Blood On the Page: On Jane Austen’s Period Drama

Mashing up Jane Austen’s fiction with zombies, erotica, or extraterrestrials has become so common in pop culture that such stuff may no longer raise an eyebrow. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was, and feels, so very ten years ago. But who could have known then that the most fresh, funny, and moving mash-up was yet to come—and that it would take menstruation as its most unlikely subject?

Jane Austen’s Period Drama, Julia Aks and Steven Pinder’s Oscar-nominated (and brilliant) short live action film, turns on a clever pun on the word “period.” The 13-minute film—recently made available to viewers on YouTube—also captured headlines when Emma Thompson signed on as its “Executive Menstrual Adviser.” Jane Austen’s Period Drama has emerged as a serious contender for the Academy Award.

I can’t imagine there’s a superior finalist, though I haven’t yet seen its competition, and I do freely acknowledge my own bias here. Jane Austen’s Period Drama is admittedly right up my, er, alley. I’m an Austen scholar who’s published Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, exploring the wild side of her writings, life, and legacy.

Austen would have advocated for a more rational and supportive understanding of women’s bodies in health and illness.

There isn’t much in the Austenverse that’s capable of surprising me anymore, but Aks and Pinder’s film blew me away. It’s not only a brilliant homage to Austen’s genius, comedy, and satire, which so frequently explores gender, health, and illness. The short film is also an effective primer about the silence required when “on the rag” in the Regency. Austen herself may even once have expressed sympathy for period pain, in a possible reference to menstruation in her private letters.

“We are not meant to speak of it.” That’s how the film has its anachronistically well-informed heroine begin to tell her ignorant hero about menstruation (“Mens-what?” he replies.) I don’t want to spoil much more of the fun of this film, including by revealing its hilarious character names. Please discover them yourself on a fresh first viewing. But a little scene setting helps make the case for why this film is a perfect tribute to Austen—far more fitting than zombies—and why we need it now.

The film opens with one of those gorgeous, sigh-inducing extreme long shots of landscape familiar to viewers of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice film (2005). Jane Austen’s Period Drama’s cinematographer, Luca Del Puppo, gets that stereotypical big-Austen-on-screen look absolutely right. The original music adds its own winning color. (My favorite song was the pianoforte-accompanied, “Down by the Red, Red River,” although “Slide Up, Slide Up,” is an earworm about period sex with its own music video.)

We next zoom in on the hero and heroine tromping across exceptionally green grass, arguing with each other. The heroine admonishes the hero that he must not declare his love to her because he’s an engaged man. After he reveals that his fiancée has run off with another suitor, he gets down on one knee to propose to her. He looks down from the heroine’s eyes and across to her mid-section, then blurts out, “Blood.”

“Hmm?” replies the dumbfounded heroine, as both realize she’s bled through her white dress. The hero, fully ignorant of women’s bodies and the basics of human reproduction, mistakes her period stain for a wound. He picks her up into his arms, Sense and Sensibility-style, and runs a very long way to carry her back to her father’s estate house and seek emergency medical attention.

Hijinks ensue as the heroine’s sisters and their widower father fight over whether lying to the hero about the misperceived “wound,” or telling him the truth about menstruation, will better extract the rest of his unfinished marriage proposal. Things resolve exactly as you’d expect in an homage to Austen—and to period blood. This is comedy, after all, not Stephen King’s Carrie.

Aks and Pinder’s underlying conceit is believable enough. It was possible for an educated young man not to know the basics about women’s “monthlies,” “courses,” or “poorliness,” as menstrual periods were colloquially called in Austen’s day. In press interviews, Aks (who wrote, starred in, and co-directed the film) has shown she did her historical homework. To collect menstrual blood, she rightly notes, women then used a “clout,” or rag-based cloth, worn in similar fashion to a baby’s diaper.

The words “menstruation,” “catamenia,” and “periodical discharge” are found in eighteenth-century British medical textbooks, but not all men had access to or interest in such books. Period blood was mentioned in eighteenth-century erotica but not much featured in polite literature, with notable exceptions. Famous author Maria Edgeworth’s short story, “The Purple Jar,” first published in The Parent’s Assistant (1796), has been interpreted by recent critics as an allegory about menstruation, featuring descriptions of months, dark liquids, and disagreeable smells.

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have been actively documenting the ways menstruation has been used to ground false arguments about women’s weakness, invalidism, and inferiority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Male medical professionals then, having read Hippocrates, knew the basics about how menstruation worked, yet superstition, prejudice, and misinformation circulated largely unchecked.

Some medical men believed menstruation was literally controlled by the moon. Others claimed that living in large towns or cities increased menstrual discharge. (The problem, apparently, was that city girls were lazier.) Dysmenorrhea might be treated by placing leeches on the abdomen to increase blood loss. My personal favorite menstrual adviser of this era prescribes drinking, twice a day, large glasses of medicated beer.

That would-be expert, author of Every Woman Her Own Physician; or, The Lady’s Medical Assistant (1776), reaches a lot of questionable conclusions. He tells his female readers that the amount of “menstrual flux” varies with climate, habits, and lifestyle. He’s especially judgy about “the women in Holland, who are addicted all their lives to drinking great quantities of watery slops, and warming the inferior parts of their bodies in the winter time with stoves.” This, he declares, leads not only to excess monthly discharges but to a “very bad and infirm habit of body.” That’s right. Trying to warm up your bum from the cold was said to produce heavier periods.

Jane Austen’s fiction never mentions menstruation directly, and we have no idea whether she read books like this one. Her fiction uses the word “blood” sparingly, most often to signal “blood relations” or biological relatives. In her send-up of Gothic novels, Northanger Abbey (1818), she does drop in a few lines about bloody deaths. Blood flows profusely, too, in her raucous teenage writings or Juvenilia, with its comic murder scenes featuring gore aplenty.

Despite this relative dearth of blood, Austen’s fiction regularly tackles bodily health and illness. The novelist’s knowledge of medicine is viewed by today’s scholars as accurate to the best information of her day. (My favorite piece of criticism on this subject is found in Janet Todd’s Living with Jane Austen.) Austen writes vividly of hypochondriacs, sometimes with comic sensitivity, as with Mr. Woodhouse in Emma (1816), although she does skewer the hypochondriacal Parker siblings in Sanditon (1817).

It’s in Austen’s letters where her ideas about the bodily functions are most unfiltered. She could be ruthless about people she thought merely ill. She once wrote derisively of “a poor Honey—the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else.” So what would Austen have thought of run-of-the-mill menstrual discomfort?

Anyone channeling the great novelist’s sensibilities in 2026 must see Jane Austen’s Period Drama as far more than another bloody mash-up lark.

Although we don’t have direct evidence, my research has uncovered one good hint in an 1808 letter from Jane Austen to her sister, when both were in their 30s. Jane wrote to Cassandra, “I hope Huxham is a comfort to you: I am glad you are taking it.”

Critics haven’t done much with these two lines, beyond noting that Huxham’s popular tincture combined cinchona bark (i.e. quinine) with orange peel, saffron, and cochineal, then mixed it with spirits. Huxham’s was prescribed for fevers, and its base ingredient would turn out to be important in treating malaria. It was prescribed for “agues” (pains) and as a hangover cure.

But advertisements also suggest Huxham’s was sold to treat menstrual discomfort, claiming it could cure “periodic headaches” “low spirits,” “appetite,” and “nerves.” The word “periodic” here reads like a tell, and much of this language seems like precursor copy for a Midol ad. This suggests the possibility that Austen’s 1808 letter could be her sympathetic take on her sister’s treating period pain.

Whether it is or not, surely Austen would have advocated for a more rational and supportive understanding of women’s bodies in health and illness. Her fiction celebrates men and women finding each other on an equal footing and reading the same books. Her admirable heroes enjoy “feminine” novels, and her sensible women read “men’s” histories, even if her most naïve heroine, Catherine Morland, complains that these histories are filled with good-for-nothing men and hardly any women at all. Austen’s ideal romantic relationships are never founded on ignorance or lies. They’re based on mutual understanding, transparency, and truth.

So anyone channeling the great novelist’s sensibilities in 2026 must see Jane Austen’s Period Drama as far more than another bloody mash-up lark. It’s an important vehicle that centers women’s bodies and reproductive health in conversations about the past, present, and future. In our own day, when women’s reproductive self-control faces renewed restrictions (and when many women still endure what’s called “period poverty,” without sufficient access to sanitary products) everyone ought to be more fully informed about menstruation. And what better way—what more Austen-like way—is there than crafting a story using clever satire, inviting open laughter, and promoting full, serious, and open discussions of period blood?