Reader and viewer engagement with "Pride and Prejudice": from the acidity of the novel to the romanticism of the adaptations

Two hundred and fifty years after her birth, Jane Austen enjoys the fullness of her international fame, having been systematically republished and adapted for TV and film for almost nine decades. It is uncertain, however, whether the cultural impact achieved by the author is related to the changes her work undergoes as it becomes popularized on screen: her marriage stories, filled with criticism toward the customs of her time, are often transformed into passion-driven love stories. In other words, when the medium changes, Austen’s genre also changes. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, such change leads to curious cultural phenomena in the 21^st century, such as fans falling in love with Mr. Darcy and identifying with Charlotte for being a spinster at 27. Based on Ian Watt’s (1965) and Wayne C. Booth’s (1983) views on Austen’s literature, contemporary considerations of Relevance Theory applied to literature and adaptations (Wilson, 2018; Furlong, 2024), in addition to cognitive notions of narrative engagement, this brief reflection will address the issue of medium/genre change as a possible result of two very different factors: 1) the desire to please the audience; 2) the lack of an ironic third-person narrator in audiovisual adaptations.