Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility
By: Jane Austen

I listened to the entirety of Sense and Sensibility from a download off of LibriVox. If you haven’t checked out LibriVox before, you should now. (Check it out here.) LibriVox is an online organization that puts classical works of literature that are currently in the public domain into audio form. The readers are all volunteers (which means that if you have a nice-sounding voice and can read with some expression, you should contact them).

In any case, I enjoyed listening to Sense and Sensibility, possibly more than I would have enjoyed reading it. I love Jane Austen, but recently, while listening to Sense and Sensibility, a suspicion snuck into my head that maybe, just maybe, I enjoy watching movies based off of her novels than reading them.

Gasp. I know.

Emma Thompson’s 1995 interpretation of Sense and Sensibility is by far one of my favorite movies and I’ve seen it enough times that I would be embarrassed to type the number. And because I’ve seen it so many times, I was very conscious when finally listening to the book of where Emma Thompson pared down the conversations, cut out characters, and tweaked scenes. I confess, I agreed with her most of the time. Maybe just because I saw the movie first, so many times that it’s firmly embedded in my memory, but even so. I didn’t think the characters of Lucy Steele’s sister, Lady Middleton and all of her children added much flavor to the story, and I thought the conversations near the end of the story between Marianne and Colonel Brandon that sealed their affection were much more satisfying in the movie. (They were pretty much nonexistent in the book. It was more implied that Marianne and Colonel Brandon married.)

Maybe I just need to read Sense and Sensibility again. I can’t believe that I just suggested that I might like a movie better than a book. I just might reread the book in a year or two. The world of Jane Austen is a safe, rose-tinted world that is refreshing to escape to sometimes, even if I must sit through one more polite conversation than I would prefer.