ABSTRACT
The late twentieth and early twenty-first-century film and television adaptations of Jane Austen's novels are rich in scenic appeal. Elisabeth Ellington states that most of the adaptations can be read as tributes to the English countryside and nostalgia for a bygone lifestyle, and cites the films exclusion of the history of Enclosure Acts and their social and economic upheaval. Austen's participation in romantic-era debates about animals and nature, the novels continue to circulate, especially in popular culture, primarily as romances whose heroines find happiness in marriage to men who happen to be rich, or rich enough. Throughout her work, Austen subjects anthropocentrism to feminist analysis: those who dominate nature and animals also oppress those lower in the social hierarchy. When we listen to Austen's description of herself as a 'wild beast', we can begin to understand that Austen's case for women is connected to the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century case for animals.
