At first glance, the glut of films and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels in the 1990s looks like nothing more than a massive indulgence in the chocolate-box of the Heritage Industry as we hurtle mercilessly towards the millennium and the uncertainties of the cyber-world. But there is more to it than that: each of the recent successful films is markedly different in what it takes from and what it adds to Jane Austen; each adapts the novel in order to fulfil a specific artistic agenda which meets the cultural needs of the community it envisages as audience