This piece written by Barbara Seeber, Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University, originally appeared in The Conversation.

Director Georgia Oakley’s new, unfettered Sense and Sensibility delivers a contemporary take on Jane Austen’s first published novel.

At the beginning of the book, Henry Dashwood’s death leaves his grieving wife and three daughters ousted from their home. Norland Park is inherited by the son of a prior marriage, John, while the Dashwood women relocate to a small cottage in another county.

The novel focuses on the two eldest daughters, Elinor and Marianne (in Oakley’s adaptation, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles) and their contrasting philosophies of sense and sensibility.

Oakley has said she was inspired by Austen’s emphasis on sisterhood, and some reviews have noted the film’s strong depiction of this.

The director has spoken to her interpretation of Austen as a writer who “was taking what she knew to be a commercial form … the romance framework,” while including “subversive” content.

The film seeks to translate Austen’s 1811 feminism to a modern audience, but, for me as an Austen scholar, some important things are lost.

Bold women who revel in nature

We expect Austen heroines to take long walks in the English countryside, but this adaptation, more than any before, firmly plants its women in nature.

The film is beautiful to watch: In the opening sequence, Marianne reclines on the ground amid tall reeds and contemplates a caterpillar balancing on her fingertip. Later, we see her bathing her feet in a cold brook; Elinor skips stones with her love interest. This is Jane Austen, unbuttoned.

Both heroines wave aside social decorum when needed. Oakley’s Elinor even makes the first move. Once Edward Ferrars is a free man, she boldly kisses him on the lips with a windswept landscape as background.

In conversation with other adaptations

Oakley’s adaptation stands in conversation with previous versions. As literary critic Linda Hutcheon argues, earlier adaptations may “be just as important as contexts … as any ‘original.’”

Oakley draws on Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation in some ways, including in the depiction of leading men.

Austen’s Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon may be underwhelming romantic interests. But their failure to capture the readers’ imagination is part of the point.

While Oakley does highlight the women’s relationships anchoring Austen’s novel, she presents the male suitors more favourably — and this undermines Austen’s subversion of the romance plot.

Literary scholar Deborah Kaplan has argued that the 1995 Sense and Sensibility and the 1996 Emma “harlequinize” Austen’s novels. We might say the same is true, to some extent, of Oakley’s version.

Fulfilment in romance?

Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility cast Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, setting up their respective characters, Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, as romantic leads.

Oakley’s men in these roles, George MacKay and Herbert Nordrum, don’t (yet) have the same Hollywood star power. But they follow in Grant and Rickman’s footsteps in romantic appeal.

The film suggests both heroines find fulfilment in the courtship plot that Austen interrogates. For example, Oakley’s Edward, like Lee’s, endears himself to the audience by playfully entertaining the 13-year-old Margaret. Such scenes don’t exist in the novel.

Oakley further ramps up Edward’s merit. In Austen, it’s not a mark in his favour that he fell in love with Lucy Steele and formed a secret engagement. In Oakley’s film, the alliance was arranged. Once the Steeles lose their fortune, he is expected to dissolve the engagement, but Edward is a man of honour.

Treatment of Brandon, Willoughby

Oakley’s Colonel Brandon, like Lee’s, is set up as a romantic hero. I initially mistook Oakley’s Brandon for Willoughby because his first appearance — tall, handsome, moody — matches the novel’s description of Willoughby’s horseback arrival.

In the new Sense and Sensibility, tension between Brandon and Marianne seems to be there from the beginning. As in Lee’s film, scenes are added to ensure that we trust Marianne has a happy ending.

Austen leaves us with less certainty. Near the novel’s end, Willoughby, having heard of Marianne’s illness, intrudes upon Elinor to inquire after her sister and offer an account of himself. It’s an explosive scene, and in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, it was cut.

Oakley keeps it — but makes significant changes.

In the novel, Elinor is outraged by Willoughby, but she also pities him. As the narrator notes: “She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner … and by that still ardent love for Marianne.”

Elinor can’t help but feel “a pang” for him.

However, the film depicts Elinor as angry; he is a player, and she tells him as much, which drains the scene of its complexity.

It’s curious that the film, at the same time, revises Willoughby’s villainy. In the novel, Willoughby impregnates a 16-year-old girl. In the film, his dalliance is with a widow of mature age.

Loss of context around Norland Park

The film, like the 1995 adaptation, circumvents an important backstory to the Dashwood women’s economic disenfranchisement.

The novel’s opening paragraphs establish a complicated family history. Henry Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne’s father, inherited Norland Park from his uncle but on terms that didn’t let him leave it to them.

Instead, the uncle’s will designated that Henry Dashwood, upon his own death, must pass the house to his son from a first marriage: John Dashwood, and, in turn John’s son, Harry.

The narrator depicts this as unjust. The son already has an ample fortune. Rather than the proprietor uncle rewarding the Dashwood women for their care of him, he is swayed by the young Harry’s “attractions:” “an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise.”

Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility, by contrast, doesn’t give this context and rather portrays the events as a matter of law.

In this way, the film alleviates male family members from direct responsibility for the poverty of women.

While there is much to enjoy in Oakley’s film, with its stunning cinematography and strong performances, it dilutes some aspects of Austen’s critique.