‘Jane Austen is for everyone’: novelist Diana Reid on adapting Sense and Sensibility – and surprising Brits with her accent

The Australian author of Love and Virtue says her nationality didn’t give her pause when she wrote the script, but Ang Lee’s ‘perfect’ 1995 film did The summer Diana Reid spent writing her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, she found herself having some oddly formal conversations down at the pub. The Australian author used only about 25 lines from Jane Austen’s first published novel for her screenplay, inventing most of the dialogue herself. To be able to mimic that very distinctive voice, Reid had to dive headfirst into studying Austen’s rhythm and sentence structure. “I got so immersed in the language it infected my own speech. I would be describing someone I just met, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, he was most amiable!’” Reid says, laughing. “It was a kind of insanity.” Continue reading...