HarperCollins has commissioned popular writers to write a modern version of six Austen books, and Joanna Trollope was selected to update Sense and Sensibility. It's a good match.
I'm an admirer of the way Trollope captures a character's thoughts, actions and speech patterns in a recognisable way. In the book she uses this talent to transpose Austen characters into the 21st century.
Sensible Elinor is a student of architecture and the only one of the family to earn enough money to pay basic bills, by working in an architect's office. Not-so-sensible Marianne is an asthmatic, guitar-playing art student given to bursts of uncontrolled emotion, and a severe asthmatic attack provides the dramatic illness that brings her close to death.
Margaret becomes an obstreperous schoolgirl, wedded to modern technology, while mother Belle is a romantic liberal who airily reveals that she never saw the need to actually marry their father, thus clearing the way for the mendacious stepson and his wife to justify keeping the grandfather's legacy.
I hadn't previously read Sense and Sensibility. When I did, I went straight from reading the original to this modernised version. I was curious to know how Joanna Trollope would make the characters time travel and how successful the transition would be, and thought it best to do so while the original was fresh in my mind. I could see some major problems: the vulnerability of women because of their dependence on men for status and income, for instance. And the courting of the very youthful Marianne by Colonel Brandon.
It was an interesting exercise comparing the two. The trappings of modern technology feature: emails, Facebook and Twitter, so every plot development necessarily follows at a faster pace. When Marianne confronts Willoughby at a society party in London and makes an embarrassing scene, for instance, the humiliation is complete when the family discovers it's been filmed and it becomes a sensation on YouTube.
The peripheral characters provide plenty of opportunities for the sly humour contained in the original, especially the Steele sisters, and the unlikely pairing of Lucy and Robert gives Trollope a great opportunity to satirise modern celebrity culture.
I did enjoy the book, although I was left wondering if this was because I treated it as a fascinating exercise in Trollope's skills of interpreting an 18th-century classic.
Would it have stood up to close examination as a novel in its own right? HarperCollins' sales figures should provide the answer.
- Patricia Thwaites is a retired Dunedin schoolteacher.
