Ask anyone in the street to name a Jane Austen novel and you can bet their first answer would be Pride and Prejudice. Even if they haven’t read it, they will have seen one of the many adaptations, whether it’s Colin Firth’s wet white shirt in the 90s or Matthew Macfayden’s “I- I- I- love you” in 2005: Austen’s second novel about misgivings, misunderstandings and allowing yourself to be proved wrong – not to mention its brooding hero, Mr Darcy – is baked into the British cultural consciousness. A starry new Netflix adaptation, written and directed by Dolly Alderton and starring Emma Corrin, Jack Lowden and Olivia Colman, is forthcoming.
But watching Georgia Oakley’s new film adaptation of Austen’s debut novel, Sense and Sensibility, I was reminded not only of its brilliance, but of its enduring relevance for the modern day. This story of two sisters, Elinor (played here by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles), of very different emotional temperaments, might as well be a moral fable for the social media generation. Though the film, darker and gloomier than the beloved 1995 adaptation starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, is a little hit and miss, I left the cinema with one thought: every millennial should read this book.
This being Austen’s first novel, written when she was just 19, the differences between the two sisters are not subtle. Elinor is a stoical, sensible type, never allowing her emotions to cloud her judgement, while younger Marianne is a whimsical romantic who would never dream of entertaining a suitor who didn’t have passion. When the family loses their fortune and the sisters are forced to look to marriage to secure their future, these preferences become all the more apparent.
But Regency society, and subtlety, aside, the tussle between, well, sense and sensibility, is ever relevant 200 years later. Thanks to the pressures of social media, it feels like everyone under 40 is caught in a constant battle between oversharing and holding it all in to maintain some social veneer. We are painfully aware of the importance not only of decorum and privacy, in an age when everything you do can be filmed and put online, but of attempting to claw back some kind of financial and existential stability when the future feels incredibly precarious. At the same time, we have never been under greater pressure to optimise our “one wild and precious life”, ensuring that everything we do, from our career choices to our relationships, is in the service of self-fulfilment, enjoyment and passion.
Austen’s heroines show how too much of either of these can end in tears. Elinor is so guarded with her feelings that she loses the man she loves to someone else (Edgar-Jones is brilliant, in the new film, at playing Elinor’s quiet but overwhelming grief), while Marianne is so exuberant that she strays into pure fantasy, her naivety and blind romantic optimism obscuring what we would now call a whole sea of red flags.
In the film, which remains mostly true to its period setting but occasionally has glimpses of modernisation, Marianne’s fated relationship with Mr Willoughby – a situationship for the ages – is almost painfully familiar through his portrayal by Frank Dillane as a classic, charming playboy. Marianne is so enthralled by the romance with Willoughby she fails to recognise not only his faults but also the love of another suitor, Colonel Brandon, who, if dull, really cares about her. Who could forget that line that Willoughby’s intentions to propose were “every day implied but never professedly declared” – leaving him free to ghost her and break her heart.
Of course, being a Jane Austen novel, the love stories are at the centre of Sense and Sensibility: but its wisdom can be extrapolated to so much of modern life. I don’t know a single millennial who doesn’t feel caught between desires to be both a chaotic free spirit and a responsible adult with their s**t together. As our generation ages, the former is increasingly looked down upon as boomers denigrate us for being stuck in perpetual adolescence. But the question of whether to live by your heart or your head has, Austen shows us, been happening for centuries.
‘Sense and Sensibility’ is in cinemas now