Sense and Sensibility

In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, Sense and Sensibility is the answer to those critics and readers who believe that Jane Austen’s novels, despite their perfection of form and tone, lack strong feeling. Its two heroines–so utterly unlike each other–both undergo the most violent passions when they are separated from the men they love.

What differentiates them, and gives this extraordinary book its complexity and brilliance, is the way each expresses her suffering: Marianne–young, impetuous, ardent–falls into paroxysms of grief when she is rejected by the dashing John Willoughby; while her sister, Elinor–wiser, more sensible, more self-controlled–masks her despair when it appears that Edward Ferrars is to marry the mean-spirited and cunning Lucy Steele.

All, of course, ends happily–but not until Elinor’s “sense” and Marianne’s “sensibility” have equally worked to reveal the profound emotional life that runs beneath the surface of Jane Austen’s immaculate and irresistible art.

“[Sense and Sensibility] is a subtler and a more searching novel than [its critics’] blunt instruments of perception have been capable of registering, because it deals not with the categories of romantic philosophy but with the transformation of those categories into ways of feeling and behaving. It explores the unsettling romantic alteration of the internal life.” –from the Introduction by Peter Conrad