The Context of Sense and Sensibility 75
died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did
neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself.
His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always
uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in
sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of
domestic felicity.”18 If this is Jane Austen’s realistic view of the
mixed nature of life, it is also a disclaimer of the strict pattern
of moods, attitudes, and destinies followed by the conven-
tional novelist. And there is a direct contravention of poetic
justice in disposing of Lucy Steele, who jilted Edward Ferrars
for his brother Robert. “The whole of Lucy’s behaviour in the
affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may
be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an
earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its
progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing
every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that
of time and conscience.” This underscores the inadequacy of
the didactic novelist. And the inversion of the stock ending
of sentimental tragedy appears in the final words on Mari-
anne herself. “Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraor-
dinary fate.” She Unromantically overcame a first love and
married a man whom she had considered impossibly old.
All this “instead of falling a sacrifice to an inevitable passion,
as once she had fondly flattered herself with expecting—
instead of remaining even forever with her mother, and
finding her only pleasures in retirement and study, as after-
wards in her more calm and sober judgment she had deter-
mined on.”
It may seem that in these concluding comments Jane
Austen simply opposes one convention of romantic fiction
and romantic taste with another convention of disillusioned
common sense, which also has its obvious limitations. But in
the manipulation of these two conventions she shows inde-