From Focus Features and Working Title comes an irresistible new take on Jane Austen’s iconic Sense and Sensibility: a charming, witty and deeply relatable story of love and sisterhood.
Based on the novel by Jane Austen and adapted for the screen by Diana Reid, the film is directed by Georgia Oakley.
For Sense and Sensibility, director Georgia Oakley and her producing partners were keenly interested in making the world of Jane Austen come alive in a way that would feel both authentic and imminently relatable to today’s audiences. “I was really trying to get into what it might have felt like to live in Devon 200 years ago, steering away from this preconceived idea that we have about Austen, that everything takes place in a stuffy drawing room,” Oakley says. “The locations and the set design and the costumes having a loose, unbuttoned feeling, that was definitely part of my overall vision.”
Inside The Story
When Sense and Sensibility was published October 30, 1811, its authorship was not credited to Jane Austen. Rather, the book’s title page announced that it was written “By a Lady.” The anonymity was by design—in 19th century England, pursuing paid work was a questionable endeavor for a respectable, upper-class woman, and the act of reading novels was viewed askance by moralists who felt it was an anti-social pastime. Nevertheless, Austen’s debut became a rare kind of literary sensation, winning praise in the publication The Critical Review and earning such admirers as the Prince Regent, the future King George IV.
By July 1813, publisher Thomas Egerton had sold all the 750 copies of the first edition, leading to a second printing. It has never been out of print since.
It is (to borrow a famous phrase from another of Austen’s novels) a truth universally acknowledged that Austen is a unique sort of literary genius—despite living in a radically different era, she managed to observe such fundamental truths about human nature that her fiction remains wildly relevant hundreds of years after it was written. But not only did she evince an innate understanding of gender, agency and survival, writing complex female characters grappling with who they are and how they feel instead of who society tells them to be—she’s also very, very funny. There’s a reason she’s considered a brilliant social satirist and the mother of the romantic comedy.
All the best qualities of Austen’s work are readily apparent in Sense and Sensibility, both the original novel and filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s fresh new take on the timeless classic, which introduces the author to a new generation of moviegoers. While the plot might focus on the romantic prospects of elder Dashwood siblings Elinor and Marianne, the narrative is layered with nuance in its depiction of the women’s rapport—their dynamic is messy, intense, exasperating and fiercely devoted, tender and brutal in equal measure. In other words, it strongly resembles real life.
The idea of a radical new take on Sense and Sensibility originated with producer India Flint who has a history of working with filmmakers including Cary Joji Fukunaga and Danny Boyle and is a veteran of Working Title, the venerable British production company that previously adapted Austen to great cinematic success with such Academy Award®-nominated films as 2020’s Emma. and 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, both of which were released by Focus Features. (The studio also distributed Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, which won writer and star Emma Thompson an Oscar® for her screenplay.)
Flint sparked the idea after reading Australian author Diana Reid’s 2021 debut novel, Love & Virtue, about a whip-smart and witty college student. “What struck me with Diana’s writing was her ability to capture a very specific kind of cultural moment, and her ability to capture the voice of her generation,” Flint says. “Of course, this is also true for what we love about Austen. Diana’s about the same age as Austen was when she wrote the novel, and she’s not that different in age to the hero characters. I also knew that she was going to inject such a witty sense of humor.”
Revisiting Austen’s novel with an eye to adapt it for the screen, Reid was surprised by how contemporary both the characters and the narrative felt. Austen certainly wasn’t using modern dating lingo, nevertheless, behaviors like love bombing and ghosting were front and center. “Just because the labels have changed, doesn’t mean that people have,” Reid says. “Some of the heartbreak in the novel felt like the kind of thing that you would see someone complain about on TikTok. A lot of her comedy comes from the fact that other people can be really annoying, but it just makes the romances all the more romantic—she essentially says that it is remarkable to find someone who you really like in this world, someone who sees the world the way you do.”
While Elinor and Marianne might be hoping for husbands who share their outlooks on life, what is most endearing about Sense and Sensibility is the love story between the sisters themselves, who cherish one another even if their perspectives are in radical opposition to each other. Reid sought to capture the tension between logic and passion that characterizes Elinor and Marianne’s opposing approaches to life: controlled, composed and socially responsible Elinor represents “sense,” while spontaneous, passionate and emotionally vulnerable Marianne represents “sensibility.”
“They both are very intelligent and they’re both deeply empathetic, but it’s just a question of what they do with those emotions,” Reid says. “For Elinor, I always thought about it as a conflict between duty and desire—she’s always thinking about what other people want. Marianne is very sure of what she wants, and she pursues her desire ardently and without inhibition.”
By the time Reid sat down to write the script, the extensive conversations she’d had with the producers allowed her to work quite quickly. She sought to depict the characters in a way that felt lived-in and authentic to the time, while also feeling fresh and modern. “We knew the characters so well and what we loved about them, that the actual process of writing it ended up being quite smooth,” Reid says. “I had the text of the book up on one screen, and then my script on the other.”
Referring to the original text was vital as Reid and the filmmaking team chose not to modernize any of Austen’s language, preserving much of the book’s original dialogue. For Reid, the choice not only helps set Sense and Sensibility apart from other recent adaptations of classic literature, but it also underscores the inherent relatability of the characters.
“For me, what’s special about reading classic literature is that you encounter these people who, on the surface, are nothing like you at all,” Reid says. “They live in totally different worlds, they operate under different social codes, and they express themselves in a way that you would never express yourself. Still, you come to feel for them, and you realize that, under the surface, they actually are like you. That feeling of empathy is so much more profound if you feel like you’re empathizing across a gulf in circumstance.”
To bring Reid’s script to life, the producers turned to BAFTA-nominated writer-director Georgia Oakley, known for her stunning debut, 2022’s Blue Jean, about a closeted teacher threatened with exposure during the Thatcher era. “I was so captivated by Georgia’s ability to convey a very specific time and place,” Flint says. “Blue Jean is set in the ’80s in Newcastle. Prior to that, she had done this short film, Bored, which was set at a contemporary house party. You could see how real her attention to detail is, which enables you to be completely transported into these worlds that she creates, along with the performances. Those were the special ingredients that we knew we would want in our adaptation.”
Although Oakley is a filmmaker known for writing her own material, she was moved by the screenplay and immediately hooked into how she wanted to approach the film, both visually and thematically. She wanted her Sense and Sensibility to be grounded, naturalistic, earthy and stripped back. She wanted to create a film about the lives of people who felt deeply alive, not fusty literary characters, and she wanted to foreground the dynamics of the central relationship between Elinor and Marianne.
“I was drawn to the relationship between the sisters,” Oakley says. “They represent these two opposing forces that a lot of women have within themselves that are always at war. As a writer, Austen seemed to understand power and gender dynamics, and that came across in Diana’s witty, brilliant, propulsive script. The fact that the central love story was between the two sisters—I think Austen was really writing about the two sides of herself that were often in disagreement with each other, and she splintered them out into these characters.”
For Oakley, there was another important character to highlight: the natural world. Putting her stamp on Austen, the filmmaker was determined to emphasize the textural details of the story to make the Dashwood’s environments feel that much more real. Again, the Dashwood women, particularly Marianne, aren’t simply well manicured ladies bound up inside immaculate mansions—they are fully realized people of flesh and blood, wandering out among the windswept fields, hair unkempt, sometimes barefoot, leading full and rich lives.
“Georgia wanted to make sure that we didn’t have a film where the women felt like they were just sitting around waiting for men to visit,” Reid says. “She wanted them to be gardening or making something, that they were out there living and the camera had just stumbled on them. Seeing them in nature is such a good way to ground their stories and make them feel relatable to modern audiences—we don’t live in drawing rooms anymore, but everybody still lives in nature.”
Georgia Oakley (Director) is an award-winning writer and director. She most recently wrapped production on Sense and Sensibility. Her debut feature was Blue Jean (2022). Georgia’s short films have screened at dozens of international festivals. She has participated in talent development schemes including iFeatures, the BFI Flare & BAFTA mentorship scheme, where she was mentored by Desiree Akhavan, BFI Network x BAFTA Crew and the 2018 edition of Berlinale Talents. She is currently writing an original feature for BBC Film, as well as adapting two short stories: Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata for Tessa Ross/House Productions and Film4; and Pillory for Michael Parets/Sinestra and Fremantle.
Diana Reid is a screenwriter and novelist. Her debut novel, Love & Virtue, won several prizes and she was named Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist in 2022. She wrote a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Working Title and Focus Features. Her television adaptation of Middlemarch is in development with Working Title and Netflix UK. Born in Sydney, Diana is currently based in London.
