Persuasion
Jane Austen · first published 1817
Austen’s last finished novel, filmed five times, and the quietest thing she wrote.
5 versions · 1960–2022
Roger Michell’s version of 1995 is the one usually held up, largely because it refuses to prettify: the rooms are dim, the faces are ordinary, and Anne Elliot spends most of it being talked over. The 2022 Netflix version went the other way and had the heroine address the camera, which the book’s whole method resists.
Everything in Persuasion happens at a remove — eight years earlier, in another room, in a letter. That is precisely what a camera finds hardest, and why the versions differ so much.
Written 1815–16, published after her death
The war was over, and the Royal Navy was paying off its officers and putting its ships in reserve. Captains who had made fortunes in prize money came ashore rich and unemployed, and country families that had lived on land and rank suddenly found themselves outranked by men who had earned their money at sea. That reversal is the engine of the novel.
Austen’s own brothers were naval officers. She wrote it while she was ill, finished it in 1816, and did not live to see it published; it appeared in 1817 with her name on it for the first time.
On screen
5Film and television, earliest first.
- 1960 Persuasion
- 1971 Persuasion Howard Baker
- 1995 Persuasion Roger Michell
- 2007 Persuasion Adrian Shergold
- 2022 Persuasion Carrie Cracknell
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.