The British press has been clutching its bonnets about an Australian writing Austen. Diana Reid's response is the right one: she never thought of Austen as anyone's cultural property, so it never occurred to her to ask permission. That's the right starting point for any adaptation — not reverence, but genuine engagement with what the source material is actually doing. What Reid found, on close reading, was that Sense and Sensibility's real spine isn't the Elinor-Edward romance or the Marianne-Willoughby disaster. It's the relationship between the sisters — one governing herself with iron self-control, the other throwing herself at life and getting hurt. The men, in Reid's reading, are rewards the women earn after completing an internal journey together. That's a defensible reading of the novel, and structuring a screenplay around it gives the adaptation a clean through-line the 1995 film, for all its perfection, didn't fully exploit. Reid came to this project as a novelist, not a screenwriter — her own books, Love and Virtue (2021) and Signs of Damage (2025), work in contemporary campus and holiday settings where believable dialogue means strategic inarticulacy. Writing Austen inverted that entirely: the task was finding the most elegant possible expression for every sentiment. She reports this was 'a joy,' and you can believe it. The screenplay uses only about 25 of Austen's original lines; the rest is Reid's invention, built on a summer of deep immersion in Austen's rhythm and sentence structure that had her describing strangers as 'most amiable' down at the pub. The adaptation, directed by Georgia Oakley, makes some deliberate aesthetic choices against the grain of Austen's heritage-industry image. Out go the florals and the cosy escapism; in come the Dashwood sisters chopping firewood and tending a vegetable patch. The look is described as drearier than the 1995 version — which matches Reid's reading of Austen as dark and cruel rather than comforting. Marianne's ending has also been tweaked: Austen's original resolution for her apparently doesn't sit well with modern audiences who 'respect what Marianne represents,' and Reid accommodates that. Purists will note this is a real departure, though Reid insists the adaptation is otherwise fairly faithful. The bar set by the 1995 Ang Lee film, with Emma Thompson's Oscar-winning screenplay, is genuinely high. Reid acknowledges she initially thought it hadn't been adapted again for 30 years because the 1995 film was simply perfect. What changed her mind was re-reading the novel and identifying the sister-relationship angle as something that hadn't been fully explored on screen — a legitimate creative justification, not just a commercial one. Whether Oakley's film actually delivers on that thesis is the question reviewers are now working through, but the intellectual scaffolding is there. Reid's comments about Austen's 'generosity about the possibility of love' as the quality that makes her endlessly adaptable are both true and slightly evasive — every adaptor says something like this. The more interesting point is structural: by treating the film as a romance with the sisters as the couple, Reid has essentially applied the romcom grammar (tension, estrangement, reconciliation) to a relationship that never gets that treatment in adaptations, which fixate on the heterosexual plots. That's a genuine creative idea, not just a pitch-meeting talking point.
