‘Jane Austen is for everyone’: novelist Diana Reid on adapting Sense and Sensibility – and surprising Brits with her accent

Diana Reid: ‘I love the 1995 film, and my initial instinct was that there was a reason it hadn’t been [adapted] for 30 years.’ Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

The summer Diana Reid spent writing her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, she found herself having some oddly formal conversations down at the pub. The Australian author used only about 25 lines from Jane Austen’s first published novel for her screenplay, inventing most of the dialogue herself. To be able to mimic that very distinctive voice, Reid had to dive headfirst into studying Austen’s rhythm and sentence structure.

“I got so immersed in the language it infected my own speech. I would be describing someone I just met, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, he was most amiable!’” Reid says, laughing. “It was a kind of insanity.”