18 - Sensibility and literary criticism

Summary

Nay, mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper! – but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke my heart had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility.

Thus, in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood criticizes the man who has been courting her sister. He lacks ‘sensibility’, a faculty of which the novel is famously suspicious, and this lack is shown in the way that he reads. ‘Sensibility’, in this example, is made explicitly a matter of literary discrimination and performance. When Marianne has her first conversation with Willoughby, she seems to be discovering a shared ‘sensibility’ in their shared tastes in reading:

her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before.

Austen's dry joke on the word ‘insensible’ only emphasizes the point: sensibility is regarded by these characters as best tested and displayed in the exercise of literary taste. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811 but begun in the late 1790s, shows sensibility to be a dangerous indulgence rather than a natural sensitivity, and satirizes the effusive professions of ‘taste’ supposed to mark that indulgence. Significantly, the most famous critic of sensibility chooses to identify it with a fashionable vocabulary of literary appreciation.