Sense and Sensibility

"It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday this year, so I had to include an Austen novel. It was published in 1811, but she wrote it during the 1790s and probably started writing it when she was 18 or 19. The thing about Sense and Sensibility —and anyone who’s seen the Ang Lee film will also know this—is that it doesn’t read like a Jane Austen novel. It’s incredibly passionate and overwrought and full of intensity of feeling. It’s organized around two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Theoretically, Elinor is the more restrained one. She has ‘sense’—she’s the rational, reasonable one. Marianne is the overwrought, hyper-emotional one. But actually, when you read the novel, what you realize is they both have equally intense, tortured personal lives. It’s not light and bright like Pride and Prejudice: it’s quite a dark novel. It’s still very fun, and it’s got social satire, but the condition of the women in the novel is of suffering and anguish at the hands of men who treat both of them incredibly badly. They’re given happy endings, but the driving force of the story is female suffering and the intensity and difficulty of female feeling that can’t really be recognized by the worlds that they’re living in. It’s a beautiful novel. It has a depth and complexity to it that Pride and Prejudice also has, but as Jane Austen said of Pride and Prejudice , “it wants shade”. Sense and Sensibility has that shade and so to read it alongside Pride and Prejudice is an amazing experience. In many ways, they’re the same story: of two sisters who are almost prevented from marrying men that they love but it all comes right in the end. The Sense and Sensibility version of it is very melancholic, with disaster hovering right there, and the Pride and Prejudice version is much more joyful and playful and Bridget Jones-like. Austen drafted them both in the 1790s and then went through a period of huge turbulence when her family had to leave their house in Steventon, in Hampshire. After her father died, she had a period that’s been described as “genteel homelessness” for about 10 years. Then her brother, Edward Austen Knight, who’d been adopted by a wealthy family, gave her Chawton House, which is where they lived for the rest of her life. So Sense and Sensibility also tracks a period of huge precarity and anxiety in Austen’s life. It’s a stunning read. I highly, highly recommend it. Yes, that’s an important point to make. They read like modern novels, and the characters feel modern. Belinda and Sense and Sensibility are the ones to start with, I would say. They’re a lot of fun. One final pitch for 18th-century novels: if you’re serious about reading and you read through these five, you will see the novel’s evolution. There’s nothing in the modern novel—or even the post-modern novel—that isn’t in these early examples of the form. Writers obviously realized fairly early on that this play between the novel’s ability to get inside the mind and also stay outside it was crucial. The juxtaposition in early novels is about isolation and togetherness or community being in constant tension. I’d make the case that’s still what most novels are about today."

"Sense and Sensibility is a different kind of choice from the others. I wouldn’t say that I loved it the best. I wouldn’t even say that I loved it as much as I loved Northanger Abbey , which I didn’t put on the list. But I’m fascinated by it, because it has changed shape over the years for me as I reread it. I am currently writing a book about rereading, so I’m thinking a lot about what happens when you reread things. I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th-century novels that I’ve read. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels. In the first place, because of the very real sense of financial danger which hovers around the characters, or at least the characters one likes. There is nothing like it elsewhere in any Jane Austen books (except the family of origin of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park , which is even more horrifying, I suppose). But thinking of the marriages at the end, there’s been a lot been written about Marianne’s marriage to a much older man, an anti-romantic marriage. But Elinor’s marriage is also not very attractive. Edward, unlike any of the male protagonists of the other Jane Austen books, appears to be a seriously depressed man. He’s a mama’s boy, he has never accomplished anything in his life and there is no sense of his having a vocation as a minister – that just seems to be what he ends up doing. One can’t anticipate a very cheery life for Elinor and Edward. As for Colonel Brandon, he is, to my mind at least, a very attractive figure. But he is certainly not the figure that Marianne would dream of and it seems as though she has willed herself to accept him, rather than accepted him out of real feeling. It’s true that Austen says that Marianne learned to love him. But, still, it isn’t a very cheery marriage. In all of the Jane Austen novels except Pride and Prejudice , at the end Austen gives you some suggestion of difficulties coming in the marriage. Usually that’s fairly light-hearted. But it’s not light-hearted in Sense and Sensibility . It seems to be a dark novel masquerading as a light novel, and I find that very interesting."

"Really to make the point that many of the greatest moral thinkers are not philosophers, but novelists. Alasdair MacIntyre, one of my other choices, describes Austen as “the last classical moralist”, and I think Sense and Sensibility bears that out. There are two central characters, sisters, and they’re both in love with men who may or may not reciprocate. But whereas Marianne, who represents sensibility, reveals her love and is then snubbed and humiliated by the worthless Willoughby, Eleanor is much more discreet and after many twists and turns she finally marries her man. Jane Austen’s purpose is to illustrate this very Aristotelian virtue of prudence: that you’ve got to look out for your interests, you mustn’t just give in to passion. Passion must be guided by reason, which goes against the grain of the way we think about it today. But Jane Austen is saying that passion that is rational and controlled is no less deep than passion that’s uncontrolled: in fact it may be deeper. This might sound cold or austere, but I think it’s right."