Mansfield Park

Patricia Rozema’s film of 1999 gave Fanny Price the wit and the writing career of Austen herself, on the reasonable ground that a shy girl who watches and disapproves is hard to photograph. Purists have never forgiven it; it remains the most interesting thing anyone has done with the book.

There is an opera too, by Jonathan Dove. The novel is the one where Austen lets the amateur theatricals expose everybody — a plot about performance, in a book whose heroine refuses to act.

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.