There have thus far been four film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, all of them controversial. Even the first, the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park, was attacked, the actors playing Fanny and Edmund (Sylvestra Le Touzel and Nicholas Farrell) seen as excruciatingly ugly and its Chekhovian slow pace condemned as excruciatingly dull. The best known adaptation of Austen’s third novel remains Patricia Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park, famously controversial, yet in many ways just another fusion of heritage, popular romance, and Austen tropes. The least known is perhaps Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), whose apparently elite cast has roused intense class antagonisms and prevented some of the actors from developing a career out of a movie that at the time was much admired by high-culture critics (Vincent Canby) and at the Cannes Film Festival. Elsewhere I have written briefly on Stillman’s in-depth exploration of the complex characters, their relationships (especially the love of Fanny-Audrey for Edmund-Tom), the film’s evocation of the worlds of young adults, its theme of parental misconduct (the abandonment and hurt of their adult children), the difficulty of launching a career in this apparently well-connected world and succeeding at it, and the movie’s exploration of what is ethical behaviour. The film is packed with allusions to Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as to Persuasion and Emma (there is a game played where losers have to tell candid truths inside their minds and, as Mr Knightley says, we find such truths can be searing, destructive).

Screenplay writer Maggie Wadey’s 2007 abbreviated (93 minute) Mansfield Park has been ceaselessly abused. I’ve defended it for its championing of the natural world as opposed to falsifying artifice, its hatred of bullying and stifling social conformity, and its addressing British issues of the 21st century. And I have written now and again on the epistolarity, female narrator (three of the films discussed here have this), Chekhovian feel, and wonderful poetry of the 1983 film. Ignored as uninventive (!), it’s in fact consistently semi-original. The screenplay is by much-admired writer, Ken Taylor, best known for his 1984 film The Jewel in the Crown. David Giles’s direction is deemed a saturnine delight (see also his 1982 Barchester Chronicles).

Over the past week I have been reading reviews of all the films I have been watching, including a wonderful defence of the 1983 film: Jan Fergus’s “Two Mansfield Parks: Purist and postmodern” (Jane Austen on Screen, ed. G. and A. MacDonald); a detailed study of Stillman’s films with several essays on their relationship to Austen’s novels (Doomed Bourgeois in Love, ed. Mark C. Henrie); lively defences of Rozema that I agree with (Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield in their Jane Austen in Hollywood, and Alistair Duckworth in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2:4 [2000]: 565-72). I newly admired the Rozema film. It’s so interesting to think about the many different kind of filmic techniques she employs to make humour, sexiness, pleasure-filled moments, and some of the wit (though words are not her strength). And she does continually choose women’s icons and women’s figures in the dialogue (Joan of Arc), while bringing out the feminist talk of the book (Fanny: “why should I jump when any man asks me to marry him?”). I like the way Lindsay Duncan acted the much-put-upon Mrs Price this time round — her pain seems very real (though the trope of Lady Bertram as drug addict was overdone).

I also listened to the voice-over commentaries by Stillman, his film editor, and two of the actors, and by Rozema on her film, and was able to read the screenplays for Metropolitan and Rozema’s Mansfield Park. I made some discoveries. All of them react to the movie (or movies) that came before (except of course the 1983 as it is the first film adaptation of Mansfield Park to have been made), and there is an increase in intensification over areas of Mansfield Park which many readers apparently do not like: either what’s there is eliminated, or inverted, or (in the case of Stillman) defended vigorously. I discovered that the 2007 Mansfield Park does not depart any more radically from the book than Rozema’s 1999 adaptation: both skip Sotherton (rather like the 1940 Pride & Prejudice skipped the visit to Pemberley). They are a body of films, distinct from the films adapted from Austen’s other books. They are all literary – in her commentary Rozema reveals she thinks Mansfield Park was originally an epistolary novel – and all but Metropolitan have deeply subjective, complicated sequences of voice-over, montage, blurring. They all have beautiful dance sequences, moments with stars. They all have strong heroines — Sylvestra le Touzel is internal strength itself and quiet narrator again and again. Wadey uses deep-musing subjectivity to make her narrator over-voice as a young woman remembering her childhood. Rozema makes a sort of show of her author-figure, Fanny.

Stillman does eschew this sort of thing, but in his commentary he makes some sharp observations that apply to Austen’s novel as well as his own film: the subject matter is embarrassing and automatically controversial because the area dramatized is social class, exclusion. He calls it social pornography with its talk so explicitly about the pain of existence in an elite milieu where individuals can fall away, fall out. This leads me to concentrate on an aspect of the 2007 Mansfield Park which was wholly unexpected: the regulation humiliation scene found in most Austen movies, nay frequently in all sorts of movies, but paradoxically especially in costume drama (supposedly targeted at women viewers), this scene for the central female in ordinary movie after ordinary movie is not there! The rationale in Austen’s case is that indeed in her novels her heroines are taught rough lessons; older essays about her books had titles such as “The humiliation of Emma Woodhouse,” and “The humiliation of Elizabeth Bennett,” but it is arguable that the scene of confession, repentance, avowal to change one’s ways, is made more central in a number of the films.

Not all: it’s muted in Fay Weldon’s 1979 Pride & Prejudice, and Davies just about omits it in his 1995 Pride & Prejudice by making Darcy’s ordeal the centre of the story (he also makes Henry and Eleanor Tilney’s stories far more poignant, deflecting attention from the misogynistic anti-romance motif), but recently I’ve noticed it’s back in full force, as much in the free adaptations (Aisha and From Prada to Nada) as in some of the older ones (the Sense & Sensibility films all have it). Rozema’s Fanny is taught grim lessons by her biological mother to marry up (for money, Henry Crawford) which are reminiscent of the mother in Lost in Austen (‘you must marry’ is Amanda Price’s mother’s refrain). Almost to my surprise, Maggie Wadey changes this. She uses the theme of the education of Sir Thomas to make the confession and repentance his own. The climactic moment is Douglas Hodge’s when he comes home (in a scene reminiscent of the scenes of Mr Bennett come home having failed to retrieve Lydia in the ’79 and ’95 Pride & Prejudice films) without Maria. He pretty well indicts himself thoroughly and we begin to see him unbend and change his ways. As if that were not enough, the scene (again justified by the book in part) where Edmund tells Fanny about his disillusion with Mary Crawford is turned into another self-reformation scene where Edmund asks Fanny to forgive him for being so blind. Lady Bertram is presented as knowing all along that Fanny loved Edmund (the “incest” motive is twice denied by having characters state strongly that Edmund is not Fanny’s brother and presenting Fanny’s love for William as part of her Cinderella story). Mrs Norris does really care for Maria (though she is corrosive in personality).

I suggest this refreshing approach has not been noticed because the movie has been so damned that people have not paid attention to its motives: I don’t say it’s a good movie — the loss of Sotherton and Portsmouth push it back to the one-hour TV versions of Austen which would omit visits to Pemberley, the Grants are dropped, and Mary Crawford made hard and mercenary, and at moments its pace and epitomizing scenes make it feel like dramatized Cliff Notes, so the critique of marriage is lost (that said, it’s ignored by most movie-makers) and Henry Crawford oddly muddled. At least in 1999 he reads Sterne’s passage about the starling who couldn’t get out, gives Fanny a wagon filled with these exhilarating birds, and is made (with Fanny) to enact the Harris Bigg-Wither proposal and morning-after rejection by Austen. But Wadey’s script breaks the code in who gets humiliated, confesses, vows to do otherwise, and is taught a lesson. Having noticed this I began to see that Rozema’s also makes Sir Thomas’s conversion and remorse central, and Edmund’s blindness and request for forgiveness explicit at the close of the movie. As a female movie-maker determined to adhere to conventional notions of strength (and thus seemingly embarrassed by Fanny’s abjectness), she anticipates the 2007 movie. Not that there is no humiliation scene: there is, and it’s in Edmund’s scornful response to Mary’s long winded amoral suggestions on how to think about Henry and Maria’s elopement and what they may hope for from Tom’s death, in a scene which gathers all the characters together as if this were a murder mystery. This is paradoxical and shows a lack of clarity in Rozema’s mind since Mary Crawford is a favourite character for her.

I recommend as deeply pleasurable and instructive watching in tandem all the movies coming out of a particular Austen novel. It can be another way into the nature of Austen’s texts and themes to see them transferred into different filmic conventions. The way in is to use film adaptations: when you have a group of them from one book you can examine the different kinds of relations between the successive films and the novel and the cultural and entertainment work they all perform.

A version of this review first appeared on Ellen’s Austen blog