Sense and Sensibility, Part 1

I am tickled pink by the cover of this edition!

Author: Jane Austen

Category: I first read this about two and a half years ago, when I was unemployed. I enjoyed it because it was actually funny, but it also had a sense of melancholy that I could relate to at the time.

My thoughts: I think that between the two Jane Austen novels I’ve read, I will always prefer Pride and Prejudice. However, Sense and Sensibility has its own charms, and I like it more than I did when I read it for the first time. I feel as if Jane Austen goes deeper here than in Pride and Prejudice on the subject of unrequited love and its emotional effects. As any preteen girl can tell you, crushes are hard! I’m not finished reading the book yet (I’ve got about 100 pages to go), and I’d like to write about the characters first, as I did with Pride and Prejudice.

I think when I was younger, I was like Marianne Dashwood in terms of personality. I felt passionately about my opinions, staunchly defended them, and freely spoke my mind. Then I got older, and discovered tact. Marianne doesn’t worry about the politeness that dominates this society and its conversations. If she doesn’t want to do something, she doesn’t make polite excuse. She just says that she’s not interested. Of course, this leaves her sister Elinor to smooth over any ruffled feathers. The fact that Marianne feels things very deeply is manifests itself in her swift infatuation with Willoughby and her shattered reaction to his cold treatment of her later. Marianne’s heartbreak is incredibly palpable. I suppose that the moment when you realize you are very wrong about ideas that you thought were unshakeable is always heartbreaking. However, Marianne brings my favorite moment in the novel, as seen in the Great Passages at the end of the post.

Now, Elinor. She is a rock, a steady presence in a novel full of mean girls (Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood) and silly people (Mrs. Jennings, Sir John, and Mrs. Palmer). Elinor knows how to take care of business. She withholds her emotions, and keeps the secrets of herself and others, even though it causes inner turmoil. She reminds me a bit of Victoria Leonard from one of my favorite novels, Summer Sisters. Elinor can read people in a way that her mother and sister can’t. She’s suspicious, rightly, of Willoughby’s intentions. In discussing Elinor, her rival and foil, Lucy Steele must be mentioned. What a vile creature! She is cunning (and not in a good way) and calculating. There were passages when I frankly admired Elinor for not getting up and smacking Lucy Steele in the face. Elinor, instead of playing games like Lucy, is determined to be a grown-up about the love triangle between Elinor, Lucy, and Edward.

At first glance, Willoughby and Wickham seem almost interchangeable as Austen villains. But the undercurrent of danger is stronger with Willoughby. Wickham is a jerk, but Willoughby downright dangerous. He is seducer and ruiner of women. His attentions to Marianne and her family are almost bipolar: he’s familiar enough with the Dashwood family to practically order Mrs. Dashwood not to make any alterations to their cottage (at that point, he got on my nerves—who is he to tell a grown woman what she should or shouldn’t do to her own house?). But then, when he sees Marianne at a party, he is so so cold to her.

Earlier, I mentioned the novel’s mean girls, Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood. Like mother, like daughter (they would probably get along well with Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice). They are nice to Lucy Steele only because they don’t like Elinor. However, Marianne puts them in their place, as seen in the moment below, when the two ladies are praising Miss Morton, who they hope will marry Edward Ferrars, at the expense of our beloved Elinor.

Great passage: Marianne could not bear this. She was already greatly displeased with Mrs. Ferrars; and such ill-timed praise of another at Elinor’s expense, though she had not any notion of what was principally meant by it, provoked her immediately to say with warmth: “This is admiration of a very particular kind! What is Miss Morton to us? Who knows, or who cares, for her? It is Elinor of whom we think and speak.”