Daisy Edgar-Jones Is the Austen Heroine We Need in a Charming Sense and Sensibility

Daisy Edgar-Jones and George MacKay —Courtesy of Focus Features When news got around that a new movie version of Sense and Sensibility was in the works, cries of dismay rang forth from Bath to Brooklyn.

How could anyone dare try to top Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation , penned by—and starring, alongside Kate Winslet— Emma Thompson? But the idea that fine adaptations of great books need to be stopping points, rather than springboards, is alarming by itself.

Why is a new adaptation of any Jane Austen novel such a bad thing? There are always new movie audiences, eager for their own fresh take.

And just as important, why shouldn’t another generation of actors have a crack at these roles? Our ability to stream anything we want, whenever we want, hasn’t necessarily made us more adventurous; sometimes it’s just a way of clinging to familiar favorites at the expense of welcoming anything new.

Austen herself, with her aversion to sentimentality, would have disapproved.

Then what would she make of Georgia Oakley’s amiable, if occasionally a little sluggish, reading of her debut novel, published anonymously in 1811? It’s hard to say for sure, but there’s nothing that’s offensive about this new Sense and Sensibility, and plenty that’s lovely.

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles play Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters in a close-knit family whose temperamental differences temporarily drive them apart.

As the film opens, Elinor and Marianne, along with their mother (Caitríona Balfe) and younger sister Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), are just learning that they’ll soon have to vacate the airy, comfortable house they’ve called home for years.

The girls’ father has just died; his property will not go to his daughters, but to his son from a previous marriage, John (Tom Brooke), who nevertheless hopes to do right by making sure his father's second family well provided for.

But his disagreeable wife Fanny (Stacy Martin), feels differently, and to maintain their pride, the Dashwood women choose to move into far more modest quarters, in an arrangement brokered by a family friend, Mrs.

Jennings (a blissfully dithery Fiona Shaw).

Mrs.

Jennings is also an unrepentant meddler, and she believes she can easily marry off the two eldest Dashwood girls.

Ever-sensible Elinor, who never asks for much, has already met, and fallen for, Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), Fanny’s brother, as kind and modest as Fanny is arrogant.