Emma Thompson won an Oscar for her fairly faithful adaptation of Jane Austen’s early novel about a mother and her three daughters who suffer from the iniquities of inheritance laws in 18th-century England. Rendered almost homeless, the two eldest of the sisters (played by Thompson and a marvellous Kate Winslet) are not exactly the most marriageable women in a society where desirability is usually conferred by property and birth. Thompson’s script remains true to Austen’s themes (the gulf between romanticism and materialism, the difference between hearsay and knowledge), and people who were surprised by the choice of Lee as director could not have seen his earlier films about family ties and responsibilities.