“Frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory,” says Dudley Andrew, “discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like. Its distinctive feature, the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievement in some other system, can be shown to be distinctive of all representational cinema.” The 1990s' adaptations of Jane Austen's novels display an intriguing variety of relationships between the screen adaptations and their predecessors. However, the screen history of Pride and Prejudice provides a unique opportunity to consider the way in which an adaptation reflects its own particular historical moment.

This essay will focus on the 1940 and 1995 film versions because they were produced under different conditions and in different cultural contexts. (The 1979 BBC version, which was shot on video rather than film, is constrained by the limits imposed by the relatively primitive video techniques of the time that make it less interesting to compare with the two film versions.) The 1940 film attempts to appropriate the novel for purposes that have as much to do with the relationship between the US and Britain in pre-war Hollywood as with Jane Austen, while the 1995 version, although encouraging the spectator to envision herself as participating in an imaginative repossession of the original, is equally preoccupied with a postfeminist rewriting of the novel's central romantic relationship.