When I told Ms. Was I had downloaded Sense and Sensibility (among other things) for a long flight I’d be taking, she said, “Well, you can’t go wrong with Jane Austen.” Were truer words ever spoken? Some Austen novels might be better than others, but they are all solid entertainment for passing the time, whether you are curled up with a cup of tea on a rainy day or wedged into a tight airplane seat and taking a break from binge-watching episodes of The Office.
Sense and Sensibility is the story of late 18th-century sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who are left with little means of support when their father dies and his estate passes into the hands of their half-brother, John. Even though John promises his father he’ll take care of Elinor and Marianne (and youngest sister Margaret, who exists but figures not at all in this story), he rationalizes (at the encouragement of his wife Fanny) every way possible to short change them once the old guy is in the ground.
Fed up with John and Fanny’s parsimony, Mrs. Dashwood and her two three daughters move to a cottage owned by Mrs. D.’s cousin Sir John Middleton. It’s small but cozy and they don’t have to hear any more of John’s yapping about how much he’s helping them out. Plus, out here in the country is where romantic shenanigans ensue!
Marianne is head over heels for Willoughby, who seems equally smitten in return. Colonel Brandon is also quite taken with Marianne, but she considers him an old man (35!) and not capable of true love or romance. Elinor and Fanny’s brother Edward have quite the flirtation going on. Mrs. Dashwood is thinking it’s going to be easy marrying these girls off, but then everything begins to crumble. Secret engagements come to light, families are scandalized, young men are cut off if they don’t marry their parents’ selected partners. The course of true love never did run smooth.
The main theme of the novel is not so much love as the expression of love. You don’t need an advanced degree in literature to recognize that Elinor is the “sense” in the title and Marianne is the “sensibility.” As they start to realize their own heartache, Marianne turns to bold and unconventional means, daring to write letters to a man (gasp) from whom she has had no promise of commitment, while Elinor buries her feelings. “. . . no one would have supposed from the appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love, and that Marianne was internally dwelling on the perfections of a man, of whose whole heart she felt thoroughly possessed, and whom she expected to see in every carriage which drove near their house.” Marianne sums up the differences between the sisters when she astutely pronounces, “Our situations are alike. We have neither of us any thing to tell; you, because you do not communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.”
Being Austen, the novel does eventually end with marriage and happiness, though perhaps of a more subdued tone than one would expect. Marianne comes to love Colonel Brandon, which demonstrates how Austen created love stories tempered with pragmatism. Love is not always a thunderbolt; sometimes it’s recognizing the value of someone close and familiar. While Willoughby may have mourned the loss of his ideal love in Marianne, he’s happy enough: “But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on–for he did neither.”
I sometimes forget how sharp Austen’s writing is, how she can scathe with a throw-away comment, such as when she writes of John, “He had just compunction enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself, to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should do a great deal.” But by far my favorite quote from Sense and Sensibility is when Austen seemingly anticipated the most sensible approach to dealing with people online: “Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.”
No, you really can’t go wrong with Austen for a cozy read. I recommend this first novel of the first lady of understated romance. And you would do well to follow it up with the Oscar-winning adaptation from the pen of Emma Thompson.
