There’s her riff on chasing blue skies above, and her admonishment of her sister for using unimaginative vocabulary for her own love interest, played by a stammering young Hugh Grant: “‘ Esteem him? ‘ Like him?’ Use those insipid words again and I shall leave the room this instant.” Or her delight at receiving wildflowers from a suitor who picked them from an “obliging field” after a previous suitor had offered more pedestrian blossoms: “ These are not from the hothouse!” she says, clutching her new posies. But the film rounds Marianne out and makes her central to the plot, giving her lines so quotable that my friends and I still use them all the time, two decades later. The book is clearly partial to the perspective of older sister Elinor. In the Austen novel, Marianne is such an object of satire that she inspires readers to want to chuck the book at the wall. The film makes Marianne’s follies and orthodoxies into cringe-comedy, Regency style, but with underlying pathos. As the over-excitable heroine who so invested in capital-R Romantic (think Keats) notions, so much so that she exposes herself to ridicule and rejection, she is so gorgeous, and her character so unintentionally funny, that she becomes more sympathetic than she might be otherwise. In classic story of two sisters with two very different conceptions of romantic conduct and true love, Winslet plays the younger, more easily inflamed of the two. Personally I prefer other Austen adaptations qua adaptations, but as a movie that stands on its own, Sense and Sensibility will always be the pinnacle of Austen goes to Hollywood for me.Īnd it’s mostly because of the script, particularly Thompson’s treatment of Marianne, who was played by newcomer Kate Winslet (I still remember seeing “…and introducing Kate Winslet” in the trailer). Thompson created her own sub-canon, an adaptation that is different from the novel’s vision but holds its own as a work of art.

Let us chase it!” Ask your average Jane Austen fan about this line, uttered by Marianne Dashwood in Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility adaptation, and they’ll admit it’s as memorable, and quotable as anything in the original novel.Ĭomparing anyone else’s writing to Austen’s is often considered a grave disservice by devotees of the author, but Thompson accomplished something quite remarkable with her Oscar-winning screenplay for Lee’s film, released 20 years ago this month. “Is there any felicity in the world superior to this? … There’s some blue sky.

Emma thompson jane austen