If you like your period dramas butchered, then you are in for a real treat. The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth falls on 16 December, and we are promised a slew of adaptations, documentaries and lectures to mark it. Inevitably, some of these will try to put a ‘new spin’ on Austen, to make out that she was somehow in line with a particular cause or interest of modernity; Mansfield Park is about saving the whales, Colonel Brandon is actually trans, that sort of thing.

This year, Emma Thompson stars in a ‘racy’ new audio drama, Becoming Meg Dashwood, which will focus on the youngest Dashwood sister and her quest for ‘female friendship, sexuality, and liberation’. Oo-er. Meanwhile, Andrew Davies is working on no fewer than three new Austen projects, which he promises will feature ‘psychopaths’, ‘slavery’ and the famously hale and hearty Emma Woodhouse dying in childbirth. It’s a pity Davies couldn’t actually have gone back in time to give Austen some direct pointers on plotting and literary style.

Even the best adaptations will present her characters as more radical than they are in the books

What’s more interesting, and often omitted from modern adaptations, is Austen’s subtle but unmistakable small-c conservative worldview which favours country over town, duties over rights, order over chaos and possesses a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Even the best adaptations will sometimes make changes designed to present her characters as more radical than they are in the books. In her 1995 Sense and Sensibility script, Emma Thompson has Elinor Dashwood complaining about women’s rights in a conversation with her suitor Edward Ferrars. ‘You........

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