The Context of Sense and Sensibility

THE CONTEXT OF SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

THE PURPOSE of this essay is to consider Sense and
Sensibility in the light of Jane Austen’s beginnings in
prose fiction, with due regard to current tendencies in the
feminine novel and to her own early writings. Since we do
not have the early epistolary Elinor and Marianne, such a
study must be incomplete, for we can never know the exact
nature, or even the exact date, of the revision that made
Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility. Something
may be learned of Jane Austen’s early period, however, by
putting Sense and Sensibility as we know it into the literary
setting of the 1790’s.

The title Sense and Sensibility immediately suggests a
stock theme so common that the ordinary patron of a circu-
lating library could easily have inferred the plot. The point
can be illustrated by a brief dialogue in a novel of which
Jane Austen disapproved:

“And yet,” said Clarentine, “without a little romance in
youth, what is life good for?”

“Every rational enjoyment that sober common sense ought
to render valuable to us.”

“But, my dearest Mrs. Denbigh, do you expect me to
have already acquired a sufficient portion of this sober
common sense to think so?”

“No, I know you have not; but a little longer residence
with me, I flatter myself, will give it you. There are certain
words with which sentimentalists by profession nourish their
folly, that I have totally effaced from my vocabulary, and
never permit even my friends to use if I can help it. Delicacy
(such false delicacy as they mean) is one; refinement is
another; sensibility is a third; .susceptibility (the most odious
of all) is a fourth; enthusiasm is a fifth; and lastly comes that
ideal bugbear, constancy, a term of which no woman
ought to know the meaning till after she is either married,
or positively engaged.”¹

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