Emma
Jane Austen · first published 1815
Eight versions, including one that moved the whole thing to Beverly Hills and lost nothing.
10 versions · 1948–2020 · screen, stage
Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) is the adaptation everyone cites, and it is faithful in the way that matters: it understands that Emma is about a clever young woman who is wrong about everything and means well throughout. There is a stage musical of it now too.
Austen said she had taken “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”. Every screen Emma is likeable from the first scene, which is the one liberty they all take.
England, 1815
Written and published in the year of Waterloo, and there is not a soldier in it. Twenty years of war with France had just ended, prices were about to collapse, and Austen wrote a novel in which the largest public event is a ball at the Crown Inn.
That is deliberate. The gentry of a village like Highbury lived through the war as a series of rumours and shortages, and the things that actually decided their lives — who inherited, who could afford to marry, who was received — went on exactly as before.
On screen
9Film and television, earliest first.
- 1948 Emma Michael Barry
- 1960 Emma Campbell Logan
- 1995 Clueless Amy Heckerling
- 1996 Emma Douglas McGrath
- 1996 Emma Diarmuid Lawrence
- 2009 Emma Jim O'Hanlon
- 2010 Aisha Rajshree Ojha
- 2020 Emma Autumn de Wilde
- — Emma John Glenister
On stage
1Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- — Clueless KT Tunstall
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.