Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion

[StrychnineInTheSandwiches]

Persuasion is my favourite Austen novel. All that longing, those disappointed dreams, the lost bloom of youth. And Captain Wentworth smouldering about the place.

Well Netflix have produced an adaptation featuring Dakota Johnson acting all giggly and Fleabag-ish. Wearing lipstick! Calling Wentworth her ‘ex’.

I will no doubt watch it as soon as soon it’s released next month but I suspect I’ll snort my way through it.

Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds will always be the perfect Anne and Wentworth so I’ll try not to get too precious about this reinterpretation.

But watching the trailer made all ‘u wot mate?’ (as eloquent as Jane herself I’m sure you’ll agree).

Amen...Lost In Austen is another favourite.
The oh-so-modern version if Poldark boiled my piss also.

Bad costuming makes me rage, it instantly takes me out of the moment.

Beachy wave hairstyles (eg women wearing their hair down anywhere out of the bedroom). Characters not wearing hats, jackets and gloves out of doors, etc.

One of the reasons I loved the latest Emma version. Emma was impeccably and appropriately dressed always.

Yes, their kiss was the daftest one ever seen on screen, and the stupid running around which she did before that -- bah! Some of the rest of that version wasn't bad.

twitter.com/RomancingNope/status/1536739830381613056?s=20&t=A7MPp0irs5cBBNrTzDs_-g

Lovely thread about Austen & Persuasion.

i should not have described it as lovely! I meant I agree with the thread and it was great to see Anne's complexity acknowledged.

Re the Amanda Root Persuasion, does anyone else think Sophie Thompson was brilliant as the querulous sister Mary? For my money she’s a better actress than her sister Emma - also loved her in 4 Weddings etc.

WitchwithoutChips, I remember my A level English Lit teacher telling us we would appreciate Anne Elliot and Persuasion more as we got older. How right she was....

NotontheStairs, that is a very good précis.

Watched the Sally Hawkins kiss on YouTube, and someone described it as looking as if she was pulling an invisible carrot out of his mouth! 😁

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER well, I was today year's old when I learned Sophie and Emma Thompson were sisters, so thanks for that. Sophie is amazing, her turn as the dippy wife on Detectorists had me giggling and then a punch to the guts about babies. She's a fantastic actress.

I'm bored of Austen adaptations. So many other authors and stories to be told and we get the same ones over and over. Similarly bloody Tudors and WW2 in history programming. Tell us the stories we don't know!

Oh she's marvellous as Sheila in detectorists. A really versatile actress.

Their mum is wonderful too. Emma and her mum have strikingly similar voices.

Am going to hate watch it too, but I love
Persuasion and no TV version has really hit it for me yet

Thanks for this - I was trying to find it online and didn't think to look on Youtube. Will check it out later!

17, in my case! I can't even bring myself to watch the trailer.

Bad costuming makes me rage, it instantly takes me out of the moment.
Beachy wave hairstyles (eg women wearing their hair down anywhere out of the bedroom). Characters not wearing hats, jackets and gloves out of doors, etc.

This bugs me so much about book covers. Grown women with their hair hanging down their backs. Anyone who has ever read any classic girls' fiction knows that your hair went up at eighteen!

Even young women in WW2 nurses' uniform with their hair loose to their shoulders - Matron would never have allowed it!

Thanks to this thread I watched the 1995 youtube version of Persuasion last night, and LOVED it. So much so that I ordered the book online this morning!

Never thought Ciarán Hinds would be a dish but he totally was.

Yes, Mary was perfectly played (as was Anne). Elizabeth, on the other hand, was completely wrong. A great shame, as that version is so nearly perfect.

I don't remember ever having seen the BBC adaptation of 1971 but I'm hoping to find it somewhere as I gather it's very true to the book.

We can only hope and pray that NETFLIX disappears up its own arse one day because of this. 🤞

Some of these "adaptations" are so far removed, they're a different bloody book!

Not Austen, but I would love to see a really good adaptation of the 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall'. I believe there has been one, but i haven't seen it.

The 1996 version of the Tenant of Wildfell Hall was excellent- Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves & Toby Stevens.
I have an old copy somewhere. You might be able to get a copy on Amazon.

I want someone to do a series of Villette, but at the same time I can’t see why it isn’t happening.

Imagine the pitch — ‘So we never know why the depressive, reserved heroine ends up completely alone in the world and penniless because she refuses to say, she recognises someone who was very important to her in her childhood in another country, and doesn’t tell him until months later, never admits to being in love with him, and is still slightly hankering after him when she turns her attention to an acerbic ultra-Catholic fellow-teacher obsessed with his dead fiancée and who tries to convert her before leaving for the other side of the world? Not to mention that ending???

I will probably watch the new one just so I can complain loudly about it to anyone who will listen. Spoiler alert, no one will listen, but I shall complain none the less.

Maybe they’ll completely change that wonderful scene in the novel where, in a room full of people, Anne is talking to Captain Harville about women loving longer than men, even in hopeless situations, and Wentworth — supposedly writing a letter about having Captain Benwick’s portrait framed for Louisa Musgrove, when he’d had it painted for his dead fiancée — is in fact furiously writing to Anne to declare his love.

Maybe she scrawls U R STILL HOT LOL on the sand (Bath is inland? No matter, give it a beach!’) and slides down a fireman’s pole, Bridget Jones-style, and he French-kisses her in the middle of the Assembly Rooms?

'it's always been you, babe. you've always been the one'

Snog!

Ugh

Inspired by this thread I have just re-watched the 1995 version. Ciaron Hinds made the perfect Captain Wentworth. I wonder if the older version is available anywhere.

Thanks for that, @Deadringer - hadn’t realised it was available but just ordered the DVD - £5.99.

TTOWH is a Brontë favourite - I much prefer it to Wuthering Heights. It must have been quite daring at the time, too, when leaving one’s husband - no matter how abusive or licentious he was - was generally so frowned upon.