It is truth universally acknowledge that a good novel in possession of a good love story must be in want of a screen adaptation. Yet no work of Jane Austen reached the big screen before 1940's Pride and Prejudice – which, though highly popular, was the last Austen film for a long period. Between 1948 and 1994, television was the chief medium for adaptations of Austen's novels. Then six important film and television adaptations appeared on the screen in two years. Following the 1995 Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and two more Emmas, all before the end of 1996. At the end of the twentieth century, a nineteenth-century novelist Jane Austen had become a hot media property. .
The present study is specifically concerned with the perception aspects of a film adaptation by the example of Emma Thompson's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995, USA/UK) film adaptation. Not all adaptations fare as well; in fact, critics literary and popular, often resort to the following complain: "it wasn't like that in the book". There viewers may be unable to recognize how film translates the complexity and subtlety of the novel. The problem of adaptation has been part of film industry. Since the very beginning, film directors have struggled to capture the essence of the written word.
The aim of the research is to find out how Emma Thompson's Film Adaptation of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995, USA/UK) has handled the challenges of adaptation from page to screen. Emma Thompson spent five years translating Jane Austen's work to the screen. In 1995, Thompson not only wrote and acted in a film adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, 'Sense and Sensibility', but also published the diaries that she kept during that time with the title "Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility: Screenplay and Diaries"(1995). Inspired by this work I became interested in the nature of adapting classical novels to the modern audience within film media.