Another Austen update. Really.

You've had enough of the Austen continuations, updates, mashups (zombies! sea monsters!). You don't want Jane to be a detective, or Elizabeth Bennett to take up solving mysteries. You don't need Colin Firth diluting his Regency splendor by playing Mark Darcy to Bridget Jones. I get it. I even find myself wondering if the BBC might forgo another round of film adaptations every decade or so (though I always get sucked in when they do -- see addendum below). So when I read some good reviews of Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, I sighed. Do we really need yet another telling of an Austen story, set in contemporary times? But the book was just sitting there on the library's new book shelf and I had a whole lunch hour. So I picked it up.

Damned if the thing didn't charm me, through and through -- both for the satisfying re-telling of the Dashwood sisters' triumph over mean relations and caddish men, and for the added pleasure of seeing how Trollope worked modern social mores and silliness into the story. She had to do some minor contortions to account for the women's sudden loss of fortune and social standing (in this version the girls' mother is not a second wife but a woman who ran away with the elder Mr. Dashwood, who left his wife and son behind).

Evil sister-in-law Fanny and her nasty mother, Mrs. Ferrars, are quite as obnoxious, if in more modern ways. And the dashing Willoughby -- or Wills, as he's called here -- tries to give Marianne a sports car, not a horse. But generally the characters go through their paces in approximately the same ways. The servant class is represented in minor but telling cameos by a series of Eastern European nannies.

It's a quick read, but fun. Highly recommended. I even hope someone does a film adaptation of it -- which would make a fine counterpart to the most recent BBC version from 2008 which is quickly rising in my personal ranks of Austen adaptations (this is the addendum mentioned above). I love Ang Lee and Emma Thompson and all that but let's face it, she was way too old to play Elinor and Hugh Grant just too stammery to earn her love. Every single person in the more recent version is perfect in their parts. And it's a perfect length, too, a three-parter so you don't have to give up an entire day like the six-hour Pride and Prejudice, but it still has room for the plot to breathe.

Reading about reading Jane Austen

Like just about every female English major on the planet, I am a Jane-ite. I read the books. I watched the movies. I watched the various miniseries. It was a screen version -- the 1980 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," shown on Masterpiece Theater -- that first sent me to read Austen as a youngster. As an adult in the 1990s, when the BBC began a new round of Austen adaptations, I bought the new P&P miniseries on VHS. I bought it again on DVD. I go to the movies for new adaptations and then I buy THEM on DVD. I own a gigantic Modern Library Jane Austen compendium and a couple of the novels as individual volumes.  They're free on Kindle so I have them there, too. I have never, however, been a big consumer of the rest of Janeworld -- the zombie mash-ups, the novels where Jane solves crimes, etc. I read The Jane Austen Book Club and thought it was OK. But generally, I prefer the original.

Only I realized recently that it has been quite some time since I've actually read the original. For the last decade and a half -- yes, OK, since the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" -- my Austen consumption has been almost entirely onscreen.

And that's too bad, as William Deresiewicz reminded me in his appealing new memoir, "A Jane Austen Education." He doesn't diss the movies (well he does, a little; more on that later). But his focus is all on the books, the actual Austen, and the life lessons her small but significant output offered him.

The book is broken into six sections, one for each of the published novels, with a lesson or moral value he received from each. That can feel a little pat and I disagree with a couple of his choices -- he has "Persuasion," my favorite Austen novel, teaching him about true friendship. He makes a good case but, to me, that novel is all about constancy, and learning to have the courage to do what's right for you, even if the people around you disapprove.

As a memoir of a relatively privileged, intelligent but self-absorbed young man's journey to self-awareness and maturity, "A Jane Austen Education" is fine -- it's just that memoirs aren't really my thing, especially memoirs about learning not to be a jerk. Congratulations! I'm happy for you and those around you, really, but is that worth a couple hours of my time? As an evaluation of Austen's work, by someone trained to think critically about literature but who writes for what Virginia Woolf famously called the common reader, it is superb. And it has inspired me to pull out my 1,364-page, 3-pound (yes, I weighed it) edition of the Complete Novels. They are arranged in order of publication; I'm 56 pages into "Sense and Sensibility" and wondering why I've been neglecting Jane -- the real Jane, not her on-screen stepchildren -- so long.

About the movies: While I will swoon along with everyone else when Colin Firth-as-Darcy dives into the pond, my favorite screen adaptation remains "Persuasion" starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. I've always had a Ciaran Hinds thing. And more significantly, it was the first Austen adaptation that struck me as remotely realistic -- the rooms were small and dark, the clothing was not unfailingly elegant, Anne Elliott did look like a woman past her prime and depressed. And the acting is superb. Plus you don't need to commit an entire weekend (or sick day home on the couch) to watch it.

My husband's favorite, on the other hand, is the 1999 Mansfield Park. He says it's because it's the only Austen adaptation that acknowledges the existence of sex. Which is just why Deresiewicz, apparently, hated it: he refers to it as a "travesty" because it "turns prudish Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth."

And  for the record, the Kate Beckinsale Emma is way better than the Gwyneth Paltrow version and I much prefer the recent (2008) two-part BBC Sense and Sensibility to the much-lauded Emma Thompson/Ang Lee movie. Love Emma and all  but Elinor Dashwood is supposed to be nineteen. And Hugh Grant (way too good-looking for Edward Farrars) looks like he just left a fancy dress party at Oxford or something. The more recent version didn't have any big name actors I recognized (unless you count Mark Gatiss, the hapless patient-killing veterinarian from "League of Gentleman" as the useless older brother) but it was, like the huge majority of BBC productions, well executed all around.