The Context of Sense and Sensibility

The Context of Sense and Sensibility 69
tional observer and telling the story largely from her point
of view. Just as in the Richardsonian epistolary novel one of
a pair of correspondents is always dominant, so one of a
pair of heroines is always dominant. Both Marianne and
Elinor are disappointed by the faithlessness or reticence of
a lover who should declare himself. The deadly parallel re-
quires that the novelist take two such affairs upon her hands,
and it also imposes passive roles upon the heroines. The
theme of the story is their moral and psychological educa-
tion, but the girls are not going to write long letters or
analyze their situations elaborately. The story proceeds by
presenting the suspense and disappointment caused by the
defaulting lovers, revealing the reasons for the lovers’ ap-
parent or real defections, and finally offering a remedy or
solution. This plot machinery operates through a rather
miscellaneous group of people who happen to come into con-
tact with the Dashwood family. The family itself, the
widowed mother with the three daughters and the half-
brother John Dashwood and his wife, is technically the
center of the story, but it does not offer the inexhaustible
and varied interest of the Bennet family in Pride and Preju-
dice; though the famous second chapter, in which Mrs. John
Dashwood succeeds in inducing her husband to do nothing
for his step-mother and half-sisters, is one of the diploma
pieces in the Austen gallery. For stimulus and variety Sense
and Sensibility depends more than the other Austen novels on
the casual introduction of people who are unsympathetic or
defective in various ways. The introduction and use of such
a variegated cast derives from the Bumey type of story. The
genial vulgarity of Mrs. Jennings, the crudely malevolent
Steele sisters (transferred from Bartlett’s Buildings, Holbom,
to become the hangers-on of gentlefolk in Berkeley Street),
the rude Mr. Palmer and his silly wife, the shallowly genial

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