Sense and Sensibility (film) Emma Thompson had written. Doran believed the humour and style of writing was "exactly what [she'd] been searching for." Thompson and Doran were already working together on Mirage's 1991 film "Dead Again." A week after its completion, the producer selected Thompson to adapt "Sense and Sensibility", although she knew that Thompson had never written a screenplay. Also a fan of Austen, Thompson first suggested they adapt "Persuasion" or "Emma" before agreeing to Doran's proposal. The actress found that "Sense and Sensibility" contained more action than she had remembered, and decided it would translate well to drama. Thompson spent five years
Sense and Sensibility have long been engaged in conversations about Jane Austen, and "Sense in Sensibility" has figured in these discussions, especially around the patriarchal system of inheritance and earning. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal feminist work "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination" contains several discussions of "Sense and Sensibility." Gilbert and Gubar read the beginning "Sense and Sensibility" as a retelling of "King Lear" from a female perspective and contend that these "reversals imply that male traditions need to be evaluated and reinterpreted from a female perspective." Gilbert and Gubar argue that Austen explores