Why Jane Austen Fans Are Annoyed About Netflix’s Persuasion Trailer
Netflix’s upcoming period drama Persuasion recently released a trailer and the adaptation has a number of Jane Austen fans annoyed. An adaptation of Austen’s 1818 novel of the same name, Persuasion stars Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliott. From the looks of the trailer, it thoroughly missed the tone of the original Jane Austen novel, if internet commentary is to be believed.
The work of Jane Austen ranges in terms of tone. For every moving love story like Sense and Sensibility, one of director Ang Lee's best movies, there is a more playful and light-hearted romp like her earlier gothic novel parody Northanger Abbey. However, the success of 2020’s Emma appears to have convinced the creatives at Netflix that all of Austen’s work falls into the quirky, frothy rom-com genre. At least, that is what the response to Persuasion’s first trailer alleges.
Related: How Emma 2020 Compares To Jane Austen's Book: Biggest Differences
Unusually for an Austen heroine, Anne is introduced as a 27-year-old who has already loved and lost rather than a young, inexperienced heroine. This gives the novel a famously elegiac tone and a more wistful style than a lot of Austen's sharper writing, although the similarities between Netflix’s Persuasion trailer and 2020’s successful Emma adaptation have led commentators online to argue that the movie adaptation appears to be aping that earlier critical success without capturing the source novel’s maturity. The comments section is flooded with readers noting that the novel Persuasion isn’t tonally similar to Emma, yet the movie seems strikingly like 2020’s Emma adaptation. It’s an odd choice since Persuasion is a sadder, more introspective text than the broadly comic Emma, and the quip-heavy, outright
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