Of all the great novelists I’ve worked on, Jane Austen is my favourite. Why? Because, in an Austen novel, everything works. Her plots are as finely tuned as Swiss clocks; she lets off her little explosions at precisely the right moment, she never spawns unnecessary subplots, she never overeditorialises, and all the details are accurate.

If the apple trees are in blossom, she will make sure we are in the right month; she knows how long it takes to get from A to B, and exactly where you would have to stop on the way; she knows exactly what everything costs, from a country mansion to a pair of gloves, and exactly how grim is the situation of a disinherited hero facing the prospect of living on the interest of a mere £2,000. She gets things absolutely right in human and social terms, too. Her novels may deliver the emotional rewards of a fairy tale or a romance, but the obstacles that stand in the way of her heroines are real and solid, and generally to do with money and social status. Austen never offends our credulity or our sense of the way the world really works.

Best of all, Austen has dramatic gifts herself. She would have been an excellent playwright. She builds surely and subtly towards the big scenes, then writes them so well that all the adapter has to do is copy them out.

Why this book, and why now? There are two reasons for reading old books, or adapting them. They can be timely or they can be timeless, or both. Particular novels by Trollope, or Dickens, or Eliot (I’m thinking of Daniel Deronda) can seem awfully timely and relevant to our current preoccupations. With Austen, the themes tend to be timeless: love, sex, money; growing to maturity; the struggle for independence and fulfilment.

In Sense and Sensibility, Austen splits her heroine into two. Marianne has all the emotion, all the romantic readiness, and no common sense at all, while her older sister, Elinor, seems to have more common sense than is good for her, if that is possible. It’s a lovely idea, and would make a terrific high-school movie or gritty urban drama. Which one do we most identify with, and whose side are we on? I’ve read this novel a number of times, at different times in my life, generally identifying more with Elinor; but I remember one reading when I felt passionately protective towards the recklessly emotional Marianne, and I have always had a weakness (is it a weakness?) for girls who are reckless with themselves, girls who let it all hang out.

Austen, we can be pretty sure, identifies more with Elinor. Her wry shrewdness is very close to Austen’s authorial voice, and a million miles away from Marianne’s rather soppy eulogies about falling leaves, which are not unlike the utterings of Fotherington-Tomas. Moreover, Austen lets us see into Elinor’s mind and heart, whereas Marianne is represented by what she does and says in Elinor’s presence, and by what Elinor thinks about her. Whether consciously or not, Austen forces us to identify with Elinor.

I think it’s conscious. I think Austen saw emotion – passion – as dangerous, untrustworthy and likely to lead a girl into perilous places. She feels enormous sympathy for the Mariannes of this world, but no way would she go there. That isn’t to say that she presents Marianne as a fool. She is given some silly things to say, but she is also brave about expressing her true thoughts and opinions in company, which resonates well with modern readers.

The problem lies with the men. Not Willoughby – he’s wonderfully satisfying, a glamorous Byronic shit with all the trimmings. I mean the guys who get the girls in the last reel: can we really convince ourselves that Edward is worthy of Elinor, or that Marianne could come to love Brandon?

Sense and Sensibility began as Elinor and Marianne, written as far back as the 1790s. Austen revised it twice before publishing it in 1811 – her first novel to be published. It’s cheeky of me, but I think she should have given it one more rewrite, mainly aimed at the problems raised by Edward and Brandon. (She could also have updated the poetry – Cowper is a rather feeble example of the Romantic temperament, and by 1811 Marianne could have been rhapsodising over Wordsworth and Byron, and would have seemed much less silly as a consequence.)

Edward comes across as a very dull dog indeed. He is shy, he is reserved; he doesn’t seem to know where he wants to be or what he wants to do with his life. He has no talents (though he does admire Elinor’s drawings). He is attracted to Elinor: why wouldn’t he be? She is beautiful, intelligent, talented and tender-hearted. What Austen fails to do is give us anything that would explain why Elinor, or indeed any woman, should be attracted to him. Edward is a big problem for the adapter. Emma Thompson, in her otherwise admirable screenplay, doesn’t manage it any better than Austen did. Having him play nicely with Elinor’s little sister does not do the business.

Then there’s Colonel Brandon. Austen shows us his instant and powerful attraction towards Marianne. We learn that he had a tragic love affair when young, and has not looked at another woman since. So, he has a passionate nature. Excellent. This is all very promising, except that Marianne sees him as an old man (that flannel waistcoat is a real downer); when Willoughby comes onto the scene, Brandon becomes virtually invisible to her. It has potential, but it’s difficult material, and Austen doesn’t handle it as well as she would have done in her later novels. We need a few hints earlier on that Brandon is more than a dry old stick, and, crucially, we need to see, in the final movement, how Marianne comes to love him. There’s at least one missing scene.

I love the darkness that lurks in the subplots and back stories of Austen’s comedies. We are always aware of the fragility of existence: young women, in particular, can plummet straight into the depths. Consider Brandon’s first love. Because she brings a huge dowry, Brandon’s autocratic father decides she must marry his elder son, whose “pleasures were not what they ought to have been”. His conduct “provokes her into inconstancy”, they divorce and she is shunned by society. She has nowhere to go but down. Brandon discovers her dying, in abject poverty, with a little girl, Eliza, whom he adopts.

At about the time the main story begins, Willoughby is deflowering Eliza, now aged 15. Tiring of her, he abandons her, pregnant, without leaving a forwarding address, and forgets all about her. We may surmise that he doesn’t give her another thought until his rich relative, Mrs Smith (whose estate he expects to inherit), inconveniently finds out all about it.

These dark Austenian subplots are never fully dramatised; we always hear these stories at second hand. We never meet Eliza or her mother, so we are not likely to feel for them as we feel for Marianne, though their fate is so much worse, and I for one feel quite haunted by them. One can’t help feeling that Willoughby, that emotional psycho-path, gets off far more lightly than he deserves. So, I begin my adaptation with little Eliza’s seduction and abandonment, as a sort of “teaser”. It is the first Austen adaptation to start with a sex scene; and about time too, in my opinion.

What would you do?

© Andrew Davies 2008. Sense and Sensibility, with an introduction by Andrew Davies, is published by Max Press at £8.99 (hardback) as part of its Max Literary Classics series; available from The Sunday Times BooksFirst for £8.54 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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