Why we're still 'bewitched body and soul' with Pride and Prejudice - on Jane Austen's 250th birthday

In an era where women can inherit property, would not bring shame on their family if they moved with a man to London, and where a man with a good fortune may not be in want of a wife, the continued appeal of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice may be surprising.

Yet clearly many of us still love the book a public vote once called the second best of all time. The hashtag #prideandprejudice has more than 200,000 posts on TikTok, with users feverishly arguing about their favourite adaptations.

Dozens of films and series have tried to bring the story into the modern day, from Helen Fielding taking inspiration from the story to create Bridget Jones to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a 2012 YouTube series that turned the novel's heroine into a vlogger.

Adaptations that keep the original's Regency setting remain eternally popular, from the BBC's lavish 1995 series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, to the 2005 film featuring Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen.

Tuesday, 16 December is the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth - and there are plenty of Pride and Prejudice adaptations arriving, including a Radio 4 adaptation on BBC Sounds (available now) and an upcoming Netflix production. Meanwhile, a BBC adaptation of spin-off book The Other Bennet Sister is coming soon.

So why does Pride and Prejudice still speak to us in a world that is very different from Austen's time?

When it was published in 1813, the book was "far from a runaway best-seller," says Dr Gillian Dow, who teaches a module on Austen in adaptation at the University of Southampton.

As we moved further in time from the early 19th century, more popular authors began to dim in the public consciousness while Austen's star rose. "Jane Austen sits above politics," Dow adds, "one can go to her fiction and read her without a great understanding of the Regency period."

In place of lengthy historical detail, we get Austen's "delicious" wit, says Rachel Joyce, who has adapted the book for Radio 4. Ella Bruccoleri, soon to play Mary Bennet in The Other Bennet Sister, was charmed by how "wonderfully dry" Austen's writing is.

"Her books are smart," adds Joyce. "When you're in the company of smart people, you feel a bit smarter yourself."

Reading it for the first time at 12 years old was a revelation for her. "Being in this world was so intoxicating. I discovered for the first time that books could completely transport you from your own life."

Dow adds: "She's not a dramatist, but her work lends itself to dramatisation, because she writes such good dialogue. And it can be lifted from the page quite easily and put on the screen."

In Dow's opinion, the book being "quite light in plot" but rich in dialogue and detail has helped it endure, with the story working equally well as a two-hour film or a five-hour TV series.

She adds that with so much detail in the book, each generation's adaptation has space to adapt it for their times without Austenites feeling they are taking too many liberties.

"The 1980 BBC adaptation had a real feminist take of the novel, which was very fitting on the back of second-wave feminism," says Dow.

"The 1990s adaptation, with the wet shirt Darcy that everyone of a certain age knows and loves, has a sexualisation of the hero which was of its time and moment – there was a lot of attention at that time to the female viewer."

As for the 2026 adaptation, it comes following the successes of so-called "colour-blind casting" in series like Netflix's Bridgerton, which has had what Dow calls "a real impact on how we tell stories of Regency period England".

Even when some plot details feel rooted in Austen's era, for Dow the "universality" of the characters and story allows the book to stay relevant.

"We've all misunderstood people we've met for the first time," she says. "We all have pragmatic friends like Charlotte Lucas and impetuous friends like Lydia Bennet." She adds that we also "all know a Mr Collins," the character known for his chronic sycophancy and name-dropping of his benefactor Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Though the book often gets boiled down to being the love story of Lizzy and Darcy, for Joyce its success is down to the fact that the book is about numerous romances. These appeal to everyone from believers in love at first sight (Jane and Bingley) to those cynical that marriage is always happily ever after once the story ends (Mr and Mrs Bennet).

When Joyce first read the book, her sympathies were with Lizzy, who she says "it's hard not to want to be because she's so quick-witted."

Since having children, however, she has started to empathise more with marriage-obsessed matriarch Mrs Bennet. "She can be outrageously stupid," she says, "she is doing everything in her power to make sure that they survive."

Even her less well-drawn characters have their fans. For Bruccoleri, it was the fact that Mary was so often portrayed as a "one-dimensional stereotype of preachiness and awkwardness" in adaptations that drew her to want to bring a fuller picture of the character to the screen.

Nearly every character in the books has had their story taken on by later authors, including Charlotte Lucas (in Rachel Parris' 2025 book Introducing Mrs Collins), Georgiana Darcy (in Laura Masselos' Georgiana Darcy's Diary) and Mr Wickham (in Claudia Gray's The Murder of Mr Wickham, which also brings in characters from other Austen novels for good measure).

With so many adaptations and productions on the way, we are sure to continue to 'ardently admire and love' Pride and Prejudice for centuries to come.

Pride and Prejudice (1995) is streaming now on BBC iPlayer. Radio 4's new adaptation of the novel by Rachel Joyce is now available on BBC Sounds.