The Year That Made Jane Austen Sexy Again

The first grown-up film I really fell for, aged ten or 11, was Sense and Sensibility (no, I was not super cool at primary school). I remember wishing passionately, bitterly, that my hair was gold and curled like spaghetti-hoops; that someone would come along and break my heart so I could write them insane letters by candlelight and then charge up a hill and mumble poetry into the rain. It was with some relief that I realised later that these fairly weird fantasies revealed less about me than the tides of history tugging me along. I was born three years after Sense and Sensibility’s premiere in 1995 (it was more widely released in the UK a few months later) – the year that Jane Austen, like her heroine Anne Elliot (from Persuasion) before her, enjoyed her triumphant second bloom.