Daisy Edgar-Jones 'always understood' Elinor Dashwood

Daisy Edgar-Jones has explained how she relates to Elinor Dashwood, her on-screen character.

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Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in Sense and Sensibility
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in Sense and Sensibility

Daisy Edgar-Jones has always "really understood" Elinor Dashwood.

The 28-year-old actress plays the fictional character in Sense and Sensibility, the new film adaptation of Jane Austen's 1811 novel, and Daisy admits that she's always felt an affinity with Elinor.

The actress - who first read Austen's novel as an adolescent - told Bustle: "When I read Elinor Dashwood in my teenage years, I always felt I really understood her. I really love characters like Elinor that are often overlooked or misunderstood."

Daisy took inspiration from the character and applied it to her own life.

She said: "There was a quote in the book that was kind of my North Star, which is that ‘her feelings are strong, but she’s learned how to govern them'.

"That was everything, because I think that her restraint doesn’t mean a lack of passion. In fact, she’s somebody who has this deep, deep, deep well of love and pain and she’s taking on all of the pressures of everybody else’s heartbreak and the financial situation that they’re in and making sure Margaret stays educated. She’s kind of this parentified child who’s become very adept at putting herself aside to support others."

Meanwhile, Daisy previously hailed Austen's work as timeless.

The actress relished shooting Sense and Sensibility, and Daisy feels grateful that the source material is "so transcendent".

The brunette beauty told E! News: "What Austen was writing about was the human experience. And therefore every new group of individuals that make her books and bring them to life, just the mere kind of individuality of the people making it, but also the context of which it's being made, will kind of imprint into something different."

Daisy was particularly attracted to director Georgia Oakley's take on a classic tale.

She said: "I was really struck by Georgia Oakley's vision for this and how she wanted to see a version of the Dashwoods that felt really raw and earthy and quite undone in a really beautiful way, and to really centralise the sisterhood and the love story being between the two women as the kind of main arc of the film. And I feel like she really achieved that."