I have read all of Jane Austen's novels right the way through once a year every year since I was 9 years old and received the Modern Library edition of her collected works as a birthday present.

I loved this movie for its romance and for the music, which stayed, hauntingly, in my head. It was an interpretation of course, not an Emma or a Sense and Sensibility, but something quite different and something Catherine herself would have loved. And oh to be loved by this passionate Henry! This was the Henry of Catherine's imagination, and she is the romantic heroine she read about in her novels, and which was promised to us by the practical Jane Austen who tells us right at the beginning that the unlikely Catherine will indeed be one. I wonder if Jane was being entirely satirical in her novel. Perhaps, she too, could imagine such a Henry.

I haven't seen the film in many years, at least a decade. But, I have been yearning for it ever since.