Sense and SensibilityStudy Guide

John Dashwood promises his dying father he will provide for the women of Norland. By the time the funeral meat is cold, Fanny has walked him from three thousand pounds to occasional presents, and the sister who never makes a scene will spend the next year carrying what everyone else feels out loud. That is the audit Jane Austen opens with in her first published novel, revised for years from an earlier draft called Elinor and Marianne: not which sister is right, but what each defense costs when the roof is entailed away from you.

Elinor Dashwood is nineteen, cool in judgment and loyal in feeling, so practiced at composure that even her mother cannot always tell when she is breaking. Marianne, at seventeen, treats reserve as fraud and gives every joy and grief the volume it asks for. Mrs. Dashwood loves both daughters and still prefers Marianne's weather because it looks like honesty. Edward Ferrars is awkward, kind, and bound to a secret he lacks the courage to name. Willoughby arrives in a shooting-jacket, carries Marianne home from a sprained ankle, and performs the hero so well that Barton Cottage stops asking questions. Colonel Brandon is thirty-five, quiet, filed under flannel waistcoats. Lucy Steele is sweet in company and precise in private, holding Edward's engagement for four years and knowing exactly when to show the miniature. The pressure is not sister against sister. It is money, charm, and silence pressing both.

Fanny talks the inheritance down until Norland is no longer a home. At Barton, Marianne falls on the downs and Willoughby becomes the plot before anyone has checked his character. He leaves without an explanation that can bear daylight. Lucy takes Elinor on the walk from the Park to the cottage, produces Edward's picture, and asks her to keep a secret that destroys a hope Elinor has never quite admitted. In London, Willoughby bows from across a crowded room and returns to Miss Grey. The letter that follows is cold enough to be someone else's, and in a sense it is. Brandon tells the story of the first Eliza and the second; the cancelled Whitwell trip finally has a name. Marianne's fever at Cleveland nearly finishes what the letter began. Willoughby forces his confession on Elinor while her sister may still die. Lucy marries Robert. Edward shreds a pair of scissors in the Barton parlor, and Elinor, for once, cannot govern her face.

Austen never crowns Elinor or rehabilitates Marianne into a moral. Sense without feeling is a prison. Sensibility without judgment is a cliff. Willoughby is not a cartoon: he loved Marianne and still chose fifty thousand pounds. Edward is not a hero of candor: he was never free and still let a whole cottage build a future on his reticence. The double wedding at Delaford is earned, not a verdict. Most ruin in this book does not come from strangers. It comes from people who looked, for a season, exactly like the life you wanted.

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