Often regarded as dark and disenchanted in comparison with the "light and

bright and sparkling" Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen's Sense and

Sensibility (1811) has recently emerged from its shadowed position to find

both intellectual and popular appeal, partly thanks to Ang Lee's acclaimed

movie adaptation based on Emma Thompson's screenplay (1995). Drafted

in the political turmoil of the 1790s when sensibility had become such an

overdetermined trope that it failed to generate stable meaning, Austen's first

published novel stages a transition in her oeuvre: while its critical scrutiny

of the waning cult of sensibility and parody of sentimental conventions

displace an outdated style of didactic fiction, its daring representation of

the patrilineal system of inheritance, closural ambiguities and nuanced

narrative strategies all point to the more sophisticated achievements of the

domestic realist novel. As Jane Austen boldly dramatised the economic rules

and stifling secrets of her society, the plot is fraught with tensions inherent

in the discrepancy between the elegant rituals of English society and the

utter female powerlessness which underlies monetary pressure to marry.

Similarly, even as the genre of the heritage film associates the novel with an

ideal pre-industrial England, Ang Lee's aesthetic adaptation reads Sense and

Sensibility as a text of female empowerment.