Sense and Sensibility (film) 1995, though some of the actors met with Thompson the previous year to help her conceptualise the script. Lee eventually cast all but one of them: Hugh Grant (as Edward Ferrars), Robert Hardy (as Sir John Middleton), Harriet Walter (as Fanny Ferrars Dashwood), Imelda Staunton (as Charlotte Jennings Palmer), and Hugh Laurie (as Mr. Palmer). Amanda Root had also worked with Thompson on the screenplay, but had already committed to star in the 1995 film "Persuasion". Commenting on the casting of Laurie, whom she had known for years, Thompson has said, "There is no one [else] on the planet who
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