Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

What, precisely, is Jane Austen's schtick?  Is she a chronicler of her age, a satirist or just a teller of romantic tales?  Or is she all of the above?

Sense and Sensibility is an odd novel.  On face value, it is a tale of two sisters looking for love.  They find it; they lose it; and when it comes calling again, love turns out not to be so straightforward.  So far, so good.

On the other hand, the novel is studded with more than its fair share of unattractive and insensitive characters.   A social calculus, based on each individual's social standing, appearance, personal fortune or likelihood of inheritance, is always at play.  The prospects of the characters are bloodlessly assessed on this basis.  John Dashwood, contemplating the negative effects that illness has had on the looks of his half-sister, says: "I question whether Marianne now will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a year, at the utmost ..."  A callous observation, indeed, and one that draws no protest from Marianne's sister Elinor.  John's wife Fanny, a worthy successor to Lear's Goneril and Regan, is equally unattractive.  Over-zealous in protecting her own son's patrimony, Fanny effectively disinherits the widow and daughters of her father-in-law, and her husband meekly acquiesces to her views on the matter. And we haven't even got to the dubious suitors.

Are we to assume that this is how Austen's contemporaries actually thought, spoke and acted, or is she satirising their fears and vanities?  Is Sense and Sensibility itself a satire on the genre of the sentimental novel?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody, respectively, the attitudes sense and sensibility alluded to in the novel's title.  Where Elinor is pragmatic, thoughtful and guarded, playing her cards close to her chest, Marianne is ruled by her passions and wears her heart on her sleeve.  Both experience heartbreak, and each deals with it according to their own nature, almost disastrously in Marianne's case.

Comparisons are odious, as Dr Johnson said, and this novel will not fare well when compared to a work like Pride and Prejudice.  Its relative lack of restraint in terms of emotion and analysis, perhaps, mars rather than elevates it.  Having said this, I did enjoy this book despite its flaws, mainly because Austen gave me good reason to care for the gentle characters in the book.  I became genuinely anxious for their welfare and happiness, and that is something I cherish in a novel.

I read the Signet Classics 200th Anniversary Edition.  It contains an introduction by Margaret Drabble and an afterword by Mary Balogh.  In some respects, these two treatments of the novel are diametrically opposed to each other, which in itself is thought-provoking.  Worth the money.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'

Well, at least that is what the mothers and daughters in the town of Meryton believe; and when the affable Mr Bingley, young, rich and single, moves into the neighbourhood, the mothers want him for their son-in-law and the daughters want him for their husband.

Mr Bingley has brought his friend Mr Darcy with him. Darcy is far richer and more handsome  than Bingley and just as single. He's a dream come true for the ladies of Meryton, and then he opens his mouth.  It quickly becomes a truth universally acknowledged that Darcy is a self-opinionated and bumptious snob.  Who would want to marry such a man?  Certainly not Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a solidly respectable country gent.  She says of Darcy:

I believe, Ma'am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.

And with these words Elizabeth seals her fate.  All we need do now is wait and see which path she and Darcy will take to the wedding chapel together.

In the course of the novel we get to see the little world of the Bennets and the people who move in and out of their circle - some of them endearing, some repulsive, and some of ambiguous personal merit, but all very memorable and well drawn.  It is to Austen's great credit that readers can easily immerse themselves in the story and come to care for the people they meet in the pages.

Pride and Prejudice gives us insight into the world of the English rural gentry in the early nineteenth century, and the reader is scarcely made aware that England had been at war with Napoleon's France for the better part of a decade.  No, the novel strictly confines itself to an examination of the manners and morality of that small slice of English society in a diverting way.  And why not?  Diversion is good when it is this entertaining.