Sense and Sensibility (Broadview Literary Texts)

Austen’s work has of course enjoyed a renaissance of interest, but whereas for many years it was Pride and Prejudice and Emma that were almost exclusively taught, recent critical attention and course curricula have increasingly found room for Austen’s other work, including the delightful and witty Sense and Sensibility. The story revolves around two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Elinor is level-headed and self-controlled. Marianne is passionate and impulsive. When their father dies, his first son by a previous marriage takes possession of the family home against the father’s dying wishes. Elinor, Marianne and their mother remove to a cottage and each sister meets a man in whom she is interested. As with other Austen novels, requited love does not come easily, and many revelations and a trip to London are needed before a resolution can be found.

When Sense and Sensibility first appeared, the words of its title had enormous cultural weight: Austen was addressing–and also satirizing–notions of sensibility, the meaning of which, while akin to the current use of "sensitivity," was already a subject of debate. Sensibility had been considered the incorporation of reason and feeling, a virtue–according to many–that would lead people into correct and benevolent behavior and that marked them as intellectually and morally superior. However, by Austen’s day, there was already a concern about excessive sensibility, and most especially the effects of such excess on women. Sensibility had come to imply a susceptibility to illness, and untamed female sexuality (an association in part derived from The Memoirs of Emma Courtney in which Mary Hays’s heroine cultivates her feminine sensibility and offers herself sexually to the object of her affections). Indeed in Austen’s novels, characters of sensibility do not distinguish between bodily and mental sensation, leading Marianne to the questionable conclusion that she would be physically "sensible" of any improper action. More recently, critics have found the "sense" in Sense and Sensibility the more problematic term with the debate centering on whether Austen’s characterization of the self-controlled Elinor may have a satirical edge as well. James-Cavan addresses these questions and in the appendices, she includes materials from conduct books prescribing women’s behaviour.