Which Jane Austen to start with
Six novels, and no order to read them in. They are separate stories with separate characters, so the only real question is which one to pick up first. You have almost certainly seen a film or a series of at least one of them.
Below is each novel, the screen version you would know it by, what it is actually about, and how long it takes to listen to. All six are narrated in full.
If the Netflix Pride and Prejudice brought you here, the novel behind it is ten and a half hours, and it is the first one below. The series runs to six parts, written by Dolly Alderton, with Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet.
The six, easiest to hardest to start with
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Colin Firth 1995 · Keira Knightley 2005 · Bridget Jones · Netflix 2026Pride and PrejudiceThe usual answer, and usually the right one. It moves quickly, Elizabeth Bennet is good company from the first page, and you will recognise more of it than you expect.If you only ever listen to one, this is the one. It is also the novel the new Netflix series adapts, so it is the one most people will be reaching for this autumn.
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The 2022 filmPersuasionHer last completed novel, and the quietest. Anne Elliot turned down a proposal eight years ago and has to watch him come back.Under seven hours, and the most grown-up thing she wrote. Several readers who love it will tell you not to start here, because its restraint is easier to appreciate once you know her usual register.
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The 1995 film with Emma Thompson and Kate WinsletSense and SensibilityTwo sisters, no money, and two entirely different ideas about how to feel things. Her first published novel.A good alternative first choice if Pride and Prejudice feels too familiar from the screen. Same world, same sharpness, a story you are less likely to know the ending of.
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Clueless · the 2020 filmEmmaEmma Woodhouse arranges other people's lives and is wrong about almost all of it. Funnier than its reputation.Yes, Clueless is this book. Thirteen hours is a commitment, and the joke only works if you can hear how sure of herself she is, which is exactly what a narrator gives you and a page does not.
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The 1999 filmMansfield ParkThe difficult one. Fanny Price is poor, quiet and morally immovable, and the book refuses to make her easy to like.Often called her most serious novel, and the one most likely to be abandoned by someone new to her. Worth it, but not first.
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The one you have not seenNorthanger AbbeyA teenager who has read too many Gothic novels goes to stay in an old house and starts imagining murders. Austen sending up the thrillers of her own day.The shortest, the least adapted and the least like the others. If you have already seen three of these on screen and want the one that will surprise you, it is this.
Austen is easier listened to than read
Plenty of people find Austen hard going on the page, and it is usually the same two reasons: the sentences are long, and the jokes are dry enough to miss entirely.
Both of those are problems of pace. A sentence that takes three clauses to arrive is difficult to hold in your head and easy to follow when someone says it out loud. And her humour lives in the narration rather than in the dialogue, so a lot of it depends on how a line lands. Miss that and Austen reads as manners and marriages, which is what puts people off her.
If you already know the story from a film, listening is easier still. You are not holding the plot together, so you can let a paragraph go past and pick the thread up again without having lost anything.
What it costs. You get an hour of listening to try it, with no account and no card. Create a free account and you get an hour a month. Unlimited listening is £2.99 a month, and you can cancel any time.
Start with Pride and Prejudice
Unless one of the others above sounded more like you, in which case start with that one instead. Nothing is lost by picking wrong; they are separate books.
Or browse the whole library: Dickens, the Brontës, Conan Doyle and plenty besides. Got a PDF of your own? Upload it and listen to that the same way.