As it turns out, you can watch nearly every Austen remake on YouTube. In 10-minute increments, of course. If you choose to do this, every 10 minutes YouTube will suggest other movies to you, which is kind of annoying and kind of amusing, because it will keep suggesting North & South.

Ha! thought I. Here are the limits of metatagging! No human would suggest that an Austen fan watch a mini-series about the American Civil War.

Then once I did, accidentally, click through to North & South.

Now you're laughing, right?

The movie is about the north and south of England. It's based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote in the mid-1800s. I totally loved it.

Watching all those remakes of Austen's work followed by North & South is so striking. North & South begins with a train. A train! There aren't any trains in Austen's work. There weren't any trains in Austen's time. In North & South there's a cotton factory; there aren't any factories in Austen's work, because there weren't any factories then. Isn't that striking? Jane Austen was 35 when Gaskell was born – not even old enough to be her grandmother. The transition from cars to rockets in the 20th century was nothing compared to the transition from horses to trains in the 19th, I'd say.

If I ever have the need to teach the history of the Industrial Revolution to teenage girls, that's how I'll do it: I'll have them watch Sense & Sensibility ("Girls, why does Marianne reject Willoughby's gift of a horse? How would it have changed the family's daily routine if she'd been able to accept it?") and then Persuasion (in which the men, at any rate, have sailed to the East Indies and made their fortune in Europe — so far away in a horse-drawn world) and then North & South, with its train and its factories.

So interesting!

(And John Thornton has rather fine eyes.)