SHE wrote some of Britain’s best-loved books, but Jane Austen didn’t really understand men or how to portray them. So claimed Andrew Davies, the prolific screenwriter, at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival yesterday.

Davies, best known for his television adaptations of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, said: “Austen never really had men in her books on their own, or men without women. I don’t think she really understood them. She didn’t draw out her male characters enough.”

In his latest project, an adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, he plans to remedy matters by hardening up the male characters. “I’ve had to work up the guys to make them stronger,” he said. He has written up the main character, Willoughby, as a “shit”, as he put it.

“I got fed up with that screen version where all the women swooned over him,” he said, referring to the 1996 movie directed by Ang Lee that starred Greg Wise as Willoughby.

In the film, written by Emma Thompson, Willoughby was very much a charmer, just as Wise proved to be in real life. He met Thompson on the set, they fell in love and then married.

Davies will open his BBC drama with a scene from the middle of Austen’s book in which Willoughby, here played by Dominic Cooper, rapes 15-year-old Elisa. Davies says it sums up Willoughby’s true character.

He also plans to have a “wet shirt” scene reminiscent of Colin Firth’s famous emergence from a lake as Mr Darcy in Davies’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In his version of Sense and Sensibility, Davies will have Edward Ferrars – played by Dan Stevens – cutting wood in a forest in the pouring rain.

Davies almost relishes testing the tolerance of Austen enthusiasts, who can be fiercely protective of her works. They point out that she wrote 200 years ago, when sensibilities were very different. Though sex and money underlie Austen’s tales of social conventions, they were much less overtly portrayed than now.

Davies, known for ramping up the eroticism of period pieces, calls his Sense and Sensibility “a sort of rural Sex and the City”.

One critic dismissed his adaptations as “journalistic: first simplify, then exaggerate, usually by turning up the volume on the sex and the humour”.

However, Davies, a former academic turned writer, does not always simply inject more sex. When he adapted The Line of Beauty, the Booker prize-win-ning novel by Alan Hollinghurst about a young Oxford graduate coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain, he was criticised for toning down the gay sex scenes that are a feature of the novel.

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