Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · first published 1811
Ang Lee’s film won Emma Thompson an Oscar for the screenplay — and it has been remade in Tamil and in Spanish since.
6 versions · 1996–2011
The 1995 film is the rare adaptation that improved a book’s reputation rather than replacing it. Thompson spent years on the script and cut hard; what survives is the argument the novel is really about, which is money, and how little of it two well-bred women were allowed to control.
It travels well. Kandukondain Kandukondain moved it to Tamil Nadu in 2000 and From Prada to Nada to Los Angeles in 2011, and both work, because a family thrown out of its house by an inheritance law is a situation that needs no period costume.
Published 1811, at the family’s own risk
Austen published it “by a Lady”, on commission — meaning she carried the financial risk herself and would have had to cover the loss. She was thirty-five, unmarried, and had no income of her own.
That is the situation the novel is about. English law let an estate pass to the nearest male heir, and a widow and her daughters could be turned out of the house they had lived in all their lives with an allowance decided by the man who inherited. Austen’s readers did not need this explained; a reader now generally does.
On screen
6Film and television, earliest first.
- 1996 Sense and Sensibility Ang Lee
- 2000 Kandukondain Kandukondain Rajiv Menon
- 2008 Sense and Sensibility John Alexander
- 2011 From Prada to Nada Angel Gracia
- — Sense and Sensibility
- — Sense and Sensibility Rodney Bennett
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.