The Austen re-read commences, while Helena Kelly’s book is fresh in my mind. And hoo boy does it benefit from close reading.
I’m already predisposed to read Jane Austen politically, and I’m already inclined to claim Sense and Sensibility is Austen venting her spleen at the English inheritance law instead of a swoony romance. But reading the book for what it is instead of what we expect to see, thanks to a dozen soft-focus adaptations, produces a very different story from Hugh Grant mumbling charmingly while Emma Thompson weeps with joy, happy ever after.1
Economics and primogeniture fill the page much more than affection and romance. Not a single marriage in the book is written as if it’s a desirable state. In true Austen fashion, what the story tells us is painfully different than what it shows.
It’s a book of hearsay and projection, a novel-length game of telephone half a century before the telephone was invented. Rarely do two characters inhabit the same reality. Highlighting every occurrence of imagine or fancy or assume or conjecture or believe means every page was bleeding ink. (This feels absolutely intentional; even in Pride and Prejudice, where the premise is mistaken impressions, these words are used much less often.)
Even Austen’s infamous narrative voice is used to cunning effect: the supposedly omniscient narrator, instead of zooming out to provide a clearer picture, repeatedly and intentionally zooms in on one person’s grossly mistaken perspective, to obscure the picture further. Mrs. Jennings eavesdrops and is convinced Elinor and Colonel Brandon are on the cusp of matrimony; Elinor has no more sense though, she’s done the same to Marianne, and even her tendre for Edward has been pulled out of the same thin air. (Elinor, far from being uniquely sensible, is fooled nearly as often as the others, in ways that make Emma Woodhouse look downright astute.)
There’s a fascinating layer to all of this, where we as readers, centuries removed from the original context, have done the same. If we expect to see Willoughby the scoundrel and Edward the hero, we dismiss the parallels between them and fail to see the similarities in their actions. If we read it as a romance, our mind’s eye filling in Colonel Brandon as the lovely Alan Rickman, then we overlook all the discrepancies and uncomfortable hints in the text that Austen’s initial audience would know. (Avignon; the criminality of the East India Company; enriching himself on the family fortune at the expense of his female relatives, etc.)
What’s not there tells the story. Austen does so much sleight of hand that genre writers, horror and SFF alike, could take a page from her book on how to destabilize a narrative and make it unsettling as fuck. (Then again, the effect has arguably been missed by generations of readers, so perhaps it’s too subtle.) (Then again again, readers of those genres would be way more attuned to those vibes than those expecting straight romance? Maybe that’s why it seems incredibly clear to me??? I dunno, interesting to think about.)
If Mary Shelley invented science fiction, then I’m entertaining bold claims of Austen’s own genre inventions, is what I’m saying.
But it’s the elder Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, who is the necessary touchstone. Themes resonate, often loudly, with Austen using parallel phrases as well. Helena Kelly delves into it further, but here are a few relevant quotes from her chapter on Sense and Sensibility:
Jane wasn’t alone in questioning the fundamental fairness of primogeniture. The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft did it too, in her 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, asserting that “children of the same parents” have “an equal right.” The passage in which she makes this claim is worth looking at more closely.
Wollstonecraft begins by talking about the common opposition between male “reason” and female “sensibility,” before moving on to discuss how women are persuaded—or coerced—into devoting themselves to “the duties of a mother and the mistress of a family.”
For Wollstonecraft, it’s clear that the current system of inheritance erodes instincts of fairness and generosity, that it warps the very idea of family and natural affection. In a society like this, even sensibility, fine feeling, a sense of connection to others, can only ever operate bluntly, selfishly, and with an eye to the main chance. And the sexual responsiveness that (most) men are looking for in women? Well, that becomes something to be exchanged, too.
Re-reading with that in mind, those themes recur everywhere, as if it’s Wollstonecraft’s treatise in fictional form.
The Dashwood women are evicted from the only place they’re told they belong: their home. Their father and brother each fail them. By the end of the novel, their husbands are poised to do the same.2 This pattern repeats with each family, the Ferrars, the Brandons, even the Middletons. Families and relationships are warped along the fault lines of greed and survival, and the laws and etiquette that society dictates as moral.
And at the center of that is the transaction of matrimony. Like I said before, Austen is not writing about marriage like someone who ever desires to partake in one. Missing is the meeting of like minds we see in Pride and Prejudice, the genuine warmth, affection, and respect, acting with the other’s best interests at heart. Colonel Brandon views Marianne as an object, a interchangeable replacement for his failed youthful infatuation. Edward is repeatedly as cruel and selfish to Elinor as he is to Lucy Steele. I started underlining each instance of the Dashwood women declaring their happiness, their luck, their good fortune. It happens at all the lowest points of the novel—when they’re exiled to Barton Park, when Elinor’s heart is broken by Edward, when Marianne’s heart is broken by Willoughby. It’s emphasized so clearly and repeatedly in contrast to their true feelings that it starts to read as a kind of manic denial on par with the this is fine meme, a Panglossian toxic positivity that no matter what, this is the best of all possible worlds.
When the same thing happens at the end, the same insistence of happiness as its “happy” couples pair off—although, notably, it’s Mrs. Jennings declaring Elinor and Edward the happiest couple in the world, another warp of the text—it’s been false so many times that instead of indicating to the reader that it’s finally true, it feels unsettling, even foreboding.
Because the truth of it is… Edward doesn’t know Elinor any more than he knew Lucy, or Willoughby knew Marianne. Colonel Brandon, notably, knows Marianne even less—he doesn’t even have one conversation with her on the page. Repeatedly, each person only sees what they want to see, in love with a fancy in their minds. Nothing in the text indicates they aren’t repeating the same mistakes. In fact, it seems to be the point—polite society prevents any other possibility. There’s no real truth or intimacy possible when propriety takes precedence. When a few social calls before marriage is the best one can hope for, and fortune the primary goal, of course all the marriages are disastrously matched. (John and Fanny Dashwood get the best of it: they’re well-matched because they’re equally cruel and vain.)
Elinor’s marriage makes Edward happy.3 Marianne’s marriage (of convenience) makes Colonel Brandon happy. (It’s mentioned upwards of three times, including on the last page, how she is his “reward” for suffering; a rightful compensation; a transaction; all the others, even Elinor, see it this way.) Elinor and Marianne have… each other. The last paragraph dwells on their closeness, the necessary support they will give each other for the rest of their lives.
Throughout the ending, as elsewhere, the text is pecuniary, often downright mercenary. After “the lovers” reunite—again, the word lovers is placed in other people’s mouths instead of their own, or an objective narrator—less ink is spent on their feelings than the strategy by which they must secure a living. With that focus, Austen seems to be asking, this is the institution that undergirds our civil society? And proceeds to make a farce of it all.
I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to keep the Ang Lee version, optimistic and lovely, and practically a whole-cloth invention. I believe I’ll keep it myself, but on a different shelf from what Jane Austen actually wrote.
Sense and Sensibility in context ⚭
Since this was a re-read after Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, I’m going to put my relevant highlights from that book here.
In Britain, in the early nineteenth century, land was everything. If you wanted to sit on a jury, to serve as a magistrate, to vote in elections, to hunt, it was the ownership of land over a certain value that qualified you to do it. Without land, you were nothing, certainly not a fully functioning member of society. Add a desire to mimic the behavior of the aristocracy, and, on top of that, the fact that a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s when she married, unless complex legal documents were drawn up first, and it starts to become apparent why family estates were almost always left to eldest sons. Where land was power and influence, only a fool would choose to squander that influence or to see it pass into another family altogether.
There are countries where it’s impossible to disinherit any of your children. In eighteenth-century England, the state was waiting to do it for you. Primogeniture amounted almost to a fetish, and firstborn sons were very nearly sacred.
On the real life parallels to Jane’s experience:
No effort was made to provide the Austen girls with even the smallest of independent dowries. Cassandra inherited a little money on the death of her fiancé, enough that she would always be just about able to support herself. She’d been lucky to find a man who was willing to marry her, when she had nothing to bring to the table.
Jane was penniless. Her father might have loved her, but at his death he left her nothing at all, and even before he died, he’d made her homeless.
Nowhere in her surviving letters is Jane openly critical of her father or of her brothers. But in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice she permits herself to write about the carelessness, and thoughtlessness, of men who do nothing to provide for their female dependents, and to touch on female financial anxiety and the psychological pressures of being beholden to more fortunate relations.
This is the first instance of a sibling pattern that we see repeated over and over again in the novel—a pattern of two brothers and a sister. It’s so neat a way of examining the question of inheritance that it looks very much as if it must be design.
The opening chapter is bewildering because the concept it describes is. Jane is making explicit a deeply held (and deeply inconsistent) cultural belief—that women, the very people who are supposed to spend their life at home, in the bosom of their families, don’t really belong there. Whatever the domestic contribution of the Dashwood women—the “solid comfort” and “cheerfulness” they have provided, the “attention” they have given—it’s worth nothing at all; its “value” can easily be outweighed, ignored, dismissed. Behind Elinor and Marianne and Margaret and their mother are a whole imaginary army of others, generations of them, a disinherited multitude of Dashwoods both male and female.
Wollstonecraft was subjected to a vicious character assassination after her death in 1797. Even before her death, her illicit relationship with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin had put her firmly in the sights of conservative thinkers. If Sense and Sensibility is a work of the 1790s or very early nineteenth century, then it looks as if it were written as a deliberately and self-consciously feminist one. By 1811, of course, that effect would have been muted for a fair portion of readers who were less familiar with Wollstonecraft.
What we can say is that Sense and Sensibility, even in 1811, would have been read as a novel about property and inheritance—about greed and need and the terrible, selfish things that families do to each other for the sake of money.
Lucy Steele—later Ferrars and so doubly metallic—is thrice described as “sharp.” Characters “cut” their acquaintances, refuse to acknowledge that they are acquainted, a word that doesn’t appear in this context in Jane’s other novels.
Jane is less interested in psychological plausibility here, I think, than in resolving the plot: Robert’s sudden acquisition of wealth and independence wins him the affections of Edward’s practical-minded betrothed, Lucy Steele, freeing Edward to marry Elinor. But it also shows how arbitrary and absurd it is to concentrate resources on any one child to the disadvantage of the others, how unnatural. Nearly every character in the novel is taken aback at Mrs. Ferrars’s decision to make Robert “to all intents and purposes…the eldest,” at “so unfair a division of his mother’s love and liberality”; there’s much talk of how unfortunate Edward is, of how unkind his family is being to him. This, though, is exactly what primogeniture always did: it’s a zero-sum game.
No reader who was familiar with Udolpho would have been surprised to discover that Willoughby is a weak-willed, sexually inconstant gambler who gets himself into debt; the difference between him and Valancourt is that Jane doesn’t subscribe to the comforting notion that a sinner can be reformed by love—or that he ought to be.
Happy endings, truly happy ones, are in short supply in this novel.
This isn’t enough to marry on. Mrs. Dashwood is in no position to advance them any money; the only way for them to marry is for Edward to appeal to his mother. She, grudgingly, gives him £10,000, the same sum “which had been given with Fanny.” Edward isn’t just made into a younger son; he’s made into a daughter.
Still, thanks to Edward’s mother, he and Elinor will have an extra £500 a year, making £850 altogether. It’s a perfectly adequate income. But it falls short of the “wealth” without which “every kind of external comfort must be wanting.” They’ll be able to afford servants, perhaps a carriage, but they will struggle to send their sons to school or university, to set them up in careers. They’re unlikely to be able to provide dowries for any daughters, certainly not extensive ones. And as a vicar, Edward will have no home to leave to his wife and children—just like Jane’s own father.
It’s a tendency Edward shares with Willoughby, this ability to always find someone to blame. It’s not the only similarity between the two characters, in spite of their apparent positioning as opposites.
Both encourage one of the Dashwood sisters to believe that they are interested in marrying them, and Jane makes a point of showing us that it isn’t just Marianne and Elinor who are misled but almost everyone who observes the two couples together. It’s arguable as to which man behaves worse in this regard. Whatever Willoughby intended at the beginning, there was a period when, he says, “I felt my intentions were strictly honourable.” Edward knows, right up until nearly the end of the novel, that he’s engaged to another woman. He’s not in a position to have proper intentions toward Elinor. Both men indulge their own vanity, and their own feelings, without much regard for the women they claim to love.
Willoughby and Edward are deceivers, capable of lying to mothers, lovers, sisters. All the way through the novel, a careful reader can see that Jane suggests reserving judgment about people. Someone may seem or appear a certain way; what they really are is harder to ascertain. Almost every page reveals sentences that, on a second reading, hesitate, equivocate.
Over the course of Sense and Sensibility, readers learn enough about Edward to doubt his sense, and perhaps his goodness too; we realize that it’s more than just “shyness” concealing his “understanding and principles.”
There are far more secrets in Sense and Sensibility than in any of Jane’s other novels. There are also confessions, and the person who receives nearly all of them is Elinor. The contortions Jane has to go through in order to make this happen suggest that it’s important, perhaps because we’re meant to be holding this pronouncement of hers in mind. What people “say of themselves” shouldn’t be used as a guide “without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”
Jane puts three male romantic interests into the novel. Given that two of them spend large portions of time lying, and conceal dark secrets in their romantic and sexual pasts, we’re well within our rights to ask a few hard questions about Colonel Brandon.
The age difference wouldn’t have been as troubling for Jane’s first readers as it is for us, however. What they were much more likely to be troubled by is the colonel’s connection with India.
The East India Company essentially gained Britain a vast imperial holding on the cheap. But public opinion was hostile. British men who returned home, having gained fortunes in India, were referred to, scornfully, as “nabobs,” a corruption of the Urdu nawab. The company’s rule was seen as corrupt and corrupting, even criminal.
But whatever Jane’s family connections and family loyalties might have been, she can hardly have avoided knowing that for the majority of her readers a reference to India would have been a black mark, a reminder of corruption, of avarice. Brandon is tainted by association. She could easily have avoided it, either by not mentioning where Brandon had been or by replacing the “East Indies” with somewhere like Canada. She doesn’t.
If one sets aside the insistent egoism apparent in the colonel’s story (just look at all the instances of “I” and “my” in it), it never seems to enter his head that perhaps he ought to be saving up as much money as he can to give to his ward—to replace, in some measure, the fortune that was effectively stolen from her mother and used to prop up the estate.
We can’t be certain, but there’s room for doubt—doubt about Colonel Brandon’s morals, his motivations. Doubt, ultimately, about whether Marianne can ever really be happy with a man who, if he doesn’t quite steal the bread out of the mouths of his daughter and granddaughter, is happy to enrich himself from the fortune that, morally, ought to belong to his female relations.
We’re never shown the two in conversation together. The one time we see Marianne actually address a comment to the colonel, he doesn’t reply. Even toward the end of the novel, there are no more than a couple of indirect references to their exchanging very basic courtesies.
For Wollstonecraft, it was self-evident that sensibility, in exciting women’s feelings, particularly their sexual feelings, would be a lifelong burden. As she says, “A husband cannot long pay those attentions with the passion necessary to excite lively emotions, and the heart, accustomed to lively emotions, turns to a new lover, or pines in secret, the prey of virtue or prudence.”
In the world of Sense and Sensibility love and family, honor and duty, have hardly any meaning. Promises are made to be broken. Women are exiled from their homes. Guardians don’t guard. Brothers ignore their sisters, mothers disinherit their sons, fathers fail to safeguard their daughters.
Actually the men were fairly easy to see anew; I had the hardest time not picturing Marianne as Kate Winslet, followed by Elinor as Emma Thompson. Which makes an enormous difference, given that Winslet was 20 and Thompson 36 when the Ang Lee adaptation was filmed. It’s bullshit that the glorious creature that is Emma Thompson got backlash for daring to play the leading lady at that age, but the fact is—that changes the story dramatically. Age is repeatedly stressed throughout the book. Elinor is bearing all of this burden, and is frequently as wrong-headed as the others, at nineteen. Marianne is barely seventeen when the book starts, barely nineteen in the footnote that’s supposed to count as her happy ending. They’re young women thrown to the wolves, impoverished by their own father, and the mature, even-tempered Thompson doesn’t quite convey those stakes. ↩︎
For instance, as a vicar, Edward will have no home to leave to his wife and children—just like Jane’s own father. ↩︎
Crucially, when Edward confesses and proposes, we get… none of that scene, just a paragraph focused on Edward, Edward, Edward—after multiple pages and chapters of exposing Willoughby as self-centered and foolish, Edward looks so self-centered and foolish that Willoughby nearly looks good by comparison. ↩︎