Sense and Sensibility

1811, 1983 Bantam Classic edition
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
Bought new (but a few years after '83) for $3.95
Tattered paperback
B+

I reread Jane Austen every year or two, since she's my favorite writer.  This isn't my favorite book of hers, but it's an impressive first published work.  It has the romance and drama of 18th-century works but with more realistic dialogue and events.  It also has Austen's dry humour, as seen in Elinor's remark to Marianne about dry leaves, as well as the narrator's ironic praise of Lucy's "unceasing attention to self-interest."  It isn't a perfect book, and in fact I think the 1995 Emma Thompson script improves on it in three significant ways:  fleshing out Margaret's character, omitting Edward's first visit to the cottage (so that it's more dramatic when he visits Elinor in London), and reducing the amount of Marianne's mope-time in London.  On the other hand, we do lose such delightfully self-centred characters as Lady Middleton and the elder Miss Steele.  The small children are also omitted, and some of Elinor and/or the narrator's sarcastic observations are thus lost, too.

The worst omission, which apparently it frustrated Thompson and producer Lindsay Doran to have to let go, is of course Willoughby's reappearance, just after Marianne has passed the crisis point of her illness.  In the next book, Mrs. Bennet will claim that "people do not die of little trifling colds," but this wasn't necessarily true in the early 19th century.  Marianne has been neglecting her health since her rejection by Willoughby, and wandering in the rain could actually be fatal at this point.  Then Willoughby shows up and tells a story of his "suffering," which generally reasonable Elinor accepts at face value.  At the end of Mansfield Park, the narrator drily points out the difference between how men and women were punished in her society for missteps.  Here, Marianne is guilty mainly of an adolescent's innocent embrace of the cult of sensibility (in the sense of celebrating your feelings, with "sense" matching the modern meaning of "sensible").  Ironically, she's also been too insensitive, to other people, which she repents of.  In any case, she's done no permanent damage.  Willoughby, however, has not only seduced and abandoned 17-year-old Eliza Williams, but he jilts 17-year-old Marianne in order to marry an heiress he dislikes.

"But that he was forever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or 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."

Marianne does find her happy ending as well, with a man she originally (and with reason) found too old and sombre for her.  As a modern 43-year-old woman, it is weird for me to see a 35-year-old man treated as an elderly invalid, but this was meant to be ironic even at the time.  When I first read this book in my early 20s, it was equally strange to see a hypothetical 27-year-old spoken of as a spinster, and I hadn't yet read Persuasion.  (Austen was 35 when S & S  was published.)  The age difference is odd, although it wouldn't stand out in, say, Tolstoy.  More importantly though, Marianne and Col. Brandon are very different, and it doesn't feel like opposites attract for her.  There is a slight aftertaste of her friends and family having pressured her into marrying him, even if she does end up whole-heartedly loving him.  In any case, the Marianne/Brandon romance is the main reason why I can't give this story a higher grade.  It's also a less quotable and insightful book than its successor.

I haven't said much about Elinor, who in some ways is more the main character than Marianne.  This neglect is appropriate since Elinor represses her feelings so much that even her own mother thinks much more about Marianne.  As readers, we're shown what Elinor's hiding from the world, but we still don't fully participate in her emotions.  The tone is too offputting.  I like Elinor-- and, yes, Emma Thompson's performance helps, never mind if she was too old (as if Alan Rickman wasn't!)-- but I don't love her or Marianne as I love some of the other Austen heroines.  I find Catherine of the Bower, or even Lady Susan, more intriguing, and just about all of the later Austen protagonists engage me more.  Still, I do like the sisterly dynamic here, the ways that the "title characters" play off each other.



Whew, only 200 years to go!