Several years ago, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet did a pretty good job of playing Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. I thought Emma Thompson’s portrayal was especially good, though she looked and behaved too old. Also, Hugh Grant was too handsome to play his role, but looks aren’t everything, are they?
Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret Dashwood are three sisters whose financial well-being dies along with their father in typical 19th-century British fashion. As a single woman, Jane Austen seems to have been especially sensitive to the precarious nature of a woman’s
property holdings and
bank accounts. Actually, women didn’t have property holdings or bank accounts, and that was the problem. The girls’ brother inherited the home they lived in when their father died, and they had to depend on the kindness of other relatives by moving to a cottage in the country.
Elinor and Marianne, both of marrying age, feel the pangs of love, but they respond to their troubles in different ways. Marianne, emotional and very sentimental, weeps openly for the loss of the man she loves and becomes physically ill from the heartbreak while Elinor, practical and conventional, suffers inwardly, never speaks an ill word of another even at
great consequence to herself, and adheres to social norms. The sisters grow to understand one another and compromise in the extreme ways they handle their emotions and relate to each other and the other
characters.
Like Jane Austen’s other terrific novels, Sense and Sensibility relies more on characterization than
plot, which is wonderful because Austen’s talent in creating likeable, very human characters is rivaled only by a few authors. She’s one of the greats. This is not to say that the plot is lacking in any way. There is more than enough plot to keep the pages turning. I’d recommend reading this book before you watch the movie. And by the way, the soundtrack is great.
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