Emma Thompson With a background in comedy, Thompson's performances are typically delivered with an ironic touch. Ang Lee, director of "Sense and Sensibility" stated that Thompson's comedic approach may be her greatest asset as an actress, remarking, "Emma is an extremely funny lady. Like Austen, she's laughing at her own culture while she's a part of it." Thompson has stated that the "most moving things are often also funny, in life and in art" which is present in her film work. She often brings her real personality to her roles, and Kellaway believes that her lack of conventional beauty contributes to her
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"