6 Jane Austen Stories That Have Never Been Adapted
Beatriz (Bea) Valero de Urquia is a Books & Literature author at Collider, where she focuses on Lists surrounding recent bestsellers, classical novels, and everything in between. She is a historian by training and a bilingual reader, moving between English and Spanish literature.
Beatriz began her career as a technology writer at a startup in the UK. Almost a decade later, journalism has taken her to five cities across three continents and into business reporting, cultural criticism, and live TV commentary. She joined Collider in 2026.
Beatriz has a passion for travelling and loves keeping an eye on the books headed to the screen. One of her favorite pastimes is critiquing the historical accuracy of period movies. She also once volunteered for the Charles Dickens Museum. Beatriz also has a core belief that a book is always better than the movie, but she has been happy to have been proven wrong in a couple of occasions.
When she isn’t reading, Beatriz is watching musicals, stage managing Shakespeare plays with a local theater group or doing historical research. She enjoys tracing family trees for her history and genealogy TikTok, creating databases for historical analysis and sifting through 17th-century stories for the novel she is currently in the process of writing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Hollywood loves Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice alone has been adapted over 15 times into movies and TV shows. These adaptations range from the 2005 movie starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen to the 2004 Bollywood film Bride & Prejudice starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Martin Henderson. In 2026 alone, there are three large productions scheduled to be released, all inspired by Jane Austen stories. Two have already been released, BBC One’s The Other Bennet Sister and Focus Features’ Sense and Sensibility, while Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice will be available on streaming in December.
It often seems like there are only two Jane Austen stories out there, Pride and Prejudice and Emma. However, the popularity of Regency romances has led studios to look beyond those two, turning to Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, with varying levels of success. It would not be a surprise to see someone take on Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey next, despite them being the two least popular out of Austen’s six published novels. There is, however, another direction a studio could choose to go, yet unexplored: to give a go at adapting one of the stories Austen never got to complete.
Jane Austen died at the age of 41, in 1817. She left behind an eternal legacy, but also a series of manuscripts containing another unfinished novel, a satirical history book and a stack of short stories she had written as a teenager. These are funnier, stranger and far more violent than anything in Emma. A few have been staged by Austen societies or read aloud on the radio, but none has caught Hollywood’s attention — yet. It worked with Sanditon, the seaside novel Austen abandoned after 11 chapters, which became an ITV series written by Andrew Davies in 2019. It could easily work again.
6
‘The Watsons’
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Image via Penguin Classics</figure>
Meet Emma Watson. Not the British actress famous for portraying Hermione in Harry Potter. Jane Austen’s version is a young woman raised by her wealthy aunt. Once this aunt remarries, Emma finds herself back with the family she belongs to, but one that she hardly knows. Her father is an ailing clergyman in the Surrey village of Stanton, where two of her sisters spend their time husband-hunting. At her first local ball, Emma rescues a ten-year-old boy who has been stood up by his dance partner, and shortly draws the attention of three bachelors: the awkward aristocrat Lord Osborne, the flirtatious Tom Musgrave and the quiet vicar Mr Howard. Who will win her heart?
Out of all the entries on this list, The Watsons is the closest to a fully-formed novel. The novelist started it in 1803 and abandoned it after her father died in 1805 at around 80 pages. Years later, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra told the family how it was meant to end, revealing the identity of the person Emma chooses to marry. Since then, many writers have tried their hands at finishing the manuscript, from Austen’s own nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh (who gave the story its title), to Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, and, most recently, Claudia Gray in 2026. Laura Wade’s stage adaptation of the novel premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2018.
5
‘Catharine, or the Bower’ (1792)
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What was Jane Austen like as a teenager? Although only her adult novels have been turned into movies, the author copied all of her early work into three notebooks. Catharine is included in Volume The Third. The story was written in 1792, when Austen was only 16. It was first titled Kitty or the Bower and it stayed unpublished until 1951. Catharine is now available in Oxford World’s Classics’ Catharine and Other Writings. In 2017, it was staged as a parlor play at the Jane Austen Summer Program in North Carolina.
Catharine Percival, or Kitty, is an orphan raised by a very strict aunt, Mrs Percival, who distrusts young men and the danger they pose to her ward. Kitty’s joy comes from her two childhood friends, the Wynne sisters. As children, the three planted a bower in the garden, which becomes Kitty’s refuge. However, when Mr Wynne dies, Cecilia is sent to India to marry a man she does not love, and Mary becomes a companion to a distant relative, leaving Kitty alone again. Years later, some wealthy relatives, the Stanleys, come to visit Mrs Percival. They are accompanied by their two children: a frivolous daughter, Camilla (a forerunner of Northanger Abbey‘s Isabella), and a son, Edward. When Edward takes Kitty to a ball and kisses her hand, Mrs Percival is scandalized. Before the romance can fully bloom, Mr Stanley sends Edward abroad, and the manuscript breaks off, leaving readers in the dark as to Edward’s true feelings and the ending of his romance with Eliza.
4
‘Love and Friendship’ (1790)
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Image via Penguin Classics</figure>
A Love and Friendship movie already exists. The 2016 film directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale was inspired by the title Jane Austen had chosen. However, he did not choose to adapt the story that it represented. Stillman borrowed this title and used it for his adaptation of Austen’s Lady Susan, which is why that one is not on this list. The original Love and Freindship, misspelling and all, has never been filmed. The closest it has gotten has been a radio reading done by the actress Anna Maxwell Martin.
Austen wrote Love and Freindship in 1790, at age 14. It is a teenage novel written in letters, in which the heroine, Laura, tells the story of her life to a younger friend as a warning. The story is a merciless parody of the sentimental novels Austen had read as a child, whose heroines fell in love at first sight and were overprone to fainting. This is the case of Laura, who, overtaken by romantic imagination, marries Edward Lindsay within hours of meeting him despite him already being engaged to someone else. The couple is happy for a time and befriend another couple, Sophia and Augustus. When Augustus is arrested for unpaid debts, Edward also disappears. Laura and Sophia become close friends and decide to also flee together. During their travels, they meet their long-lost grandfather and cause chaos in more of the relatives’ lives, before discovering their husbands’ tragic fate. The end is more than shocking for an Austen novel, but the author had not hidden it. The story’s own subtitle says: “Deceived in freindship and betrayed in love”.
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to
be somebody’s person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of
you.
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have
already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most
durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy,
conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening. - You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is
doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers. - The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly
until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it. - You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own
life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the
relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of
them equally seriously. - You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a
rival, and that never entirely goes away. - It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each
other, but whose turn it is this year. - You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are
drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting
somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides,
meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned. - You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things
more real than public ones. - The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what
it would cost either one to say it out loud. - Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally
stop hiding.
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is
immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version
of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five
days, which is precisely the point of it. - You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats
decades of something merely comfortable. - The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an
enormous life afterwards because of it. - You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the
same way.
3
‘Henry and Eliza’
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This is a story for those who say that “nothing happens” in Jane Austen’s books. One of Austen’s earliest works, Henry and Eliza packs more action in a few pages than that present in most of her published novels. The story has been read on the radio and staged as a parlor drama at the Jane Austen Summer Program in 2015, but its intense plot of secret marriages and revenge has never made it to the screen.
Before Elizabeth Bennet, there was another Austen heroine with the same name. This Eliza, however, is thought to have been named after Austen’s own cousin Eliza de Feuillide. In the story, Eliza is an orphan, found under a haycock. She is raised by the wealthy Sir George and Lady Harcourt until she is caught stealing a £50 banknote at 18 and thrown out of the house. Eliza then gets a job as a companion to a duchess, and falls in love with Henry Cecil, the Duchess’ daughter’s suitor. The two marry in secret and are forced to flee to France to escape the Duchess’ wrath. The story does not end there, though; Eliza’s adventures continue over the coming years, and include the revelation of Eliza’s parentage, a tragic death and a prison break. In some ways, real life is even more dramatic than fiction, as Eliza de Feuillide would go on to marry Henry Austen, Jane’s brother, after her first husband was executed in France during the Terror.
2
‘Jack and Alice’ (1793)
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Image via Macmillan Collector's Library</figure>
Another one of Jane Austen’s teenage writings, she dedicated Jack and Alice to her brother Francis, then a midshipman on HMS Perseverance. If anything else, it reads like something written to make a teenage sailor (and almost any reader) laugh. Once more, Austen takes every convention of sentimental novels of her time and pushes it to the point of absurdity. With its binge-drinking heroine, a vain love interest and a poisoning, it has all the ingredients for a perfect black comedy TV show.
The story is set in the village of Pammydiddle, where Mr Johnson is throwing a masquerade for his birthday. Only one man comes without a mask: the handsome Charles Adams. Alice Johnson falls in love with him instantly. The fact that she is “heated by wine”, as Jane Austen puts it, likely does not help. However, someone else is vying for Charles’ love. Lucy, a Welsh tailor’s daughter, travels all the way to Pammydiddle to win him over. Before the ending, the story’s rivalries escalate to a body count that would not look out of place in a crime drama. What makes the story hilarious is the polite tone Austen uses to narrate it, a clear sign of her talent. As for Jack, despite his name being on the title, he barely appears.
1
‘The History of England’ (1791)
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What if Jane Austen wrote Drunk History? The last entry on this list is not a story at all, which may be the reason why nobody has tried to film it yet. In 1791, at 15, Austen wrote a parody of the textbooks of her time, covering the history of England from Henry IV to Charles I. She signed it “By a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian”. The note she included on the title page warned: “There will be very few Dates.” Austen did not lie. In the manuscript, she makes a passionate defense of Mary Queen of Scots and blames Elizabeth I, whom she calls “that pest of society,” for her death. Austen also skips most of Henry VIII’s reign because “it would be an affront” to assume her readers don’t already know it, and praises him only because his ruined monasteries proved “of infinite use to the landscape of England.”
The History of England has the most royal cast of any Jane Austen work. Her sister Cassandra (to whom the work is dedicated) illustrated the manuscript with 13 portraits of the monarchs in ink and watercolor, among them a sneering Queen Elizabeth I. The originals are now in the British Library. Beyond these visuals, what makes this work such tempting material for TV is the writer’s voice: Austen treats centuries of wars and complicated politics like gossip. An adaptation would also show a side of the writer very few readers engage with: her opinions on religion, politics and power. Done right, an animated series or mockumentary based on The History of England could make history lessons far more fun than any textbook, and might win over even the harshest of Austen’s critics.
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