‘You’re a complete star, Mags Dashwood. D’you know that?’

Margaret – the third, often forgotten Dashwood daughter in Jane Austen’s first published novel – steals the show in Joanna Trollope’s twenty-first-century reimagining of Sense and Sensibility. At the end of the first chapter of Austen’s original, Margaret is introduced only to be quickly dismissed: ‘Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humoured well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sister at a more advanced period of life’ (Austen, p. 8). And that is pretty much that. She reappears to embarrass Elinor by letting slip that her eldest sister fancies someone beginning with F – a faux pas which Trollope has her own version repeat – but is more or less forgotten for the rest of Austen’s novel. Trollope refashions Margaret, or Mags, as a much more active comic foil to both Elinor and Marianne.

Mags makes her appearance only a few pages into Trollope’s first chapter, trailing the complicated knot of her iPod headphones, revealing her capacity for faux pas as a distinctive character trait:

Now she looked up, as if she had just realised something.
‘I expect,’ she said brightly, ‘that Dad couldn’t leave you anything much because he hadn’t married you, had he?’
Marianne gave a little scream…

Elinor looked at her youngest sister.

‘Just because you know something, Mags, or even think it, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to say it,’ (Trollope, p. 7-8).

Mags lets slip Trollope’s ingenious retrofitting of the Dashwoods’ disinheritance at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility, shifting the blame from the primogeniture which privileges the male heirs of John and Fanny Dashwood to Belle and Henry’s bohemian disregard for the bourgeois institution of marriage. Later in the same chapter, Elinor realises that Margaret has probably turned a photograph of the brutally selfish interloper Fanny to face the wall: ‘Despite the distress of the day, Elinor couldn’t help an inward smile. What a brilliant little gesture! Who had done it? Margaret, probably… Elinor stretched a foot under the table and gave her sister a little nudge of congratulation’ (Trollope, p. 12). Mags continues to develop as a candid, confused, caring character, balancing teenage rebellion with a sweet naivety, tenderly sketched in by Trollope. There’s a touching scene between her and Elinor, when the latter, stressed out by Marianne’s histrionics, her own disappointments in love, and the pressures of managing their household affairs and her new job at an Exeter architectural firm, arrives to pick Mags up from school: they get into a petty argument, Mags apologises, and Elinor guiltily relaxes – indeed, the relationship between Elinor and Mags makes the eldest Dashwood into a more human, flawed, sympathetic character than the sometimes stiff figure in Austen’s original.

One of the repeated criticisms of Trollope’s reimagining of Sense and Sensibility, and the Austen Project of which it forms a part, is that the twenty-first-century versions remain too beholden to their eighteenth-century counterparts. To an extent, this is a problem which besets both Trollope’s novel and Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey: their plots are predictable; their style falls painfully short of Austen’s; Austen’s wider-ranging interests in social commentary, politics, philosophy, international events, and culture are crushingly reduced to a conventional marriage plot. (I also felt that McDermid didn’t actually like her teenage characters, betraying an impatience for them to grow up; Trollope is much better and more believable in giving voice to adolescent fears and desires). And yet: both novels are at their most engaging when they diverge from Austen’s plots, a facet of their reimaginings which requires – nay, demands – a close attention to the originals. McDermid’s version is at its most thrilling when she hints at a lesbian attachment forming between her Cat Morland and Ellie Tilney (conjectured about in original Austen criticism), making – spoilers! – General Tilney’s homophobia the reason for her heroine’s expulsion from Northanger, instead of disappointed fortune-hunting. Trollope and McDermid both focus on the need for their heroines to find employment, an added angle to Austen’s texts which could be exploited more. The choice of architectural drawing for Elinor, and writing children’s fiction for Cat and Ellie, demonstrates both a subtle understanding of Austen’s own interests in landscape aesthetics and minor literature, and how these subjects could be reimagined for the twenty-first century.

Returning to Mags, she also shows how a minor, even underwritten character from Austen’s original text can be playfully reworked in the new version, opening up new understandings of the novel. By the time she romantically gives up the treehouse built for her outside Barton Cottage so that Elinor and Edward can have some privacy on their reunion, the reader is ready to join with Edward in declaring Mags Dashwood a ‘complete star’ (Trollope, p. 332).

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 

Joanna Trollope, Sense and Sensibility (London: HarperCollins, 2013).

Val McDermid, Northanger Abbey (London: HarperCollins, 2014) – Criticks review by Kathleen Hudson available here.