Sense and Sensibility returns to cinemas as a new film of Austen's sisters opens this week, with Pride and Prejudice due in December

Wednesday's news is not a new Jane Austen. It is a film already playing in Britain, a Kent manor house showing off its dance, and a Friday opening that will put the Dashwood sisters on more screens just as another Austen romance waits for December. Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid have put Elinor and Marianne at the front of the tale. The posters sell sisterhood and charm. The novel underneath still turns on money, reputation, and two very different ways of loving.

Austen's Sense and Sensibility knows what a dance can hide. Marianne meets Willoughby after a fall, and she treats his ease, his taste, and the later parties as proof of a future he has not offered. In London she looks for him at a ball and finds him with Miss Grey, cold in public, the engagement she believed in never having been spoken. Elinor, in the same season, keeps Edward Ferrars's silence and Lucy Steele's secret engagement without making a scene. One sister spends feeling in the room. The other spends it in private. Both have to learn that charm arriving first is not the same as character remaining after the music stops.

Pride and Prejudice opens on the same lesson in a different assembly. At Meryton, Darcy will not dance with Elizabeth Bennet and calls her not handsome enough to tempt him. She decides against him from that slight. Later she refuses Mr Collins because a proposal is not a claim, and she refuses Darcy's first proposal because pride on one side and prejudice on the other are not yet a marriage. Netflix's new series will have to decide whether it is retelling the spark or the refusal. The book is the refusal as much as the spark.

The useful question this week is not whether the new film is as loved as Ang Lee's. It is what a viewer takes home from the dance: a wish to be chosen in public, or Austen's harder plot, in which the person who looks like the romance is not always the person who can be lived with.