Director Georgia Oakley’s new, unfettered Sense and Sensibility delivers a contemporary take on Jane Austen’s first published novel.

At the beginning of the book, Henry Dashwood’s death leaves his grieving wife and three daughters ousted from their home. Norland Park is inherited by the son of a prior marriage, John, while the Dashwood women relocate to a small cottage in another county.

The novel focuses on the two eldest daughters, Elinor and Marianne (in Oakley’s adaptation, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles) and their contrasting philosophies of sense and sensibility.

Oakley has said she was inspired by Austen’s emphasis on sisterhood, and some reviews have noted the film’s strong depiction of this.

The director has spoken to her interpretation of Austen as a writer who “was taking what she knew to be a commercial form … the romance framework,” while including “subversive” content.

The film seeks to translate Austen’s 1811 feminism to a modern audience, but, for me as an Austen scholar, some important things are lost.

Bold women who revel in nature

We expect Austen heroines to take long walks in the English countryside, but this adaptation, more than any before, firmly plants its women in nature.

The film is beautiful to watch: In the opening sequence, Marianne reclines on the ground amid tall reeds and contemplates a caterpillar balancing on her fingertip. Later, we see her bathing her feet in a cold brook; Elinor skips stones with her love interest. This is Jane Austen, unbuttoned.

Both heroines wave aside social decorum when needed. Oakley’s........

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