In Praise of Fanny Price

I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene inSense and Sensibilitythat turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the originalAusten is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and fun...