Everybody Loves Jane.(Jane Austen)(Television program review)

You remember Jane Austen--she was one of People's "25 Most Intriguing People of 1995." That honor, which is not handed out to every early-nineteenth-century writer--the magazine is not Regency People, after all--was, of course, an amusingly self-mocking acknowledgment of the absurdity of ranking Austen; anyone who is remotely connected to the world of letters or has ever wanted to be or has ever merely recited the alphabet would feel unqualified to rate Austen. Reading her makes us rate: just mentioning her, just saying her name, makes us feel more clever, more discerning, more observant, and more keenly fit to understand and endure life's wounds, including the ones that we inflict ourselves. It's a wonder that all parents don't name their daughters Jane (or, hewing to the naming habits of our day, Austen), as a way of thrusting greatness by association upon them.

The 1995 honor was in recognition of the fact that Austen keeps coming back like a song; that year's productions included a TV miniseries of "Pride and Prejudice," starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and a film adaptation by Emma Thompson of "Sense and Sensibility," starring Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman. Then there was the delightful and very successful movie "Clueless," written and directed by Amy Heckerling, and starring Alicia Silverstone as a Valley Girl Emma, and the anticipation of two other "Emma"s--a movie with Gwyneth Paltrow and a TV version with Kate Beckinsale. For Jane Austen, it was a year to write home about.

The last couple of years have seen another surge in Austen mining and manufacturing: a "Pride and Prejudice" movie with Keira Knightley; a movie called "Becoming Jane," which, taking off from letters that Austen wrote to her sister, imagines a bona-fide love affair between the young Jane (played by Anne Hathaway) and an Irishman of her acquaintance named Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy); a Bollywood musical called "Bride and Prejudice"; and the movie "The Jane Austen Book Club," based on a 2004 novel about the lives of a group of otherwise disparate aficionados in a California university town. PBS has insured that 2008 will be a big year for Austen, too. On January 13th, it began a four-month Austenpalooza, in which it will present adaptations of the six Austen novels, and a new kinda-sorta biopic--another stab at Austen's love life, also based on letters--called "Miss Austen Regrets."

PBS's Austen promotion is part of a rebranding campaign to raise the worn-down profile of "Masterpiece Theatre," which is thirty-seven years old and no longer attracts corporate support. Lashing itself even more tightly to the word "masterpiece," the network is now using the word alone as a rubric under which it will present "Masterpiece Classic" (what used to be called "Masterpiece Theatre" and, as of this season, is hosted by Gillian Anderson, late of "The X Files"), "Masterpiece Mystery!" (formerly known as "Mystery!"), and, to show that there is room at the PBS inn for programs that are set in the years since the telephone was invented, a new category called "Masterpiece Contemporary." There's something a little sad about the Austen hoopla, though; two of the six offerings--the Beckinsale "Emma" and the Ehle-Firth "Pride and Prejudice"--were on A&E more than a decade ago, and both have been available for sale or rent for many years. (They, and two of the four new adaptations, were by Andrew Davies.) Still, the Austen logjam has many pleasing aspects--as well as aspects that will vex Austen maniacs, but, as far as I can tell from the various Web sites devoted to the author, being vexed is part of the joy of being an Austen maniac.

The first show in the PBS series is "Persuasion," a bold choice, since it's a cold, damp afternoon of a story, whose happy ending comes less as a triumph than as a relief. Sally Hawkins is Anne Elliott, who, at the age of twenty-seven, is haunted by her rejection, eight years earlier, of a suitor she loved, having been persuaded that his fortunes were not bright. Instead of watching a heroine make ...