The Jane Austen Season The Jane Austen Season The Jane Austen Season is a British television series of dramas based on novels by Jane Austen. The season began on ITV at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday 18 March 2007, with "Mansfield Park". The following week, "Northanger Abbey" was aired. The season ended with the airing of "Persuasion" on Sunday 1 April 2007. A repeat of the 1996 feature-length film "Emma" was broadcast on Friday 6 April 2007. The combined ITV and BBC series was shown in the United States by the PBS Masterpiece Theatre drama anthology television series from January through March 2008. The following
Reception history of Jane Austen Austen saw themselves as discriminating readers—they were a cultured few. This became a common theme of Austen criticism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes articulated this theme in a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. In "The Novels of Jane Austen", published anonymously in "Blackwood's Magazine" in 1859, Lewes praised Austen's novels for "the economy of easy adaptation of means to ends, with no aid from superfluous elements" and compared her to Shakespeare. Arguing that Austen lacked the ability to construct a plot, he still celebrated her dramatisations: "The