Fun fact: the woman who played Elinor in this adaption of Sense and Sensibility played Charlotte Lucas in the same year’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. And, actually, you know what? Fair play. There’s a tendency when making a visual medium product with a heroine whose thing is that she’s not the hot one to nevertheless cast a notable smokin’ hottie in the role because audiences won’t get behind a protagonist who is genuinely slightly plain And, don’t get me wrong, Irene Richard is perfectly pretty but she’s got the kind of face that codes as plain on TV especially when paired with an unflattering hairstyle. She’s very definitely the kind of person you would cast as the Charlotte Lucas character, not as the character who is ostensibly the romantic lead.
Although, actually, one of the things that’s interesting about Sense and Sensibility in general, and this adaptation of Sense and Sensibility in particular, is that in a lot of ways Elinor isn’t the romantic lead because its not a particularly romantic story.
I feel like I’m going to find myself litigating (or dancing around litigating) the “was Jane Austen a romance writer” question in every single one of these posts and I’m going to keep giving my slightly hedgy “well, it kind of depends” answer but I think this adaptation especially is a really strong check in the “no” column. Genre romance fundamentally is characterised by a central love story and Sense and Sensibility, in this adaptation at least, really isn’t. Its defining relationship, at the end of the day, is the one between Elinor and Marianne and while that relationship is loving it’s not a love story in the romance novel sense of the word. It’s about, well, it’s about sisters.
And I want to say I like that this version of the story brings that element out. But I’m not sure it does. I think it might just sell the sisterly relationship badly but then sell the romantic relationships even worse. And on the surface of it, that’s pretty harsh criticism. But I sort of don’t mean it to be. The refrain I kept coming back when thinking about this adaptation when I was watching it was “all the creative choices are great, all of the technical choices are terrible.” One of the weird things about watching TV from … Jesus fucking Christ more than forty years ago now is that sometimes it completely holds up and you can be all “okay, that wasn’t made with modern technology and some of its social attitudes are a bit last century but this still feels like I’m watching a TV show.” But sometimes a combination of technological and stylistic differences between then and now can make old media look almost … I guess I want to say … fake isn’t the right word, but I can’t off the top of my head think of a better one.
And it’s not that this isn’t professionally done or that it doesn’t have what, for the time, were decent production values but it’s almost like you’re watching something filmed on a camcorder from the back of the cinema. Like, every scene is lit really dimly, most of the interior ones have an echo, and the ones that don’t have really intrusive street noise piped in which I briefly thought might be because they were filming on location in actual London and couldn’t block it out … except, well, then there would have been more car horns and fewer hoofbeats. And all of the dialogue is delivered in this way that feels very mannered and stilted and I couldn’t tell if that was an 1800s-ism or a 1980s-ism or a 1980s-pretending-to-be-the-1800s-ism. Which is especially weird because the Pride and Prejudice filmed at the time, in which the lead actress had a significant role, felt very naturalistic even if things got a bit blurry whenever anyone went outside.
A tiny tiny part of me does wonder if I didn’t give the adaption enough credit because I do diagnose its problems as having started with the DVD menu. And I don’t really mean with the DVD menu, I mean with an adaptational choice that the DVD menu reveals. When I went to play the first episode, I noticed there were seven episodes in the series and I thought to myself, oh that’s unusually long, these tend to be four episode mini-series because it can be hard to get more than four hours-ish of TV out of a fairly slim novel. But, actually, they hadn’t made seven hours of TV, they’d made a little bit under three and a half hours of TV, and each of the seven episodes was half an hour long. As always, I am not an expert, I know jack shit about visual media, but I feel like twenty-seven minutes is exactly the wrong episode length for a Jane Austen adaptation.
Perhaps the most illustrative example of this, and I’m sorry this is deeply non chronological and also contains spoilers from a book published more two hundred years ago, is in episode 6 (of 7) in which Marianne lies on her sickbed and Willoughby comes and gives Elinor his big “yes I’m a shithead but I was really in love with her speech”. The speech is presented pretty much in full, like I confess I haven’t gone back and checked, but I’m pretty sure it’s more complete than the version of that scene in the 1971 adaptation: this means, though, that is pretty much the only thing that happens in that episode. I think the problem is compounded by the aforementioned very mannered style of filming so the way an episode tends to work is that it starts, a couple of people have a couple of conversations that go on quite a long time, and then it ends. It makes for a very disjoined viewing experience that, in turn, makes it very hard to invest in…well … any of it?
Another way to put it, and another thing that prejudiced me against this series at the start, is that the title sequence shows Elinor and Marianne on opposite ends of a seesaw going up and down very slowly inside one of those soft-focus lozenge-shaped window that you used to get at the start of historical dramas. And I know it’s a metaphor for, like, how they don’t see eye to eye and need to get their world views in balance (oh d’you see) but … it still means that at the start of every episode you have to watch a gauzy close up of Elinor’s face moving slowly up and down in profile on the extreme left-hand side of lozenge and then an equally gauzy close up of Marianne’s face slowly moving up and down in profile on the extreme right-hand side of lozenge and it’s only after that you get the final gauzy long-shot which is, I should stress, the first time you actually get a glimpse of the seesaw so you realise what’s happening and … just … it just makes my brain every time.
There’s a common criticism of a certain type of [BLANK] that I’ve seen applied to musicals, board games, video games and basically any other medium which is “this [BLANK] is what people who don’t like [BLANK] think [BLANK] is like.” And the opening sequence of every episode of the 1971 adaption of Sense and Sensibility is, without a doubt, the best summation I can imagine of what people who don’t like costume dramas think costume dramas are like. It’s slow, its people doing Looks that are sort of non-specifically significant, it has a bleached out colour palate, there’s generic classical music happening and, did I mention, it’s slow. I mean, I love costume dramas and I was still set up to expect boredom every time I saw it.
The thing is, I do feel bad about disliking this adaption so much because I do think time hasn’t been kind to it and I do, in abstract, like that it seems to have been aiming for a more understated take on the story, especially relative to the 1971 adaptation with Extremely Extra Marianne and Hyacinth Bucket as Mrs Jennings. The problem is it was so understated as to leave almost no impression at all. Like, in about episode 4, Edward Ferrars show up at Barton and I think I’d genuinely forgotten what the guy playing Edward Ferrars looked like in this adaptation. Which is a kind of remarkable achievement in many ways because he looks like this:
Like, how could I forget that man? He’s got a comb-over even though he obviously has plenty of hair. He looks like Joffrey Lannister grew up and kind of let himself go. And, let’s not forget, he’s supposed to be a major character. And, obviously, part of Edward’s role in the book is a bit weird because he’s not actually in it that much: he and Elinor fall quietly in love at Norland, then they are parted, then Lucy Steele, then they are allowed to get married. Like, there’s a bit at the end of this adaptation where Mrs Dashwood is all, “oh my dear Elinor, I have been so distracted by Marianne’s problems, I had forgotten you were suffering too” and I couldn’t help thinking “yeah, no shit, so had I.”
Their Brandon is, in a lot of ways, much better but that might just be because he does do some more conventional hero stuff, like being sort of vaguely broody and having to go to London suddenly for reasons he can’t explain, and he’s more present through Marianne’s illness than in the one 1971 version, where he just sort of pops up and is like “can I be the romantic lead now?” Plus the actor has a deep sexy voice and excellent side-burns which, somehow, seems to have become the Brandon Code.
Sidebar: I occasionally wonder if adapting Brandon is a uniquely difficult because I suspect there’s a lot of ways he would have been coded at the time that just don’t translate at all for both good and for ill. As far as I can tell, and different people’s readings will be different, Marianne’s judgements about him are supposed to be kind of superficial and incorrect. There’s the whole thing about him wearing flannel waistcoat and, obviously, even to a modern audience flannel is a funny word but … I don’t think I’ve ever looked at anybody in a Regency-set costume drama and thought, hmm, that man’s outfit is notably fuddy-duddyish. Like unless you go full Bridgerton and just give him a modern cardigan or something. Like, I assume a flannel waistcoat in the Regency was the equivalent of a cardigan in the present day, and not a sexy cardigan, like a “your nan made this to keep you warm” cardigan. But then, on the other hand, you’ve got the thing where Marianne’s second objection to Brandon is that, um, she’s a seventeen-year-old girl and she doesn’t particularly want to marry a man who’s nearly forty. And, yes, in the 1810s that was not considered a super reasonable objection to marriage. But it’s hard find a way to convey that on screen to a contemporary audience without it either coming across as absolutely nothing (26 year old actress thinks 27 year old actor is old and gross) or overwhelmingly unpleasant (17 year old actress doesn’t want to marry man more than twice her age).
I can see why they went with sideburns, is what I’m saying.
The final character I want to talk about here is Lucy Steele because I think this adaption does a really good job with her. And okay, in a lot of ways that’s faint praise because she’s very much a supporting character. Although in other ways it’s less faint praise because she’s actually in it quite a lot. Like I think even trying to be fairly detached it’s very easy to bring modern media assumptions to adaptations of classic novels, and so even though Edward is inarguably less of a presence in the story (in this version at least) than Lucy, my brain automatically codes him as more important because he’s the “main love interest”. Which is probably actually doing the whole thing a disservice.
Anyway because of the way I’m watching these adaptations I can’t not compare this version of Lucy Steele to the 1971 Lucy Steele. Who was basically evil and awful and constantly doing evil awful voice and definitely being a shit to everybody throughout. By comparison 1981 Lucy Steele is actually plausible. She’s soft-spoken and gives off a real aura of false innocence that’s actually compelling. She’s also—and this comes right back to the point I made at the top of this not-quite-a-review—genuinely more conventionally attractive than Elinor (which she also is in the book) and I’m weirdly respectful of the people who made the adaptation for being willing to bite that bullet.
The supporting cast in general were quite strongly articulated. For some reason I found their version of Mrs Palmer less toxic than she usually is. The central “joke” of the character is normally that her husband hates her and she’s oblivious to it in a way we’re invited to look down on whereas in this adaptation it’s more that her husband hates her but she DGAF and he can’t do shit about it. Also she has a really annoying laugh. And for some reason in this one specific instance I found the “you’re meant to dislike this woman because she has an annoying laugh” trope actually worked, instead of being miserable and awful. Maybe it’s because the sound quality was so weird anyway that being annoyed by something intentional was a blessed relief after being annoyed by the nagging question of where the fuck those hoofbeats were coming from.
Also, despite every scene in the adaptation being incredibly downplayed, even Marianne’s bits, when Fanny Dashwood discovers that Lucy Steele is engaged to Edward Ferrars she reacts like this:
To get the full experience, stare at that picture for about twelve straight minutes. Again, I don’t know what this production did to my brain because normally “hysterical woman has hysterics” is not a trope I am here for. But it was so weirdly out of keeping with everything else that I was, in this very specific single circumstance, definitely here for it.
So that’s the 1981 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I feel bad about disliking it because I feel everyone tried their hardest and I think a lot of what made it not work for me was genuinely no-one fault, except whichever intern was all like “hey, you know what would be cool, if we opened with a shot of two women on a seesaw where you can’t see the seesaw.” When I started the thousands-a-year rating system I set the 1940s Pride and Prejudice adaptation at five thousand a year and then gave it an extra thousand year for having a beautifully crass title drop. I have a weirdly strong memory of this adaptation containing a bit where Elinor says “have you no sense” and Marianne replies “have you no sensibility” but I think that might have just been me projecting onto a scene that was otherwise entirely forgettable.
I’d be tempted to give this adaptation a living at Delaford and leave it at that but since I gave Jane Austen in Manhattan two thousand a year that seems unfair. It’s definitely better than Jane Austen in Manhattan and, honestly, there probably will be worse adaptations later on but, speaking purely personally, I really didn’t enjoy the experience of watching this.
Three thousand a year.
Oh the things you do for science. And your craft. As always, it was such a pleasure to read your thoughts. And as a completionist I absolutely salute you. But. Do you have any regrets? With these life choices, ever? 😁 I mean I hope not, I don’t want you to suffer. And I selfishly want to continue to read these reviews.
I was about to proudly declare I never regret my life choices but I live in a state of mild regret most of the time 😉
I don’t actually regret the Austathon though, even though I didn’t super enjoy this production: there’s sort of so much media in the world that sometimes it makes me feel less I’m missing, um, literally everything if I’m doing one specific and totally irrelevant thing, like watching every Hugh Grant movie or all the Austens or something.
My cousin and I and two boys we were looking for an excuse to spend time with once watched every adaptation of Jane Eyre while processing locally harvested meat, and though many of the adaptations were terrible it was 100% worth it. We learned, among other things, that every single Jane Eyre adaptation includes the scene where Mr. Rochester asks her “Do you play?” and she says, “A little,” and he sits her down at the piano and makes her play for him and then says “I can see it is only a little.”
Excellent review 🙂 And (I should note here that I have neither watched any adaptation of Sense and Sensibility nor read the original novel) I do love that screencap of Mrs. Palmer. She’s just really extra, you know? It’s fun.
Oh that’s Fanny Dashwood who is wonderfully done in this production, although their Mrs Palmer is too – she’s this pretty red read with the most catastrophic giggle. Like there a scene where Elinor and, I think, Brandon are having a serious conversation in a corridor and–in an example of the sound design actually working–Mrs Palmer’s giggle keeps floating through from the room next door.
Your comments on the production values give me a sense that time travel is involved here somehow. Like this was actually made in a very different future and was their idea about the past. The whole “we’re living in a simulation” idea is becoming more plausible all the time.
Austenception.
My experience watching this was sort of interesting. I’ve been watching along (except for Jane Austen in Manhattan b/c it was a pain to get ahold of and you said it was bad) and it turned out that everything from Pride & Prejudice 1980 through Northanger Abbey 1987 was available from this extra subscription on amazon prime which I could get a 7-day free trial of so I was like “oh hooray if I can binge all these in 7 days, I won’t have to pay anything.” I’m watching Northanger Abbey this evening with two days to spare. I’m not sure if I should be proud of this or not.
That said, your point about this one not leaving a strong impression is pretty accurate. I remembered not disliking it but I couldn’t actually remember any details until reading your blog.
I agree that the supporting cast are pretty strong, and the part I liked the most. My favorite thing was the scene at the beginning with John Dashwood and Fanny. I liked this John Dashwood especially, because I think there is sometimes a tendency to portray him as haplessly weak-willed and influenced by his manipulative, evil wife, and I felt this version showed them more as actively conspiring together. In fact throughout the whole scene, John looked gleefully eager to be persuaded by all her arguments, while she looked kind of bored and focused on her embroidery (or whatever that was). It gave me the impression this was a common scene for them, where they each know their roles – Fanny’s to offer some excuse for John to abandon his moral duties, and his to grasp at them – and she can perform this task with only half her attention. It was so great. I think he’s my favorite John Dashwood of them all now.
Anyway, that was the most interesting scene in the whole thing. All down hill from there. I did like this Lucy Steele quite a bit also. Nobody can compare to Hyacinth Bucket as Mrs. Jennings.
I’ve just started the Mansfield Park which I think precedes the Northanger Abbey. And so far, I’m finding much better. The sound quality is still dodgy AF but I think it helps that it has “full length” episodes and no bored women on an invisible seesaw.
ALSO, getting a trial of a subscription service to binge watch something in 7 days is, like, a whole thing.
That’s a great point about John and Fanny Dashwood – and I think it sort of speaks to how well the supporting cast are articulately in general through this production. I felt their John got more screen time that he usually does, like there’s a scene where he’s totally insisting to Elinor that Brandon is in love with her while she’s like >.< It just had excellent awful big brother energy. But now that you've pointed out, I really like this slightly more nuanced dynamic between John and Fanny: I'm not really here for evil women being evil, so seeing her like ... wearily enabling him in his selfishness in a kind of dark mirror of supportive wifeliness is very satisfying.
Yeah, “dark mirror of supportive wifeliness” is an excellent way to describe it! I appreciated that John doesn’t get to shift all the blame onto his wife in this version, and I liked this view of them. Showing that they kind of work as a couple because they are both united in being awful. It was great.
Mansfield Park! I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it. Looking forward to your blog about it!
Some old television is, without a doubt, really poorly made. It looks as though the costumes, at least, were spot on for this one?
The men: I love a deep sexy voice but the eyes-cheekbones-nose of this Edward Ferrars really do it for me. 🙂
Re: romance or not a romance: I think the general modern reader can read Austen novels as romance; the contemporary (meaning early-1800s) reader very likely read them as representation + a chance to aspire to a happy ending. While the academic reader (like myself) can appreciate them both ways while also thinking ‘wow the social commentary in these is barely even softened.’
I mean, I’m generally in favour of “both” at all times 😉
I confess I didn’t really give due consideration to Edward’s nose/cheekbones/eyes: I was stuck on his terrible hair.
I … actually can’t remember much about the costumes. I think they were a touch blah, honestly, like the rest of the production (and Elinor has very 80s hair, in the same way Lizzie in P&P has very 80s hair) but I remember not being actively distracted by them, or else I’ve got used to 70s/80s historical costuming being weird by modern standards, that I’ve stopped noticing or caring 😉
the “was Jane Austen a romance writer” question//
She was and wasn’t at the same time.
For me, from her first novel (if Pride and Prejudice is considered as such), it was obvious that the story line in it is very, very romantic – love, meetings, partings, and, of course, a wedding at the end. Yes, Austin herself thought so! I can’t quote verbatim now, but in one of her letters she wrote that this first novel, which brought her such popularity, was just a bright toy. She would like this novel to be deeper and contain more wise thoughts about life, “but where can I get them?”
On the other hand, for this first novel, Austen got hit on the head already. For the comical depiction of a priest in it, yes. What she (to a certain extent forced) wrote in the preface to the second edition of this book (if I remember correctly).
The rest of her books also contain a love story. But in them it is very felt how the author wants to go beyond the genre; get off the pages of the book, take the reader by the hand, show him more than is usually said in books..
Oh, my! From that picture, I just had to find and watch that scene of Fanny Dashwood’s hysterical reaction. It is quite spectacular.
I also agree that disembodied heads floating with blank expressions feels super awkward, yet I kinda wanted to keep watching. Like if I waited long enough, a new face would suddenly appear.
Thank you for watching the whole series to find us the best bits.
Omg, right? It’s so weird, because the whole production is pretty lowkey and then suddenly there’s just a massive extended scene of Fanny having hysterics while her husband ineffectively tries to calm her. Which, I confess, I was absolutely creasing over.
I’m very late, but being sick has given me time to watch~
I’ve started lowkey taking notes while watching and the #Deep #Metaphorical opening of them on the seesaw was the first thing I wrote down. So bland and somehow extra at the same time 😅
Also was that the same dog as in P&P 1980? Willoughby and Darcy’s dogs look really similar…Elinor might not be the only actor to be in both series😂
The one positive thing I’ll say about Edward is that at least he could actually hold a conversation with Elinor. In the 1971 version he just sort of bumbled out of the room as quickly as possible, so even though there still wasn’t much there, at least he had had a conversation with Elinor at least once in his life?
I know you mentioned/we discussed in reference to the 1971 version how difficult from a contemporary perspective it can be to have a Marianne who looks young…and I kind of spent this whole adaptation just feeling…really troubled by how young this Marianne looks and acts. Especially in this version, I fundamentally don’t see what Colonel Brandon sees in Marianne, other than that she reminds him of someone else who he was in love with long ago….long enough ago that the child she died giving birth to is now 17 years old. It just is like…incongruous to me that Colonel Brandon can be kind of taking on the role of parent for this one 17 year old, but like…trying to boink this other 17 year old. And I wonder if social conventions/imaginings of different ages have just changed in impactful ways or if this was always as shitty as it sounds and now we just have stopped letting men do it. Anyway, especially because the romance was so, as you point out, not central to this version it just made me really uncomfortable with Colonel Brandon, even tho he was about as young-ish and hot-ish and still realistic to the context of the story as you can get. Sigh. Kind of a waste of space to be like ‘I’m not cool with pedophilia!’ but like…that’s sort of my big take away…
I agree that this Lucy Steele is worth mentioning and I think it was important to their dynamic that she was classically prettier than Elinor. It really does shift things when in most adaptations Elinor is like super gorgeous and Lucy is like embodying (problematically) beauty correlating to goodness and being less classically beautiful to make the point that she sucks.
Also, honorable mention to the horrible clown makeup ‘sick’ Marianne wore and her head-tossing, possessed-by-an-evil-spirit performance.
Lastly, it struck me more in this watching than last that not only is Sense and Sensibility about the sisters (and not as much about the romance), but this version also kind of felt like a study of what it means to be a wife or a widow. Maybe I’m just getting what you said, that the supporting cast is very well articulated and we get a strong sense of all of them (more than Edward and almost more than Colonel Brandon). We see Mr. Palmer ignoring Charlotte and Fanny manipulating John (or as the point was aptly made above, in this version perhaps more enabling him); we see Lady Middleton whose vice it seems is…caring about her kids and wanting to spend time with them? I mean, yes the way she does it is annoying/not actually in tune with her children’s needs, but it’s kind of funny that like her supposed overconcern with her children is what we’re supposed to see as sucking about her? Not to mention that children kind of play a much bigger role in this than a lot of other Austen? Like Charlotte having a baby, women fighting over whose son/grandson is taller, etc. It seems as though women are relegated to this role, but then censured for being overly concerned with it. (Like the Steeles loving children is just them being shitty suck-ups?) Even Mrs. Dashwood tells Mrs. Jennings that she wants her daughters with her rather than married when they first meet. And Fanny’s child is the excuse for totally disinheriting the Dashwood sisters and their mother. So like mothers being overly attached to their children is kind of this ‘problem’ throughout??? And then we also get this picture of what it means to be a widow in Mrs. Jennings vs. Mrs. Dashwood vs. Mrs. Ferras….
Idk, this is kind of overwrought for the level of content this was, but it’s just kind weird to see this sort of portrayal of only dysfunctional marriages and this sort of grim look at possibilities for women’s futures (i.e. for the most part we only encounter women we are basically meant to hate or laugh at or who are deeply flawed) paired with a love story. Though, I mean, clearly this version is barely about that part of it.
Anyway, excuse my ramblings. Although I just took another at home COVID test and it was negative, I still feel like absolute garbage (sinus infection maybe?) so at the end of the day, really I just look at this and wish I could be as ‘destitute’ as the Dashwood sisters. Seriously wouldn’t mind my own little cottage, never having to work again, and Tom and Susan to look after me~
Haven’t seen it yet, but it’s apparently a truth universally acknowledged that the new Fire Island movie is a retelling of P&P. Add it to the Austathon? It looks absolutely delightful.