Georgia Oakley's new Sense and Sensibility opens with Diana Reid's screenplay

A new screen version

Australian novelist Diana Reid wrote the screenplay for Georgia Oakley's new film of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Released in Australia and the United States in October 2026, the film follows Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who lose their landed-gentry comfort and face precarious finances after their father dies. Elinor falls for Edward Ferrars, a man who struggles to voice his feelings for her, while Marianne is swept off her feet by the charming John Willoughby. Spanish dates differ between reports: eldiario.es gives 23 October, while LaVanguardia says the film was reaching Spanish screens on 22 October.

Writing Austen's voice

Reid used only about 25 lines from Austen's first published novel and invented most of the dialogue herself. To capture the distinctive voice, she immersed herself in Austen's rhythm and sentence structure, and the habit spilled into her everyday speech.

I got so immersed in the language it infected my own speech.

Reid, who is best known for the novels Love and Virtue (2021) and Signs of Damage (2025), described the adaptation as a joy, because contemporary dialogue often has to make people sound inarticulate. She and producer India Flint pitched the project because they wanted to tackle Austen, whom Reid considers a "genius". Pride and Prejudice was remade in 2015 and Emma in 2020, but the Dashwood sisters had not been revisited on film in 30 years.

The 1995 comparison

Ang Lee's 1995 version, with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, earned seven Oscar nominations, and comparisons with it are unavoidable, according to LaVanguardia. The BBC premiered a three-episode miniseries of the novel in 2008. In the new cast, Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles plays Marianne, with George MacKay and Herbert Nordrum as their suitors. A review in El Mundo called the film correct, modern and well acted, and praised Creed-Miles, but found that it lacked the witty screenplay of Emma Thompson's 1995 script.

LaVanguardia expects debate over the costumes of the women in the country scenes, whose dresses and untidy hair are an unusual recreation.

Oakley's earlier film

Blue Jean (2022), which Oakley wrote and directed, is set in the last years of Margaret Thatcher's government, as Section 28 was enacted. The film follows Jean, a female PE teacher who hides her homosexuality as a new female pupil threatens to expose her private life. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the audience award, and it earned a BAFTA nomination for best debut and four British Independent Film Awards. Sense and Sensibility is Oakley's second feature, made four years later.

The source novel

Austen published the novel in 1811 at her own expense, under the signature "By a Lady", and it brought her a modest profit of about 140 pounds. In the story, the estate passes entirely to the late husband's son from an earlier marriage, leaving his widow and daughters without their inheritance. The widow and her two elder daughters, Elinor and Marianne, move to a small house near the sea, where their romances unfold. The 1995 version and the 2008 miniseries had already put the story on screen before this film.