The Context of Sense and Sensibility

74 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

not allow Jane Austen sufficient play for her humor and criti-
cal intelligence. The last appearance of WilIoughby in
person, to Elinor after Marianne’s serious illness, repre-
sents a tendency, marked toward the end of Sense and
Sensibility, to bring things on or off by a coup de théâtre. The
confession and partial defence of this young man is not very
interesting, but there is one significant passage which takes
us back to the early happy companionship of Marianne
and Willoughby. He is talking of the appealing letter which
she sent to him in London: “Every fine, every word was—in
the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she
here, would forbid—a dagger to my heart. To know that
Marianne was in town was—in the same language—a thunder-
bolt.—Thunderbolts and daggers!—what a reproof would
she have given me!”¹⁷ Here Jane Austen tries incidentally
to protect herself and the reader from the theatricality of
the Willoughby affair by introducing an apology for the use
of stock formulas. It is a clever adaptation of the device
of criticizing or deriding the conventions of the novel while
one is in the act of writing a novel. Such criticism can come
from characters in the story, or from the novelist herself,
commenting on the views or actions of the characters or on
her own conduct of the story, and this is the central principle
in Northanger Abbey. It is not given such prominence in
Sense and Sensibility, but becomes prominent at the end
in the form of criticism of the canons of sentimental mo-
rality followed by the conventional novelist. It underlies the
famous concluding passage about Willoughby: “That his
repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own pun-
ishment, was sincere, need not be doubted;—nor that he long
thought of Colonel Brandon with envy, and of Marianne
with regret. But that he was forever inconsolable, that he fled
from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or

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