The Context of Sense and Sensibility

The Context of Sense and Sensibility 67
it is often more pervasive: when Fanny Burney’s Camilla,
the most important heroine of 1796, converses with a mys-
terious fair one with whom she has struck up an instant
friendship, “they did not speak of Tunbridge, ' of public
places, nor diversions; their themes, all chosen by the
stranger, were friendship, confidence, and sensibility, which
she illustrated and enlivened by quotations from favourite
poets.”³ The sure marks are “her passion for solitude, her
fondness for literary and sentimental discussions, and her
enthusiasm in friendship.”⁴

In a realistic and critical presentation of character the
book or poem that happens to be read is subordinated to the
character who is susceptible to the book or poem. This is
largely true even of the novel of Jane Austen’s which comes
closest to being a study of female quixotism, Northanger
Abbey; even in that story Catherine Morland is not merely
another silly romance-reader, a mere imitation of Mrs. Len-
nox’s Arabella. It must be confessed that we could make a
neater chronological scheme if Susan (the original North-
anger Abbey) came before instead of after Elinor and Mari-
anne (the original Sense and Sensibility). The one point at
which Catherine approaches absurdity, her Gothic follies
during the visit to Northanger Abbey, brings us closer to the
free burlesque vein of the Juvenifia than anything in Sense
and Sensibility. But we may consider Catherine in North-
anger Abbey and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility as con-
trasting studies : Catherine is the docile and for the most part
passive reader, one whose reading marks her dependence on
social suggestion; Marianne is the ardent enthusiast who
looks in poetry, art, and music for a congenial expression of
her own temperament.

But Jane Austen, though her early experimentation must
have shown her that it was best to center her work on one

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