Sense and Sensibility (film) to appeal to contemporary audiences. Grant's Edward and Rickman's Brandon are "ideal" modern males who display an obvious love of children as well as "pleasing manners", especially when contrasted with Palmer. Thompson's script both expanded and omitted scenes from Edward's storyline, including the deletion of an early scene in which Elinor assumes that a lock of hair found in Edward's possession is hers, when it belongs to Lucy. He was made more fully realised and honourable than in the novel to increase his appeal to viewers. To gradually show viewers why Brandon is worthy of Marianne's love, Thompson's screenplay has
Sense and Sensibility selfish," lacking the honesty and forthrightness with which Austen endows other "exemplary gentlemen" in her work. Johnson's comparison of Edward and Willoughby reveals the depressing picture about gentlemen presented in the novel. Mary Poovey's analysis in "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen" confers with Johnson's on the dark tone of "Sense and Sensibility." Poovey contends that "Sense and Sensibility" has a "somber tone" in which conflict breaks out between Austen's engagement with her "self-assertive characters" and the moral codes necessary to control their potentially "anarchic"