What Book to Read?

Yes, you’re seeing straight. This is Sense and Sensibility – 2013 style. It is the first instalment of the Austen Project, a series that rewrites Jane Austen’s six novels for the modern age. I don’t usually like prequels and sequels to Austen’s work, let alone the ridiculous vampire version of Pride and Prejudice. But Joanna Trollope is an interesting choice because in her own work she is very good at catching the speech and behaviour of the modern English middle class. She should be able to do a make-over of the 1811 original if anyone can.

Everyone pretty much knows the story, and Trollope sticks closely to it. It is a romance in which there are obstacles to the happiness of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in the shape of initial wrong choices of partner – ie wrong choices by Edward Ferrars and Marianne herself. Elinor reacts with sense to her situation; Marianne gets into hers by excessive sensibility. But as in all romances – see my discussion of romance novels here – it comes right at the end. Trollpe’s version includes most of the original scenes, translated into a modern setting. Norland is not left to Mrs Dashwood and her daughters at least partly because she isn’t actually married to Henry Dashwood, who hasn’t left a will. Barton Cottage is a rather ugly new house. Sir John Middleton has turned Barton Hall into the location for a high-end clothing business. John Willoughby arrives to rescue Marianne in his Aston Martin, not on his horse. On their visit to Allingham, they have sex. Marianne’s humiliation by Willoughby is recorded and posted on Facebook. Willoughby tells Elinor that he really loved Marianne at the hospital where she is recovering from an asthma attack, rather than the fever she suffers from in the original. Why asthma? Modern medicine says you can’t catch a fever from being wet.

The characters are also very much true to their originals. Elinor – often called Ellie – is practical and considerate of others. She gives up her architecture course to get a job to support the family. Marianne – often called M – wants to be ‘overwhelmed’ – to drown herself in emotion – and is scornful of anyone who doesn’t meet her romantic standards. The modern M is perhaps even more disdainful of others than the original. Margaret – here Mags – is a typical young teenager, convinced her family want to ruin her life; she gets rather more exposure than Margaret does in the original. This is also true of Bella – Mrs Dashwood, from whom M has learnt her love of drama and impulsiveness. She is more fully drawn, with her ‘gift for bohemian home making’, and maybe even a bit more demonstrative than the original. The adaptation of Edward Ferrars is possibly the least flattering; a man who is ‘of no profession’ in Austen’s day is a gentleman, whereas today he looks more like ‘a waste-of-space man’, sweet, but ineffectual.

It goes without saying that Trollope has done a great job updating the language of the book. Two examples will suffice. When it first seems that Edward is attracted to Ellie, M says ‘Wouldn’t it just completely piss off Fanny if you and Ed got together?’ And M is relieved to find that she wasn’t wrong in trusting that Willoughby loved her – he wasn’t just ‘a shagbandit’. Trollope’s ear for the idiom of the young – and not so young – middle class hasn’t deserted her.

But what has she managed to do with the social mores and expectations Jane Austen was working within? Clearly respectable marriage is no longer the only acceptable path for a young woman, though of all the major female characters, only Elinor has a job. Marriage – or at least romance – is still shown as a priority for women. ‘Do we have to have boyfriends?’ asks Mags. And Elinor replies ‘Of course we don’t have to. But we seem to want to, to need to, don’t we?’ But she agrees there’s no need ‘to make them our whole world.’ Money also remains important: Trollope has a little bit of fun here. When Elinor says: ‘this isn’t 1810, for God’s sake. Money doesn’t dictate relationships’, her mother replies ‘It does for some people.’  Willoughby deserts Marianne for a Greek heiress, and Lucy is after Ed for what he might inherit. Bill Brandon eventually finds Ed a job, but it remains unclear why he didn’t have one already. His dependence on his mother, OK in the nineteenth century, looks like weakness in the twenty-first. And Elinor can’t help finding his honourable nineteenth century behaviour in sticking to his engagement with Lucy as ‘utterly idiotic nobility’, as indeed it seems. Lucy’s decision to marry Robert, a gay party planner in this version, doesn’t have much justification other than to manufacture a happy ending – but I guess this was pretty much true in the original.

And what of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’? Ellie finds her role as the sensible one even more trying than Elinor does, and she wonders if she can go on coping with it. When she hears that Lucy is married, apparently to Ed, she is really upset; has she overdone ‘not wasting emotional energy in yearning’? ‘Serves you right,’ she says to herself. ‘Serves you completely right, stupid stupid Miss Sensible.’ Both Marianne and her mother come to see, as in the original, that there is more to ‘the good life’ than ‘allowing emotion to prevail over everything’. But there is a bit in the original, where Marianne is talking about how she bitterly regrets her misplaced devotion to Willoughby and her slighting of everyone else that is not in this version. Elinor asks her if she compares her conduct to Willoughby’s. Marianne answers ‘No. I compare it to what it should have been. I compare it with yours.’ In this passage it seems to me that Austen is endorsing sense over sensibility. I think Trollope is sitting a bit more on the fence.

And does this revised version suggest the Austen Project is worthwhile? I can’t see this book leading anyone to read the original. It’s fun in its own right, but I’d choose the original any day.

You can read more about Joanna Trollope here. The references to the tree house come straight from Ang Lee’s delightful 1996 film – a must-see if you haven’t already.