Lindsay Doran film. Doran explained, "For 10 years I'd been trying to find somebody I thought could adapt it. Usually romantics are too optimistic and dreamy to see Austen's cynicism, and satirists are too cynical to believe in romance." Thompson fit Doran's criteria for a good screenwriter, despite the actress never having written a screenplay before. The resulting production of "Sense and Sensibility" earned Thompson an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the only person to have won an Oscar for both her writing and acting (Thompson won the Best Actress award for "Howards End", in 1993). Along with producing,
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