'Clueless'! 'Fire Island'! Iconic Jane Austen Movie and TV Adaptations

As Jane Austen once said, “A lady’s imagination is very rapid,” and so, it’s quite important to keep it preoccupied with ingenious movies and series. What could be better than watching a program inspired by Austen’s greatest works?

While Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility have been adapted for the big screens, some put a modern-day twist on the classic prose. Clueless, which came out in 1995, is one of the most notable modern adaptations of an Austenian classic.

“You don’t go, ‘You know what, the world needs an adaptation of Emma and mine will be genius,” director Amy Heckerling told Town & Country in July 2020. “You find yourself driving around wondering, ‘What am I going to do next,’ and thinking, ‘I stink, and everybody hates me.’ Then you start to wonder, ‘What do I like and what makes me happy?’ … You really had to want to do what you were working on. I started to think of what really amused me, which was very positive characters; I just don’t understand how people can go around being positive and it kind of cracks me up.”

She continued, “I started to think what if there was a teenage girl who, no matter what was happening, couldn’t have her bubble burst … [and] I started to think of what the equivalent would be in the world I was living in, in California in the 1990s.”

Keep scrolling below to look back at some of the most iconic Austen adaptations: