The Context of Sense and Sensibility

The Context of Sense and Sensibility 73
In discussing Edward Feιτars she had already called for a
lover whose virtues should be ornamented by perfect man-
ners and perfect taste.¹² To judge a man by the way he reads
Cowper is of course as absurd as the condemnation of a
character in Love and Freindship because he had not read
Werther.¹³ But what Jane Austen is really trying to do here
is not merely to satirize devotees of the picturesque, and
lovers of romance and poetry, but to show in them the errors
natural to enthusiastic and impulsive youth. The ages of her
characters are always important, but the theme is particu-
larly important in Sense and Sensibility because of the em-
phasis on Marianne’s point of view. She is seventeen when
the story opens—seventeen is the standard age for the
heroine of a late eighteenth-century novel—and Willoughby
is twenty-five. Her mother is forty, and Colonel Brandon,
who promptly comes into view as a possible suitor for Elinor,
is thirty-five. A discussion of ages leads Marianne to the pro-
nouncement that “a woman of seven and twenty can never
hope to feel or inspire affection again.”¹⁴ Similarly, the theme
of instantaneous love and friendship, prominent in the early
pieces and in Northanger Abbey, enters seriously into Mari-
anne’s story: “It is not time or opportunity that is to deter-
mine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be
insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other,
and seven days are more than enough for others.”¹⁵ Wil-
loughby and Marianne have already discovered that their
tastes are strikingly alike in dancing, music, and books,
though it is really Marianne who is taking the lead: “He ac-
quiesced in all her decisions, caught all her enthusiasm.”¹⁶
This little world of sentimental enjoyment is largely Mari-
anne’s creation. The withdrawal of Willoughby then subjects
Marianne to a long ordeal of misery in which there is nothing
for her to do but to remain passive. The story as a whole does

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