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 draft of the novel in the form of a novel-in-letters (epistolary form) perhaps as early 1795 when she was about 19 years old, or 1797, at age 21, and is said to have given it the title "Elinor and Marianne". She later changed the form to a narrative and the title to "Sense and Sensibility". Austen drew inspiration for "Sense and Sensibility" from other novels of the 1790s that treated similar themes, including Adam Stevenson's "Life and Love" (1785) which he had written about himself and a relationship that was not meant to be. Jane West's "A Gossip's Story" (1796),