Sense and Sensibility (film) could capture Mr. Palmer's disenchantment and redemption so perfectly, and make it funny." Thompson wrote the part of Edward Ferrars with Grant in mind, and he agreed to receive a lower salary in line with the film's budget. Grant called her screenplay "genius", explaining "I've always been a philistine about Jane Austen herself, and I think Emma's script is miles better than the book and much more amusing." Grant's casting was criticised by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), whose representatives said that he was too handsome for the part. Actress Kate Winslet initially intended to audition for
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"