![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But with the more recent boom in the 1990s, there has also been a heightened interest in her novels’ potential for mystery and sleuthing. Haut de pageġ As the many film adaptations of her works testify, Jane Austen has aroused popular interest for quite some time now, the first film dating from as early as 1940. Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s adaptation lays emphasis on the role of sympathy and communion of feeling in the disclosure of intimate truths through the use of windows and frames, forming thresholds between the public and private but also revealing the characters’ perceptiveness. It merges two aspects highly revealing of the evolution that crystallized in Poe’s tales with Dupin: the rising influence of the clinical gaze and the redemptive integration of eighteenth-century sensibility – which was increasingly becoming suspect at the turn of the century – within a rational “method of understanding.” The ability to read characters to uncover their secrets is presented as a decoding of signs and symptoms which requires logic but also a subjective projection into the mind of the other. Depicting characters harbouring secrets and investigating so as to unravel mysteries – though they are mainly psychological – Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility undoubtedly heralds the rise of the detective novel. ![]()
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