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NORTHANGER ABBEY: A wide-eyed, radiant Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland, plus a director with a sense of humor.

Six new Austen adaptations? Well, four. Along with new productions of Persuasion (January 13), Northanger Abbey (January 20), Mansfield Park (January 27), and Sense and Sensibility (March 30 and April 6), we’re getting the 1995 BBC/A&E five-hour Pride and Prejudice mini-series (February 10, 17, and 24) and the 1996 A&E/ITV Emma TV movie (March 23). As compensation for there being no new Pride and Prejudice or Emma, the series is throwing in a new bio-pic, Miss Austen Regrets (February 3), that dramatizes all the proposals Miss Austen is alleged to have turned down.

Although MGM’s enjoyably airbrushed if minimally authentic (for starters, the costumes were handed down from Gone with the Wind) Pride and Prejudice came first, the bedrock of Austen adaptation is the set of six TV versions that the BBC produced between 1971 and 1986. The last of these, Northanger Abbey, is a 90-minute TV movie; the other five are mini-series running between three and five hours. The budgets are low, the sets are stage sets, the acting can be stolid, and the pacing tends to the British theatrical/television drawing-room standard of slow if not obvious. But these productions make room for the details of Austen’s 300-page books, and in Austen the details count. Moreover, they give audiences time to observe, to evaluate, to reflect and consider — just what Austen’s heroines do as they endeavor to separate what seems from what is. The more-recent two-hour theater releases feel more realistic and more immediate and are easier to take in, but at a cost.