4 - Sense and Sensibility

Summary

To excite or moderate passions

The picture of Isabella in Northanger Abbey portrayed sensibility as a cultural fad that allowed manipulative and morally trivial people to appropriate a rhetoric of feeling so as to further their own selfish schemes. But in Sense and Sensibility, a novel conceived earlier, Austen chose as one of two heroines a genuine young woman whose inner thought processes and perceptions of the exterior world were thoroughly permeated and shaped by sentimental language and its moral values.

As a result of its long gestation, when published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility struck novel-readers as displaying a ‘want of newness’. It seemed to belong to its moment of conception rather than to its time of publication during the Regency. Echoing such schematic works as Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796), its title of contrasting abstractions evoked the anxious dualities of the 1790s, reason and feeling, liberty and slavery, revolution and restraint. Its two heroines recalled pairs of contrasting girls from the period, in Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) and Jane West's A Gossip's Story (1796), the latter opposing the lovely, romantic, and indulged Marianne to the sensible and reserved Louisa. The revisions that transformed the epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into the third-person Sense and Sensibility were no doubt considerable but apparently had not tampered with the basic structure.