Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor’s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love—and its threatened loss—the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.

It’s been fourteen years since I last read ‘Sense and Sensibility’. This time it’s a Buddy Read so I’m hopiing to dive into it in a little more detail. I’ll be using this the Master Post to share my thoughts on each chapter as I read it. I’ll add the most recent chapter read to the top of the post, so the chapters appear in reverse order.

‘SENSE AND SENSIBILITY’ AS A TEACHING STORY – WHAT IS BEING TAUGHT?

This isn’t the jolly jaunt that ‘Northanger Abbey‘ was.

Jane Austen has a point to make in this book that I think she senses would be rejected if baldly stated, so she brings the reader to it slowly and indirectly. She evokes the reader’s empathy for two sisters, the younger one passionate in the fashionable Romantic way and the older one cautious and analytical, but both in the situation of being, unmarried gentlefolk, living in reduced circumstances and with few financial or social resources to call upon. 

It seems to me that this is a teaching story. The question is: What is it trying to teach?

It’s tempting, given the title, this is a story that teaches about the merits and risks of the older sister’s sense against the younger sister’s sensibility. That was the impression I had the first time I read this.

Now I think I missed the point. This is ‘Sense and Sensibility‘ not ‘Sense or Sensibility‘.

I think Jane Austen is teaching that the rules of society do not allow either sister a route to happiness that doesn’t depend on the beneficence of a man, which, in turn, is dependent on the maintenance of a good reputation.

Someone on GoodReads told me that they saw this novel as being about precarity. I had to look that up. I found that definitions vary. The word has only been around since 1910. Austen wouldn’t have known it, so I went with its etymology, which derives from the French use of précaire “granted or exercised only with the permission of another, insecure, uncertain”

It seems to me that Jane Austen is using ‘Sense and Sensibility‘ to show that the sisters live precarious lives, lives that are constantly at risk of getting worse and over which they have no control. That living in this precarious state doesn’t just deny them happiness, it pushes them towards anxiety and despair. Jane Austen was teaching the reader that the sisters live those lives not because of their sense or sensibility but because the rules of society force upon them uncertainty, vulnerability and dependence.

25%

I’m enjoying this more now. I’ve adjusted my expectations of the storytelling.

The plot moves as slowly as the lives of the characters, who regard visiting for a week as a short stay.

I like Eleanor, partly because she has, and knoes she has, such a limited talent for happiness. 

Willoughby is a qwaste of space and Edward is so repressed I wonder he can look into his own eyes as he shaves, lest he let an emotion reveal itsel

10%

I’ve swapped audiobooks from the Rosamund Pike version to the Juliet Stevenson and the improvement is substantial. 

Rosamund Pike seemed to pay no attention to the gap between the text and its intention and so ignored much of the gentle humour in the prose. Juliet Stevenson seems much more sensible of Jane Austen’s nuances. 

The book has gone from dull to amusing throungh nothimg more than a change in narrator.

5%

In 2011, I gave this three stars. This time I’m wondering if I shall make it to the end.  The start is so tedious: a lengthy discussion of finances followed by some pieces of dialogue that sound more like exchanges in a debate than conversation. 10

Im disappointed. Where is the lightness of touch, the talent for speach and the sense of fun that was in ‘Northanger Abbey‘?

Surely, the rest of the book cannot be as so dull as this?