{"id":654223,"date":"2026-10-22T22:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T22:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/654223\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T22:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T22:12:10","slug":"jane-austen-is-for-everyone-novelist-diana-reid-on-adapting-sense-and-sensibility-and-surprising-brits-with-her-accent-jane-austen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/654223\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Jane Austen is for everyone\u2019: novelist Diana Reid on adapting Sense and Sensibility \u2013 and surprising Brits with her accent | Jane Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"

The summer Diana Reid spent writing her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility<\/a>, she found herself having some oddly formal conversations down at the pub. The Australian author used only about 25 lines from Jane Austen\u2019s first published novel for her screenplay, inventing most of the dialogue herself. To be able to mimic that very distinctive voice, Reid had to dive headfirst into studying Austen\u2019s rhythm and sentence structure.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got so immersed in the language it infected my own speech. I would be describing someone I just met, and I\u2019d be like, \u2018Oh, he was most amiable!\u2019\u201d Reid says, laughing. \u201cIt was a kind of insanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until now, Reid has been best known as the novelist behind bestsellers such as 2021\u2019s Love and Virtue<\/a> and 2025\u2019s Signs of Damage<\/a>, which are set among the university campuses and Euro holiday destinations of the modern world. Adapting a book published in 1811, then, was a very different job \u2013 but one that became oddly freeing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much of writing contemporary dialogue is trying to make it sound believable, which often involves making people inarticulate,\u201d Reid says. \u201cWriting this, I got to sit at my computer and be like, \u2018What is the most elegant way this sentiment could possibly be expressed?\u2019 \u2026 It was actually a joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reid is speaking to me via Zoom from a chandelier-clad hotel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she has been flown to promote the film (one of the perks of screenwriting is that the film industry has much \u201cdeeper pockets\u201d than publishing, she says).<\/p>\n

Her adaptation, directed by Georgia Oakley and released in Australia and the US this month, retells the story of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who are forced out of the landed gentry and into more precarious financial circumstances after the death of their father. Elinor falls for Edward Ferrars, a man who can\u2019t seem to articulate his obvious reciprocal feelings for her, and Marianne is soon swept off her feet by the roguishly charming John Willoughby \u2013 but neither romance is what it first seems.<\/p>\n

Esm\u00e9 Creed-Miles (left) and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Sense and Sensibility. Photograph: Courtesy of Focus Features\/AP<\/p>\n

Reid and producer India Flint pitched the idea of a new adaptation because they wanted to tackle something by Austen, who Reid loves and considers a \u201cgenius\u201d. Pride and Prejudice had been very successfully remade in 2005<\/a> and Emma more recently in 2020<\/a> \u2013 but the Dashwood sisters hadn\u2019t been revisited on film in 30 years, when Ang Lee delivered his beloved 1995 take on the tale.<\/p>\n

The Oscar-winning screenplay for that adaptation was penned by Emma Thompson, who also played Elinor. Unlike that thoroughly British star, Reid\u2019s Australian accent has been tripping up some British fans and media.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn recent weeks it\u2019s almost felt like in Britain, perhaps [Austen] is viewed as a piece of cultural inheritance and that there are worthy and unworthy successors \u2013 and it seems striking or hubristic that an Australian would think themselves worthy,\u201d Reid says. \u201cBut I never thought of Jane Austen<\/a> as a possession. I just thought that she was something for anyone who was interested \u2026 if you don\u2019t think of her as a possession, then it doesn\u2019t occur to you to worry about whether it\u2019s your right to receive it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What did give Reid pause, though, was how high a bar Ang Lee\u2019s adaptation set.<\/p>\n

Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in Ang Lee\u2019s Oscar-winning 1995 adaptation. Photograph: AJ Pics\/Alamy<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the 1995 film, and my initial instinct was that there was a reason it hadn\u2019t been [adapted] for 30 years, and that was because the 1995 film was perfect,\u201d Reid says. \u201cBut then I read the book and I rewatched the movie, and I felt that I did find something to say that I didn\u2019t think had been said on screen before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reid believes the main love story of Sense and Sensibility isn\u2019t between Elinor and Edward or Marianne and Willoughby (or Colonel Brandon), but between the two sisters themselves \u2013 one logical and level-headed, the other utterly free-spirited.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe spine of the story was about how these two women depend on each other, challenge each other and ultimately change each other,\u201d Reid says. \u201cAnd while there are romances in it, it\u2019s almost as if the men are the rewards that the two women get for having gone on this journey of growth together.\u201d<\/p>\n

So in structuring the script, Reid tried to approach it almost as a romantic comedy but with the story arc plotted along tension between the sisters, not two love interests: the film\u2019s climax comes when Elinor and Marianne are at odds, and their happy ending requires each to adapt qualities from the other. \u201cWhich is a very typical romcom structure,\u201d Reid says.<\/p>\n

Reid says Austen\u2019s work possesses \u2018a generosity about the possibility of love\u2019 that is both romantic and timeless \u2013 and why it\u2019s perennially reinvented. Photograph: Alex Bailey\/Focus Features\/AP<\/p>\n

Purists will be pleased to hear that Reid\u2019s adaptation is a fairly faithful one \u2013 Emerald Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/a> this is not. But she did make some tweaks to the romantic fate of the younger Dashwood sister, feeling that Austen\u2019s original ending wouldn\u2019t sit well with modern audiences, who \u201crespect what Marianne represents\u201d \u2013 a bold, headstrong woman who goes for what she wants in life and accepts no substitutes.<\/p>\n

Instead of \u201cscene after scene of women sitting down in the parlour drinking tea, as Austen can sometimes feel\u201d, she and Oakley opted to depict the Dashwood sisters cooking, chopping firewood and tending the veggie patch. Aesthetically, the film feels far drearier than the 1995 film, too, as the typical aestheticisation of Austen\u2019s work \u2013 \u201cvery floral and bonnets; cosy, comfy escapism\u201d \u2013 didn\u2019t sit right with Reid, who considers her work very dark and imbued with an often cruel sense of humour.<\/p>\n

What hasn\u2019t changed is the heart of Sense and Sensibility. As Reid sees it, Austen\u2019s work possesses \u201ca generosity about the possibility of love\u201d that is both romantic and timeless \u2013 and why it\u2019s perennially reinvented.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t feel like Austen is, like, my cultural property now as a result of having written it,\u201d Reid says. \u201cI just feel like it is this thing that\u2019s endlessly adaptable \u2013 there\u2019s probably someone else doing their Sense and Sensibility adaptation right now. It is for everyone, and it\u2019s still for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The summer Diana Reid spent writing her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, she found herself having some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-654223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}