How Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility Gives Jane Austen’s Novel a Kinetic, Soulful Pulse

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Two centuries haven’t dulled the passion and heartache coursing through Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The 1811 novel chronicles love’s heights and depths through the four Dashwood women—Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret—with the elder sisters’ romantic lives at its heart. After their father’s death leaves the family with little money and forces them from their home, cautious Elinor and impassioned Marianne navigate love, secrecy, and disappointment in a misogynistic world where women’s prospects depend heavily on money and marriage. Though our world looks different today, the novel’s emotional stakes still resonate with audiences; all-consuming heartbreak and yearning are perennial afflictions.

Director Ang Lee first brought this novel to the big screen in 1995, with an Oscar-winning script by Emma Thompson, who also starred in the film as Elinor Dashwood, alongside Alan Rickman (Colonel Brandon), Kate Winslet (Marianne Dashwood), and Hugh Grant (Edward Ferrars). An instant classic, it brought Austen’s sharp social commentary on the 18th-century “cult of sensibility” and the patriarchy to life through dazzling performances and sumptuous costumes. On rewatch, however, the film feels somewhat suffocated by its period-drama trappings, with its women seemingly existing eternally as they might in regal portraiture and the reality of everyday life hidden behind a glamorous veneer. A new Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley and adapted by Diana Reid, strips away that gloss to offer a kinetic, lived-in understanding of the story. This new film, opening on October 16 in the United States, approaches Elinor and Marianne’s struggle to find love with an exhilarating naturalism that feels honest and intimate.

“We assume that things have changed so dramatically for young women in the 200 or so years since it was written,” Oakley tells Bazaar. “But, actually, things haven’t really changed quite as much as we’d like to think. The story to me is about what we tell young women they can reasonably expect from their lives and then the gap between that and what they’ve actually been offered by the world.”

Like the novel and Lee’s 1995 adaptation, Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility introduces us to the Dashwoods after the death of the family patriarch upends their future. His son from his first marriage inherits Norland, their beloved family estate, leaving Mrs. Dashwood (Caitríona Balfe), Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles), and Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with limited means and an unwelcoming home under their brother’s wife’s influence. The quartet relocates to humble Barton Cottage thanks to their relatives, the boisterous Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) and the friendly Sir John Middleton (Turlough Convery), who rent it to them for a fair price. In these new modest surroundings, Elinor and Marianne wrestle with love and longing as they fend for themselves and their family.

At the time, the Dashwoods would have been considered inherently subversive: four women living alone, without a patriarch. The story sees Mrs. Dashwood champion her daughters amid the follies of love (and the threat of financial ruin). The family lives a somewhat bohemian lifestyle, though not necessarily by choice. Despite the circumstances forced upon them, Mrs. Dashwood wants her daughters to be true to themselves—to be free and to find love on their terms.

“Mrs. Dashwood is a lover,” Edgar-Jones says. “She’s somebody who wants her girls to be happy. Our version [of the character]—and Caitríona’s so brilliant [at playing her]—has such warmth, and she celebrates the freer sides of Marianne. She tries to allow Elinor to find that within herself.”

Austen, who began writing what would ultimately become Sense and Sensibility in the late 1700s, crafted the Dashwood family as a counterpoint to the era’s one-dimensional romantic tropes. Authors, unsurprisingly, often overlooked the harsh reality of a patriarchal society in which women were thrust into the world without financial support unless they were attached to a man. Men ran rampant, making decisions about marriage without considering the feelings of the women who would suffer in the wake of their choices. Romance as a genre sugarcoated these toils, frequently dividing women into the ultra-rational and the madly passionate: sense and sensibility, respectively. The 18th-century “cult of sensibility,” in particular, championed unfiltered emotion as a moral virtue. But this, in turn, neglected the real pressures and problems these women faced.

The novel conveys the dangers of the titular sense-and-sensibility dichotomy, offering instead a nuanced view of what love—and survival—means. Oakley’s adaptation emphasizes the Dashwoods’ shared humanity, stretching the problems of these 18th-century women across time to make them relatable to today's audiences. This isn’t about modernizing them, per se, but about presenting these women plainly and asserting that their rebellious, nuanced spirit resonates today.

“Austen’s very punk and rebellious,” Creed-Miles tells Bazaar. “There’s a spirit. Even if feminism wasn’t part of their vernacular at the time, creating in those circumstances as a woman was inherently [feminist]. We were trying to keep that spirit of resistance and rebellion alive.”

Oakley had never considered working on an Austen adaptation before, but after the success of her debut film, Blue Jean (2022), she was tapped to direct Sense and Sensibility. She recalls that reading Reid’s script transported her back to the first time she read the novel as a teenager. “I remembered specifically the relationship between the two sisters really affecting me, and this story standing out against other Austen novels at that time for me, because of that relationship and of the wildness introduced because they have to move to the coast,” Oakley says. When she officially signed on, she decided to forgo revisiting Lee’s version, instead leaning on the story’s inherent wildness and the sisterly bond as a thematic compass.

Elinor and Marianne balance each other. Elinor anchors the Dashwood family, believing she can govern her emotions and internalized suffering to best care for her family. She falls for Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), a quiet, honorable man she meets at Norland, but remains composed even after learning that he is already engaged. Meanwhile, Marianne lives impulsively, believing that any moderation of emotion blemishes a person’s character. She loves the charming libertine John Willoughby (Frank Dillane) but shuns the reserved Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordum), who is immediately enamored of her.

“Elinor is like a geyser, and Marianne is like a river,” Oakley explains. “Marianne has this powerful flow, and it goes wherever it wants, and it knocks things down on its way, but there’s a uniformity to it, whereas with Elinor, everything is kept so tightly bound that when it eventually does explode, it’s more ferocious than anything that Marianne has to offer.”

Oakley cast Elinor first, knowing immediately that she wanted Edgar-Jones to embody sense. But the director understood she needed to choose Marianne (sensibility) carefully because “there is no Elinor without Marianne, and there is no Marianne without Elinor,” she explains. That’s when she found Creed-Miles, who brought the fervor needed to match Elinor’s restraint. She later learned, coincidentally, that the two actresses had worked together 10 years earlier on Pond Life (2018). “You get that yin and yang, but at the same time, there was a love there and an intimacy that you can’t just generate overnight,” Oakley says.

For women today, the sisters’ competing instincts may feel familiar: How much feeling can you reveal without being dismissed as irrational, and how much can you conceal before being mistaken for cold? Those questions take on added weight amid a national debate over women’s roles, the idealization of the traditional nuclear family, and whose ambitions women are expected to prioritize. The terms have changed since Austen’s time, but the struggle over who gets to define a woman’s place keeps bringing new generations back to her work.

Period dramas typically conjure flashy costumes and the heightened standards of polite society. Oakley and Reid shed those expectations, instead emphasizing that Elinor’s and Marianne’s feelings and experiences are far more familiar than one might assume. Oakley worked with Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles to layer their performances, so that “the audience would be able to feel that they can reach through the screen and touch those characters.”

Oakley and Reid deliberately gave Edgar-Jones space to reveal Elinor’s passion and emotion beneath her stoic exterior. For instance, when Elinor learns of Edward’s engagement, she delivers the line “Do you mean to humiliate me, Mr. Ferrars?” with dagger-like precision. Later in the film, when Elinor reprimands Willoughby on her sister’s behalf for his deception regarding his engagement and eventual marriage, she unleashes her full sisterly fury on him.

“Her feelings are strong, but she’s learned how to govern them,” Edgar-Jones says. “For me, it was really important that her restraint never felt like a lack of passion, but really that there was this woman who had this deep, deep well of emotion that she was constantly trying to keep buttoned in.… Diana gave me moments in her arc where I could actually show she had a bit more ferocity than you might think. It’s really smart because a character like Elinor occupies ‘sense,’ but she’s somebody who, in certain situations, has the capacity to really explode.”

Creed-Miles, on the other hand, imbues Marianne with unbridled passion. As Oakley says, the actress flows like an unstoppable river across the screen, whether she’s dancing at a party or gravitating toward the piano. That passion gives the story a kinetic, soulful energy, making Marianne’s ultimate heartbreak over Willoughby’s deception utterly devastating. When she breaks down into a tearful mania in the rain, her grief, though reveling in a wilder setting than the previous buttoned-up adaptation, feels deeply human.

That humanity extends to the setting. Oakley worked with production designer Francesca Di Mottola, costumer Grace Snell, and cinematographer Arnaud Potier to create naturalistic environments that complement the performances. Scenes unfold in golden-hour light or shadowy, candlelit interiors, evoking the rhythms of life without electricity. The Dashwoods’ wardrobes feature muted colors, and the daughters even share clothes. Barton Cottage’s interior feels run-down, and the surrounding fields look untamed. This world feels lived-in; it feels real rather than like a fairy tale.

Some critics have knocked Oakley’s decision to omit certain period adornments as pandering to Gen-Z, but the director says it “literally never occurred to me and was not part of any conversations.” In fact, those choices came from a desire to show how women expressed themselves in private during the Georgian era. “It feels as though we are really witnessing the interior lives of these women,” Creed-Miles says. By showing their lives “beyond the bounds of what’s expected of them socially,” the film gives audiences a more intimate understanding of these characters whose public behavior reveals only so much. Each generation of women that engages with the story finds something of itself in Austen’s heroines. The rules have changed, but the tension between desire, duty, love, and the freedom to build one’s life on one’s own terms remains. Oakley’s film is the latest contribution to that ongoing conversation.

“No one’s comparing different iterations of Shakespeare [in this way],” Creed-Miles says. “I don’t think that how we express or reinterpret female IP has to exist in a vacuum of when it was made, as if all female creators are like a monolith. This idea that Emma [Thompson] wrote that screenplay [for Ang Lee’s film] and Georgia directed this film—there’s like a conversation happening across those years of how different female energies and spirits are kind of interpreting the story. It’s relevant to bring it to a new generation and keep Austen alive for young people today.”