The Age addresses the age-old question: what is it with that Jane Austen anyway? And unlike most articles of this type, actually comes up with an answer of sorts.

But the stories themselves still feel modern. The things that distinguished Austen in her own lifetime and separated her from her peers - the lack of hysteria, the sly satire, the quotidian detail, and a succession of heroines as smart as they’re feisty - make it easy for a 21st-century audience to connect - as does Austen’s firm entrenchment in the middle-class (at least in today’s terms), in both her life and work.

It’s a social strata that’s easy to identify with. We know that if Austen’s families were around today, they’d be living in Balwyn, driving Japanese four-wheel-drives, buying frocks at David Lawrence and holidaying in Noosa.

Austen’s world was ordinary. And we like that.

The cultural references are a bit lost on us, but we agree with the general drift: as we’ve said many times, on this blog and in interviews, etc., Jane Austen wrote about people, and while societies change, people, in their essence, do not.

What also becomes clear, though - especially watching several stories in succession, as the ABC has invited us to do - is that, stripped of much of the nuance of Austen’s prose, the bedrock of the stories is pure soap. And that, surely, must be a powerful contributing factor to her enduring popularity. (Indeed, the devotion of some Austen fans is awfully like that of soap fans, who discuss characters as if they’re real people and dissect plot developments with the enthusiasm and attention to detail of senior military strategists.)

She says that like it’s a bad thing.

Even Austen’s masterwork, Pride and Prejudice, is riddled with similar tricks and happy accidents. Otherwise unconnected characters turn out to be related or well-acquainted; impromptu trips enable key encounters to occur; unlikely emergencies allow true natures to be revealed, all just in the nick of time. If any writer of contemporary TV drama tried tricks like that, they’d be howled down.

Yeah, they would be accused of imitating Jane Austen.

It was, of course, something to which Austen was fully alive. In Northanger Abbey, screening tonight, she plays with the whole idea of the absurdity of fiction, to considerable comic effect. But not many of the television adaptations of Austen bring the original funny. Two hundred years (and the varying quality of the scripts) has sapped a lot of the gags and what we’re really left with is a succession of sudsy romances - albeit delightful ones - elevated to art by the Austen brand.

And therein lies our dissatisfaction with so many film adaptations of Jane Austen’s work.