The BBC’s new serial has been touted in the press as revealing the latent ‘sensuality’ of Jane Austen’s world; naturally it reveals much more about the blatant sensuality of our own. Austen, after all, is notoriously cerebral – a resolute niggard in her descriptive dealings with food, clothes, animals, children, weather, and landscape. But we in the 1990s will not have it so...

The ensemble players are led by Alison Steadman. Some dull dogs have found her Mrs Bennet too broad, too Dickensian, but in fact she establishes a miraculous equipoise between bitterness and boiling vulgarity (and this balance is stabilised by clear traces of her past allure)... The sensualism imported by Davies and Langton brings one unarguable gain: all those creamy, dreamy scenes in the bedroom shared by Elizabeth and Jane, with the candles lit and the hair down, make us feel the crucial heaviness of their sisterly love.