Sense and Sensibility has never been my favorite Austen novel, but after reading Joanna Trollope's updated version, I'm looking forward to re-reading it. Trollope's version was the first in the Austen Project's re-writings, and I think that it works even better than Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey, which I reviewed recently. In addition to being highly entertaining, Trollope's version works because, on the whole, there aren't any off notes or any moments where the connections to Austen's novel seem forced. Trollope has seamlessly incorporated modern equivalents for the situations in which the characters find themselves, and I think that she does it effectively - and, for me, she's done it in a way that makes me see Austen's novel anew.
Here's what I mean: years ago, when I read Sense and Sensibility in Pat Spacks's Austen and Richardson class, she remarked that this is a novel about depressed men. She's absolutely right about that - Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, in particular, are depressed figures, and the women's challenge is to change their emotional registers and expectations to match those of the men.
In Trollope's re-writing of Sense and Sensibility, none of this is lost, but she also emphasizes the extent to which Marianne's enthusiasms, depths of despair, and disconnectedness are connected to depression. And she doesn't do this in a way that simply diagnoses her (which I would have hated), but rather makes her character make more sense to me as a reader. It's not that these elements aren't in Austen's novel, but they somehow came through to me more clearly in this version.
Likewise, she translates Marianne's passion for poetry into a love for moody pop music, which Marianne strums on her guitar as she wallows in teen-agerly angst. Even her physical delicacy is made more legible with Trollope's choice to make her an extreme asthmatic.
When updatings of classic novels work, they not only entertain, but also render what is historically distant understandable to a modern reader - even to a modern reader who has spent a good deal of time reading Austen and studying the novels in their historical context. For undergraduates encountering Austen for the first time, her novels can seem incredibly foreign and incomprehensible. Why is it such a big deal that Marianne is sending Willoughby letters in London? Why can't Elinor and her mother just go out and get jobs? How much money do they need? One of the most useful essays on explaining money in Austen's novels is Edward Copeland's contribution to Approaches to Teaching Pride and Prejudice, where he avoids attempting to quantify the value of money in modern terms, but rather in terms of quality of life - i.e., how many servants you could afford on X pounds a year and what that meant in terms of labor you had to do yourself.
For me, one of the reasons that Trollope's Sense and Sensibility works so well is because she renders the circumstances of Austen's characters in modern terms - and she does so in a way that makes me want to revisit the novel. That's not to say that any of these translations are necessarily accurate, but only that they are a useful lens for revisiting Austen's novel.
And, aside from the pitch perfect translation of Austen's world to the modern day, Trollope has done a marvelous job rendering the characters, especially the most obnoxious. Her Fanny Dashwood is brilliant, as are Mrs. Jennings and her son. As a reader, you're right there with Elinor and Marianne wanting to throttle all three of them. What more could you ask for?
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