IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY acknowledged that every few years someone puts out a new film or television version of a Jane Austen classic. Latest in the line is Keira Knightley, pouting her way through Elizabeth Bennet’s witticisms in the new Working Title version of Pride and Prejudice, out in cinemas next month. God knows how many screen versions of P&P have been made: sometimes it seems like those first ever filmgoers must just have finished rushing out of the cinema screaming “It’s a train! Coming straight through the wall into the room! Quick, flee for your lives!” before a producer said: “OK. What about Prince Albert as Mr Darcy?”

Of her other novels, the only one not to have been made into a film is the unfinished fragment Sanditon, and the biggies — Emma, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility — have all been made and remade nearly as often as P&P. I wondered briefly about Northanger Abbey but a quick delve into Google reveals a 1986 television adaptation starring Peter Firth, thus establishing the now familiar rule that there must always be someone called Firth in a Jane Austen adaptation.

What is it about Jane Austen and the screen? Recent outings have tended to play up her modernity. The new Pride and Prejudice, like Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park in 1999, is being touted as a grittier, more realistic, and, by implication, more radical version of Austen than is normally conceived, which is fine, as long as everyone bears in mind that Jane herself was in no sense whatsoever a radical, and most certainly not, however feminocentric her outlook, a proto-feminist.

The word that crops up most often when her heroines are discussing what they require in a man is propriety, which at the point at which she was writing was a word in transition. In the first edition of Dr Johnson’s dictionary, published in 1755, the meaning of propriety is defined as “peculiarity of possession; exclusive right” — in other words, ownership, a word not very far away from its sister word, property. A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the first meaning of propriety, in fact, is still “the fact of owning something”; it is only the seventh meaning that is given as “conformity with good manners”, a meaning that first came into usage in 1782, in the work of Austen’s greatest influence, Fanny Burney. So by the time Pride and Prejudice is written in 1814, bourgeois ideology has forced itself into language, and propriety has come to mean two things simultaneously — correct social behaviour, and ownership of property: essentially, of a great big f***-off country estate. And this, if you’ll excuse the scholarly diversion, is the combination of characteristics in a male suitor that all Austen’s heroines are searching for.

The reasons for Austen’s particular suitability to film lie elsewhere, not in content but in form. The most obvious reason for the peculiar malleability of her narratives into film is that they more or less created the template for the genre we now call romantic comedy: a woman and a man meet, and have to overcome a series of obstacles before they can get married and live happily ever after. Of course, she is not the first writer to use this narrative — it’s in Shakespeare, and before — but in Austen, you see tropes still incredibly common in the genre: the man and the woman not liking each other at first, even though their attraction is immediately obvious to the reader/viewer (When Harry Met Sally); discrepancy in their social standing (Pretty Woman); one of the two main characters nearly deciding to marry someone else (Four Weddings and a Funeral); etc, etc. If only there had been flea-markets in the Napoleonic era — rather than just flea-infested markets — for her characters to wander through in a montage soundtracked by Maroon 5, she’d essentially have nailed every romcom trick first. All this, plus pretty costumes, houses and countryside, and a smattering of literary gravitas on top, and you can see why studios continue to commission Austen adaptations.

But there is another, subtler, reason for her connection to the screen. Austen was, in my opinion, the first modern novelist in English. And her modernity lies principally — as perhaps modernity always does in art — in her understanding of perspective. She is the first novelist expertly to control the distance between narrator and character, and thus to be able to impart information to the reader about her characters without bald statement: her work, in other words, has the deadpan-ness, the transparency, of the camera.

And then in Chapter 41 of Emma there is, I think, an extraordinarily important historical moment. Most of Emma is seen from Emma Woodehouse’s perspective, and Austen controls the reader’s objective understanding of events, away from Emma’s generally misguided subjective interpretation, through sophisticated use of irony. But Chapter 41 is actually seen through the perspective of her eventual husband, Mr Knightley: during which he sees Emma’s potential alternative suitor, Frank Churchill, indulging in a clever bit of coded messaging to another woman. He tries to tell Emma this, and of course she won’t have it: but the use of this other perspective allows the reader to know what is really going on. He — and therefore we — see things that the main character cannot see, that are happening, both literally and figuratively, behind her back. What Mr Knightley’s perspective provides, in other words, is a different camera angle; it’s the first ever cut to another point of view, the first ever widen, the first ever reveal on action.

Anyway, I think I’ve run out of space. Jane, is that a wrap?

David Baddiel’s latest novel, The Secret Purposes, is published in paperback by Abacus

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