Things
are bad enough for Mrs Dashwood and her daughters when Mr Dashwood suddenly
drops dead, but their situation doesn’t exactly improve when their daughter in
law talks their brother out of giving them enough money to live on. Marianne
likes a bit of drama and tragedy to spice up her life, but her elder sister Elinor
can see they’re in deep dog poo. Then some random cousin offers them a home out
of nowhere, separating Elinor from the guy she fancies and throwing Marianne
into the path of a guy she should probably stay well away from.
I don’t usually enjoy Sense & Sensibility quite as much as Jane Austen’s other books, but I have to say I fell completely in love with the book on this reading. Maybe it helps that I don’t know it as well as Pride & Prejudice - I wasn’t nearly as aware of the alterations.
Jane Austen writes the Dashwood sisters
with great affection, and although I’m definitely more Marianne than Elinor,
it’s easy understand the problems Marianne causes, and impossible not to
appreciate and admire Elinor, even though I don’t think I’ll be turning into
her anytime soon (the people around me might like that, but I wouldn’t). Not
many of Jane Austen’s characters are completely unlikeable, but the bumheads
are as rewarding to read about as the characters I love. (Note to any non-British
people reading – a ‘bumhead’ is someone who behaves stupidly or objectionably, i.e.
someone who is thinking with their bottoms rather than their heads.)
It’s strange, but calling a character after
someone I love does seem to make me love them more. Colonel Brandon was so much
sexier when I imagined him as Gareth, and although I was surprised a relatively
unimportant character like Mrs Jennings was personalised, I really loved her
with her new name.
The personalisation issue did cause a few
problems as I made the mistake of calling my Elinor character Charlotte. There
is a non-personalised character in the book called Charlotte Palmer, but I
think of her as Mrs Palmer, and I’d momentarily forgotten that Jane Austen
quite often calls her Charlotte. Even though I know the book quite well, there
were a couple of moments when I wasn’t completely sure which Charlotte was
which.
Someone called Lucy is going to have even
more trouble - Lucy Steele is such a big character, and she’s almost always
referred to by her Christian name. I’m quite surprised such an important
character wasn’t personalised (she’s a baddy, but Pride & Prejudice's Wickham and Lydia, who are
personalised). Another name to avoid is John. There are already at least four
of them, so you don’t want a personalised John as well.
There is a bit of confusion where the
editors have decided Colonel Brandon should sometimes be called by his first
name instead of his surname - which would make it seem more modern,
though Willoughby is always called by his surname, even by Marianne. There is also
an instance of Marianne calling the Colonel ‘Mr Gareth’, which seems
overfamiliar, even for her (she calls him Mr Brandon in the original book), and
also a place where he’s referred to as ‘Colonel Gareth’. I know the book well enough to find it odd, but it doesn’t spoil the
book. It’s always clear who is who (except for my two Charlottes). It’s a shame because the book is so perfect
in every other way, but it’s probably impossible to make everything completely
perfect, and it must have been a lot of work for BookByYou to edit the books as
well as they have.
I love how they have changed the texts so
the ‘Miss Dashwoods’ are the ‘Misses Dashwood’. This avoids any strange plurals
– the Bennet family in Pride &
Prejudice are called the Rhys-Edwardss, but this slight alteration in Sense & Sensibility means you can
enter any surname you like and it still works.
The only really bad mistake is
that inside the book, the title appears as Sense
& Sensibilities. It’s correct on the cover, but I think the title of
the book should be right all the way through.
