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Sense and Sensibility — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Plot summary

On his deathbed, Henry Dashwood makes his son, John, promise to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne and Margaret, from his inheritance. John's wife Fanny instead persuades him not to support them financially, leaving them a greatly reduced income.

Fanny's brother Edward Ferrars arrives for a visit. When he and Elinor seem to be growing close, Fanny warns Mrs Dashwood that their mother has higher goals for Edward. Affronted, Mrs Dashwood moves her family to Barton Cottage in Devonshire, which her second cousin, Sir John Middleton, offered for a low rent. Later, while dining with the Middletons at Barton Park, family friend Colonel Brandon is attracted to Marianne. However, he is aged thirty-five, which seems too old to sixteen-year-old Marianne's romantic sensibilities.

While out walking, Marianne sprains her ankle. John Willoughby happens upon her and carries Marianne home. During subsequent visits, their similar artistic taste causes Marianne to fall in love with him, abandoning caution and propriety. Just as an engagement seems imminent, Willoughby informs the Dashwoods that his elderly cousin Mrs Smith, whom he is financially dependent upon due to his debts, is sending him to London indefinitely on business. Marianne is left distraught.

When Edward Ferrars visits Barton Cottage, he seems subdued. Shortly afterwards, sisters Anne and Lucy Steele, vulgar cousins of Sir John's mother-in-law, Mrs Jennings, stay at Barton Park. While there, Lucy confides to Elinor that she and Edward are secretly engaged, giving Elinor an insight into Lucy's jealous and calculating nature.

Mrs Jennings invites the elder Dashwood sisters to visit her in London. After Marianne's letters to Willoughby go unanswered, they unexpectedly meet at a ball. Willoughby, there with another woman, greets Marianne coldly, later informing her he is betrothed to the rich Miss Grey. Marianne is heartbroken but tells Elinor that she and Willoughby never were engaged.

Colonel Brandon reveals to Elinor that Willoughby had earlier seduced and abandoned Brandon's teenaged ward, Eliza Williams. Willoughby's cousin has consequently disinherited him, which explains his need to marry an heiress. Meanwhile, the Steele sisters come to London and are invited to stay at John and Fanny Dashwood's London house in preference to Elinor and Marianne. Based on their cordiality, Anne mistakenly believes that the Ferrars have become fond enough of Lucy to welcome her into the family and reveals Lucy's engagement to Edward. As a result, the sisters are dismissed from the house, and Edward's wealthy mother orders him to break off the engagement. When Edward refuses, he is disinherited in favour of his younger brother. On learning this, Colonel Brandon shows his admiration for Edward's honourable conduct by offering him the nearby parsonage, allowing him and Lucy to marry after he is ordained.

Mrs Jennings takes the Dashwood sisters to visit her second daughter as they journey back to Devonshire. Marianne goes walking in the rain and contracts putrid fever. When Marianne's condition worsens, Elinor writes home. Colonel Brandon, who has been accompanying them, volunteers to bring Marianne's mother. That night, Willoughby arrives and tells Elinor that he genuinely loved Marianne. However, the callous way he talks about Eliza and his wife lessens Elinor's pity for him.

Marianne recovers, and learning of Elinor's own silent heartache, is ashamed of her ostentatious grief and vows to be guided by her sister's good sense and amend her future behaviour.

After their return home, a family servant happens to encounter Lucy at a nearby market town and brings back news that she is now Mrs Ferrars. This final act of spite becomes obvious when Edward arrives to reveal that Lucy had jilted him and married his now wealthy younger brother. After being ordained, Edward marries Elinor, while Marianne later marries Colonel Brandon. The two sisters can now harmoniously live as neighbours.

Composition

Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the novel in epistolary form, possibly as early as 1795, when she was around 19 years old, or in 1797 at the age of 21. She reportedly gave it the working title Elinor and Marianne, reflecting the focus on the contrasting personalities of the two eldest Dashwood sisters. This early version of the story was written in letters, a common narrative style of the period, which allowed for intimate insight into the characters' thoughts and feelings. Austen later revised the novel, changing it from an epistolary format to a continuous narrative and retitling it Sense and Sensibility, thereby enabling a more flexible and expansive exploration of the story’s themes and social commentary.

Austen drew inspiration from contemporary novels of the late 18th century that explored similar themes of romance, morality, and social conduct. Adam Stevenson's Life and Love (1785), which recounts personal romantic experiences and societal expectations, is thought to have influenced Austen's depiction of complex emotional relationships and the challenges of constrained social circumstances. Jane West's A Gossip's Story (1796) is also considered a significant influence, as it features one sister characterized by rational sense and another by passionate, emotive sensibility. Notably, West's romantic sister shares the name Marianne with Austen's character, and modern editions of West's novel highlight textual and thematic similarities, suggesting that Austen may have consciously or unconsciously drawn on these elements in shaping her own characters and plot.

Austen may also have drawn on historical figures in developing certain characters. In particular, Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, is often cited as a potential inspiration for Colonel Brandon. Parallels include rumored illegitimate daughters—Hastings with his possible daughter Eliza de Feuillide, and Brandon with Eliza Brandon in the novel—as well as early departures to India at age seventeen. Both figures are also associated with dueling and matters of honor, characteristics echoed in Colonel Brandon’s backstory. Literary scholar Linda Robinson Walker has argued that Hastings “haunts Sense and Sensibility in the character of Colonel Brandon,” noting that Austen may have drawn on her knowledge of contemporary political figures and family connections to lend historical depth and realism to her fictional characters.

19th-century responses

Early reviews of Sense and Sensibility focused on the novel as providing lessons in conduct (which would be debated by later critics), as well as reviewing the characters. The Norton Critical Edition of Sense and Sensibility contains a number of such responses in its supplementary material. An "Unsigned Review" in the February 1812 Critical Review praises the novel as well-written and realistic, with well-drawn characters and a "highly pleasing" plot in which "the whole is just long enough to interest the reader without fatiguing". Elinor and her mother are praised, while Marianne's extreme sensibility is seen as bringing unhappiness on herself.

Another "Unsigned Review" from the May 1812 British Critic further emphasises the novel's function as a type of conduct book. In this author's opinion, Austen's favouring of Elinor's temperament over Marianne's provides the lesson. The reviewer claims that "the object of the work is to represent the effects on the conduct of life, of discreet quiet good sense on the one hand, and an overrefined and excessive susceptibility on the other." He goes on to state that the book contains "many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life" within a "very pleasing and entertaining narrative."

W. F. Pollock's 1861 article for Fraser's Magazine, on "British Novelists" is described as an "early example of what would become the customary view of Sense and Sensibility." In addition to emphasising the novel's morality, Pollock reviews the characters in catalogue-like fashion, allotting praise and criticism on the assumption that Austen favours Elinor's point of view and temperament and extending it to the minor characters. Mrs Palmer is silly, Sir John Dashwood is selfish, the behaviour of the Steele sisters is vulgar. However, an anonymous piece titled "Miss Austen" published in 1866 in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine departs from other early criticism in sympathising with Marianne over Elinor, claiming that Elinor is "too good" a character. The article also differs from other reviews in its claim that the "prevailing merit" of the book is not in its sketch of the two sisters; rather, the book is effective because of its "excellent treatment of the subordinate characters." Alice Meynell's 1894 article "The Classic Novelist" in the Pall Mall Gazette also concurs with Austen's attention to small things and minor characters and small matters since "that which makes life, art, and work trivial is a triviality of relations." Also discussed is the children's function in highlighting "the folly of their mothers", especially in Lady Middleton's case.

Characterisation

As used by Austen, the word "sense" signifies good judgment, wisdom, or prudence, and "sensibility" signifies sensitivity, sympathy, or emotionality. By changing the title from the names of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in her first choice of title to that of their qualities, Austen adds "philosophical depth" to what began as a sketch of two characters. However, these characteristics, as demonstrated through the dominant behaviour of the sisters, are not mutually exclusive. Although their qualities are compared and contrasted through means of the plot, neither sister is a one-sided caricature. Humanised through emotional suffering, Marianne's sympathy for her sister teaches her self-control and prudence, while Elinor learns to express her emotions more overtly.

Nevertheless, the changes to the original novel's structure are never resolved in the eyes of some critics. A. Walton Litz judged that Sense and Sensibility is "caught uneasily between burlesque and the serious novel...in which the crude antitheses of the original structure were never successfully overcome". Tony Tanner sees a shift of view instead to "the tensions between the potential instability of the individual and the required stabilities of society", as demonstrated by the influence of the governing qualities on the younger and the older sister. While sensibility has its positive aspects, its over-cultivation leads in the novel to the psychosomatic disorders to which Marianne nearly succumbs.

Claire Tomalin too argues that Sense and Sensibility has a "wobble in its approach", which developed because Austen, in the course of writing the novel, gradually became less certain about whether sense or sensibility should triumph. Austen characterises Marianne as a sweet person with attractive qualities: intelligence, musical talent, frankness, and the capacity to love deeply. She also acknowledges that Willoughby, with all his faults, continues to love and, in some measure, appreciate Marianne. For these reasons, some readers find Marianne's ultimate marriage to Colonel Brandon an unsatisfactory ending.

In Rachel Brownstein's opinion, the differences between the Dashwood sisters have been exaggerated, and in fact the sisters are more alike than they are different, with Elinor having an "excellent heart" and being capable of the same romantic passions as Marianne feels, while Marianne has much sense as well. Elinor is more reserved, more polite, and less impulsive than Marianne, who loves poetry, taking walks across picturesque landscapes and believes in intense romantic relationships, but it is this very closeness between the sisters that allows these differences to emerge during their exchanges.

Mary Favret explores the contrast through examining popular forms of fiction of the time. In epistolary fiction, action, dialogue, and character interactions are all reflected through letters sent from one or more of the characters. In exploring Austen's fraught relationship with such fiction, Favret surveys how Austen "wrestled with epistolary form" in previous writings and, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility, "announced her victory over the constraints of the letter". Favret contends that Austen's version of the letter separates her from her "admired predecessor, Samuel Richardson" in that Austen's letters are "a misleading guide to the human heart which, in the best instances, is always changing and adapting." According to Favret, the character of Elinor Dashwood is an "anti-epistolary heroine" whose "inner world" of thoughts and feelings does not find "direct expression in the novel, although her point of view controls the story." Sense and Sensibility establishes what Favret calls a "new privacy" in the novel, which was constrained by previous notions of the romance of letters. This new privacy is a "less constraining mode of narration" in which Austen's narrator provides commentary on the action, rather than the characters themselves through the letters. Favret claims that in Sense and Sensibility, Austen wants to "recontextualize" the letter and bring it into a "new realism." Austen does so by imbuing the letter with dangerous power when Marianne writes to Willoughby; both their love and the letter "prove false". Additionally, Favret claims that Austen uses the correspondence of both of the sisters to emphasise the contrasts in their personalities. When both write letters upon arriving in London, Elinor's letter is the "dutiful letter of the 'sensible sister'" and Marianne writes a "vaguely illicit letter" reflecting her characterisation as the "sensitive" sister". What is perhaps most striking about Favret's analysis is that she notes that the lovers who write to one another never unite with each other.

Societal themes

A common theme of Austen criticism has been on the legal aspects of society and the family, particularly wills, the rights of first and second sons, and lines of inheritance. Gene Ruoff's book Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility explores these issues in an extended discussion of the novel. The first two chapters deal extensively with the subject of wills and the discourse of inheritance. These topics reveal what Ruoff calls "the cultural fixation on priority of male birth". According to Ruoff, male birth is by far the dominant issue in these legal conversations. Ruoff observes that, within the linear family, the order of male birth decides issues of eligibility and merit. When Robert Ferrars becomes his mother's heir, Edward is no longer appealing to his "opportunistic" fiancée Lucy, who quickly turns her attention to the foppish Robert and "entraps him" in order to secure the inheritance for herself. Ruoff comments that Lucy is specifically aiming for the heir because of the monetary advantage. William Galperin, in his book The History Austen, comments on the tendency of this system of patriarchal inheritance and earning as working to ensure the vulnerability of women. Because of this vulnerability, Galperin contends that Sense and Sensibility shows marriage as the only practical solution "against the insecurity of remaining an unmarried woman."

Feminist critics have long been engaged in conversations about Jane Austen, and Sense and Sensibility has figured in these discussions, especially in the context of the patriarchal system of inheritance and earning. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal feminist work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination contains several discussions of this novel. The authors read the beginning of Sense and Sensibility as a retelling of King Lear from a female perspective and contend that these "reversals imply that male traditions need to be evaluated and reinterpreted from a female perspective." Gilbert and Gubar argue that Austen explores the effects of patriarchal control on women, particularly in the spheres of employment and inheritance. In Sense and Sensibility they educe the fact that Mr. John Dashwood cuts off his stepmother and half sisters from their home as well as promised income, as an instance of these effects. They also point to the "despised" Mrs. Ferrars's tampering with the patriarchal line of inheritance in her disowning of her elder son, Edward Ferrars, as proof that this construction is ultimately arbitrary. Gilbert and Gubar contend that while Sense and Sensibility's ultimate message is that "young women like Marianne and Elinor must submit to powerful conventions of society by finding a male protector", women such as Mrs. Ferrars and Lucy Steele demonstrate how women can "themselves become agents of repression, manipulators of conventions, and survivors." In order to protect themselves and their own interests, Mrs. Ferrars and Lucy Steele must participate in the same patriarchal system that oppresses them.

In the chapter "Sense and Sensibility: Opinions Too Common and Too Dangerous", from her book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Claudia Johnson also gives a feminist reading of Sense and Sensibility. She differs from previous critics, especially the earliest ones, in her contention that Sense and Sensibility is not, as it is often assumed to be, a "dramatized conduct book" that values "female prudence" (associated with Elinor's sense) over "female impetuosity" (associated with Marianne's sensibility). Rather, Johnson sees Sense and Sensibility as a "dark and disenchanted novel" that views "institutions of order" such as property, marriage, and family in a negative light, an attitude that makes the novel the "most attuned to social criticism" of Austen's works. According to Johnson, Sense and Sensibility critically examines the codes of propriety as well as their enforcement by the community. Key to Austen's criticism of society, runs Johnson's argument, is the depiction of the unfair marginalisation of women resulting from the "death or simple absence of male protectors." Additionally, the male characters in Sense and Sensibility are depicted unfavourably. Johnson calls the gentlemen in Sense and Sensibility "uncommitted sorts" who "move on, more or less unencumbered by human wreckage from the past." Johnson compares Edward to Willoughby in this regard, claiming that all of the differences between them as individuals do not hide the fact that their failures are actually identical; Johnson calls them both "weak, duplicitous, and selfish," lacking the honesty and forthrightness with which Austen endows other "exemplary gentlemen" in her work.

Mary Poovey's analysis in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen concurs with Johnson's on the dark tone of Sense and Sensibility. Poovey contends that Sense and Sensibility has a "somber tone" in which conflict breaks out between Austen's engagement with her "self-assertive characters" and the moral codes necessary to control their potentially "anarchic" desires. Austen shows, according to Poovey, this conflict between individual desire and the restraint of moral principles through the character of Elinor herself. Except for Elinor, all of the female characters in Sense and Sensibility experience some kind of female excess. Poovey argues that while Austen does recognise "the limitations of social institutions", she demonstrates the necessity of controlling the "dangerous excesses of female feeling" rather than liberating them. She does so by demonstrating that Elinor's self-denial, especially in her keeping of Lucy Steele's secret and willingness to help Edward, even though both of these actions were hurtful to her, ultimately contribute to her own contentment and that of others. In this way, Poovey contends that Austen suggests that the submission to society that Elinor demonstrates is the proper way to achieve happiness in life.

Publication history

In 1811, Thomas Egerton of the Military Library publishing house in London accepted the manuscript for publication in three volumes. Austen paid to have the book published and paid the publisher a commission on sales. The cost of publication was more than a third of Austen's annual household income of £460 (about £15,000 in 2008 currency). She made a profit of £140 (almost £5,000 in 2008 currency) on the first edition, which sold all 750 printed copies by July 1813. A second edition was advertised in October 1813.

Sense and Sensibility was the first Austen title to be republished in England after her death, and the first illustrated Austen book produced in Britain, in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series of 1833. The novel has been in continuous publication since 1811, and has many times been illustrated, excerpted, abridged, and adapted for stage, film, and television.

The novel was soon translated into French by Madame Isabelle de Montolieu as Raison et Sensibilité, ou les deux manières d'aimer (1815). Montolieu had only the most basic knowledge of English, and her translations were more "imitations" of Austen's novels as Montolieu had her assistants provide a summary of Austen's novels, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The "translation" of Sense and Sensibility by Montolieu changes entire scenes and characters, for example having Marianne call Willoughby an "angel" and an "Adonis" upon first meeting him, lines that are not in the English original. Likewise, the scene where Mrs Dashwood criticises her husband for planning to subsidise his widowed stepmother because it might be disadvantageous to "our little Harry", Mrs Dashwood soon forgets about Harry and it is made apparent her objections are founded in greed; Montolieu altered the scene by having Mrs Dashwood continuing to speak of "our little Harry" as the basis of her objections, completely changing her motives. When Elinor learns the Ferrars who married Lucy Steele is Robert, not Edward, Montolieu adds a scene, in which Edward, the Dashwood sisters and their mother all break down in tears while clasping hands, that was not in the original. Austen has the marriage of Robert Ferrars and Lucy Steele end well while Montolieu changes the marriage into a failure.

Sense and Sensibility

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