When I first read Mansfield Park, some 30 years ago, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly didn’t happen when I read other novels by Jane Austen. There is something about this particular book that provoked musical ideas.

“For a husband to stray he is merely responding to his biology. But for a woman to behave in a similar way is ridiculous, unimaginable. Just the idea is funny.” This unwitting strapline issues from the boobyish Sir James Martin towards the end of Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s delightful riff on Jane Austen which, in the person of Lady Susan Vernon, proves quite the opposite is true.

Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” Miss Bennet has been a busy Lizzy. In recent years she's popped up in a British Bollywood setting (Bride and Prejudice) and in the present day (Lost in Austen), and solved a murder mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley). Her latest outing – as played by literary pin-up of the moment Lily James – is as a sword-wielding, pistol-toting scourge of the zombie hordes. Naturally, she’s very good at what she does.

At the time a mere 90 years old, detective novelist PD James raised literary eyebrows in 2011 with the publication of Death Comes to Pemberley, a crime-based sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

There is a life-size cardboard cut-out of Colin Firth in Austenland. He blends in very nicely. The only way you can tell him apart from the other actors in this cloth-eared, cack-handed romantic comedy of paramount awfulness is you can't see the despair and self-loathing in the whites of his eyes.

Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of his people to get some more work out of that Jane Austen. She seemed like a good source of romantic comedies. Regrettably for all, there were only ever six titles from this promising scriptwriter, and those have been done and done again by film and particularly television.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being celebrated with balls, literary walks, readathons, television programmes and this adaptation for the stage.

Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature.

In some ways it’s been an odd career. Everyone else in Another Country (1982), the stage play by Julian Mitchell about gays and Marxists in a 1930s English public school, shot out of the blocks. Colin Firth was the only actor to play both lead parts, one onstage, the other on film (1984), but he took the slower road to outright stardom and only now is he clearly the bigger cheese than Rupert Everett, Kenneth Branagh and possibly even Daniel Day-Lewis.