cannot speak their feelings out loud. Women walking through the countryside like they’re going to war with their own dignity. Families ruining everything. That’s Austen for you.
Her stories initially feel like manners, but we know that’s just a disguise for emotional chokeholds. They mess you up in a way that you find yourself crying over a line about a pianoforte or a property.
And if we have convinced you enough to rewatch the Jane Austen masterpieces, we won’t disappoint you by not giving you a list. Here are three Austen adaptations you can stream on Netflix right now.
Three Jane Austen adaptations to stream on Netflix
Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995)
Ang Lee directing a Jane Austen adaptation was not something anyone saw coming in 1995, and yet this film is so masterfully delicate, it feels like it was handed down from the Austen heavens. You have got Elinor Dashwood, holding back every single emotion, and Marianne, falling in love with a man just because he recited poetry in the rain. Classic Jane! This film is not about whether you are more logical or more emotional… It’s about how much self-destruction you can inflict by pretending to be fine. Feeling a bit called out now, aren’t we?
But the heartbreak in this movie is elegant; your brain might confuse it for poetic romance. And ironically, the romance is unbearable. Hugh Grant stutters while Alan Rickman watches silently. Emma Thompson writes a whole screenplay and then sobs on screen so hard it makes your own ribs hurt. Oh, Emma, the woman you are!
Persuasion (Carrie Cracknell, 2022)
Persuasion broke the internet the moment it dropped, and not because it’s perfect, but because it DARED to mess with Austen. And yet, deep down, it remains a story about regret so thick you could drown in it and love that waits eight years without losing its grip. Anne Elliot is the girl who made the worst decision of her life and has had to live with it ever since. Now the man she once left behind is rich, hot, and standing in her living room.
Dakota Johnson plays Elliot with a modern touch, sure, but beneath the quips and looks-to-camera is a woman suffocating in memory. You feel every second of how long she has been carrying this heartbreak. And when he writes that letter? No amount of fourth-wall breaking can save you from the emotional destruction it causes.
Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)
Yes, yes, the cliché. But this is the film that singlehandedly taught an entire generation what yearning means. That hand flex that the internet still drools over alone belongs in a museum. Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice takes Austen’s most iconic novel and turns it into a fever dream of longing glances and people losing their minds because their crush showed up uninvited in the rain. Elizabeth Bennet walks through fields like a soldier of heartbreak, and then we have Mr Darcy.
It won’t be wrong to call the tension biblical in this film, and it’s all because of the chemistry. It’s nuclear. Keira Knightley weaponises her stare, while Matthew Macfadyen barely survives each scene without combusting… just like the character he played. If you have ever cried because someone said, “You have bewitched me, body and soul,” congratulations, you are one of us.