Sense and Sensibility

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS ' S* EN\\SIBILITY SENSE AND JANE AUSTEN was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. The Austens were cultured but not at all rich, though one of Austen's brothers was adopted by a wealthy relative. Other brothers followed profes- sional careers in the church, the Navy, and banking. With the excep- tion of two brief periods away at school, Austen and her elder sister Cassandra, her closest friend and confidante, were educated at home. Austen's earliest surviving work, written at Steventon whilst still in her teens, is dedicated to her family and close female friends. Between 1801 and 1809, her least productive period, Austen lived in Bath, where her father died in 1805, and in Southampton. In 1809, she moved with her mother, Cassandra, and their great friend Martha Lloyd to Chawton, Hampshire, her home until her death at Winchester in 1817. During this time, Austen published four of her major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield Park (1814); and Emma (1816), visiting London regularly to oversee their publication. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818. JAMES KINSLEY was Professor of English Studies at the University of Nottingham until his death in 1984. He was General Editor of the Oxford English Novels series and edited The Oxford Book of Ballads. MARGARET ANNE DOODY is the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has edited Austen's Catharine and Other Writings for Oxford World's Classics and is the author of The True Story of the Novel (1996). CLAIRE LAMONT is Professor of English Romantic Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She has written widely on Jane Austen and Walter Scott and has edited Scott's The Heart of Midlothian and Waverley for Oxford World's Classics. VIVIEN JONES is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has edited Pride and Prejudice for Penguin Classics, and Frances Burney's Evelina for Oxford World's Classics, and is the General Editor of Jane Austen's novels in Oxford World's Classics.

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics have brought readers closer to the world's great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,ooo-y ear-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century's greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS JANE AUSTEN Sense and Sensibility Edited by JAMES KINSLEY With an Introduction by MARGARET ANNE DOODY Notes by CLAIRE LAMONT OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6op Oxford University Press is a department of the Universityof Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Sataam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi SSo Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction © Magaret Anne Doody 1990 Notes © Claire Lament 2004 Select Bibliography, Chronology, and Appendices © Vivien Jones 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World's Classics paperback 1980 Reissued as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 1998 New edition 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978-^-19-2804785 ISBN 0-19-280478-2 4 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

CONTENTS vii xl Introduction xli Note on the Text xlvi Select Bibliography A Chronology of Jane Austen 3 103 SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 193 Volume I Volume II 290 Volume III 295 299 Appendix A: Rank and Social Status 301 Appendix B: Dancing Textual Notes Explanatory Notes

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION The novel that we know as Sense and Sensibility had, according to tradition in the Austen family, a precursor in a work of Jane Austen's youth, an epistolary novel entitled 'Elinor and Marianne'. This work would have been written in the 17905, about the time in which the author produced 'First Impressions', later to be reworked into Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen revised the novel in 1809 and 1810, and it was published at last in iSu.1 Sense and Sensibility was the first of the early 'Steventon' novels to be written at Chawton, and the first of Austen's novels to enter the light of public day. (An earlier attempt to publish 'Susan' (evidently the ur-text of N'onhanger Abbey) in 1803 had come to nothing, and the family were obliged to buy back the manuscript in 1816.) Austen worked diligently at revising her new novel for the press. As she joked to her sister Cassandra, 'I am never too busy to think of Sense and Sensibility. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child; and am much obliged to you for your enquiries.'2 The novel fared moderately well, netting its author the sum of £140. It received two approbatory reviews, one in the Critical Review and one in the British Critic. The British Critic assured 'our female friends' that they could read the volumes 'with real benefits, for they may learn . . . many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life'. The reviewers do not comment on Austen's ' Primary information about Jane Austen's writing comes from James Austen- Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen (first published 1870, rev. 1871; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926; repr. 1951); see also B. C. Southam's Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). There is some evidence that Austen first revised 'Elinor and Marianne' in 1797 and then again in the early years of the new century, before it went into the final revisions of 1809-10. Jocelyn Harris argues that Austen was freshly influenced by Samuel Richardson in the early years of the new century, her interest in this author refreshed by the publication of his Correspondence, edited by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in 1804. She notes too that 'In 1801 the fourteenth edition of Pamela revealed for the first time that Mr B. inhabits Brandon Hall,' and posits that edition as the source of Colonel Brandon's name. See Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen's Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chs. 2 and 3, pp. 34-83. Harris works out elaborate and detailed comparisons to Richardson's novels, believing that Sense and Sensibility represents in some respects a rewriting of Richard- son's major works. 2 Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra, in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman (2nd edn., London: Oxford University Press, 1952; repr. 1979), 272-3.

viii Introduction use of irony, nor do they note that a distinctive genius has entered the literary scene. The novel is treated as offering a simple and satisfactory moral, in representing 'the effects on the conduct of life, of discreet quiet good sense on the one hand, and an overrefined and excessive susceptibility on the other'.3 This is a temptingly easy way in which to read the novel, but we may doubt if such simplicities offer a full or just description of the work. The opening of Sense and Sensibility is one of the most ironic of Jane Austen's notably telling first sentences. 'The family of Dash- wood had been long settled in Sussex' (p. 3).4 The sense of the word 'family' here is a traditional conservative and expansive sense: the family consists of members of a landowning tribe (possessing a cer- tain income and property); as its property is held from generation to generation, going from one male heir to another, the family consists of many generations, each headed by its male property holder. The term stands for continuity. Thus the family could be 'long settled', even if individual members wax and wane; as the next sentence explains: 'for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner'. The 'they' here refers to the many generations, undifferen- tiated; 'they' come and go and are replaced in an order only perfectly available to those who live 'in the centre of their property', that is upon their landed estate, as the Dashwoods hold Norland Park. This is a 'family' that is indeed 'settled', its settlement depending upon unswerving conformity to the rules of properted behaviour. But, of course, the Dashwood 'family' that we come to know is unorthodox, differentiated, and outcast. This Dashwood family, the one that holds centre stage in the novel, is a group of women: a mother and three daughters. They have thus no claim to the real property, the real estate of Norland. That first paragraph of the novel continues to explain the condition of the 'family' in both senses of the word. The 'late owner', who is not named and to whom we can give no other title than 'the old Gentleman' (incidentally, a euphemism for the Devil), unintentionally sets up discord, chiefly by 3 Article in the British Critic (May 1812), 527, as reproduced in Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); 288. 4 This first sentence is tellingly quoted in the film version of Harvey, though it is not in the text of Mary Ellen Chase's original play of 1944; James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd starts reading Sense and Sensibility to his invisible rabbit companion. Elwood P. Dowd is a man of sensibility trying to escape the confines of dull respectabilityand settlement: he is in the sense-and-sensibility fix, between conformity and revolt.

Introduction ix his failure to marry and produce an heir. He lived with his sister, a comfortable but unorthodox mode of proceeding; he was not in want of a wife. At her death, he summons his nephew, Henry Dashwood. Henry is not only the 'legal inheritor' of the estate, should the old Gentleman die intestate; he is also the 'person to whom he intended to bequeath it' (p. 3, italics mine).5 The old Gentleman has an explicit choice in the disposition of his property. Henry has not made his uncle's mistake of not marrying; instead he has married twice. By his first marriage he had a son. Widowed, he married again and produced three daughters. The old Gentleman remains true to trad- ition, and to his sense of duty to the idea of 'family', in bequeathing his estate (lands and money) so that it is secured to Mr Henry Dashwood's eldest son, and to that son's infant boy. Henry Dash- wood has possession of the estate and its income only for his own lifetime. He himself is not 'long settled', for he dies within a year, and his three daughters and his wife have no home. Jane Austen is very interested in the condition of females who are subjected to the loss of home. As a clergyman's daughter, she knew that her home depended only on her father's life; once he died, the Rectory would go to another incumbent, and, as his income was the chief financial resource, she and her mother and sister would be dependent on the generosity of her brothers. Austen's novel The Watsons, left unfinished probably because she could not bear to con- tinue it after her father's death in 1805, deals directly with these conditions in a clerical family. Her characters who are daughters of clergymen (like Catherine Morland) or who marry clergymen (Catherine, Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price) have no permanent home and will not be able to bequeath an estate to their children. But is is not only the daughters of clerics who are confronted by the prospect of being turned out of their home. Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters are living on an estate entailed on the male heir; as soon as their father dies they will be obliged to leave their home to the new 5 In the first edition Jane Austen emphasized the element of choice in the disposition of Norland in pointing out that the 'old Gentleman' in his will made no provision for his nephew's 'female issue' by any 'division of the estate'. Chapman conjectured that her brother Henry told Jane Austen that an estate could not be divided, and she therefore changed the line to read 'charge on the estate'. See note to p. 4. But the first version reflects Jane Austen's understandable belief that an estate not legally entailed could and should be subject to division on the judgement of a present owner who acknowledges a duty to provide for his family, males and females alike.

x Introduction owner, Mr Collins. It is thus an irony that the estate is called 'Long- bourne' (as in 'long border' or 'long destination'), for it is not the long bourne of the Bennet women; they cannot settle. So is the Dashwood estate 'Norland', because that is what it gives its daugh- ters—no land. Austen, however fond she was of her brothers, was fully aware, as her novels show, of the dangers and difficulties inherent in relying on the kindness of male relatives. According to the prevailing conserva- tive ethos, good women would want for nothing, and, as long as the family is kept sacred, men will respond to their duties as to a sacred trust. Claudia Johnson, in her excellent book Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, points out how sharply if subtly Austen dis- plays the absurdities and dangers of the myth of family as it affects women.6 John Dashwood has no inconvenient capacity for regarding the sacred. A dying father's request ought to be considered a solemn obligation, and any promise made to a dying father should have the status of a vow.John Dashwood has no sensibility to keep him up to this high-flown conservative mark; his conservatism consists in a desire to keep tight hold on his goods. Throughout the novel the Dashwood women fare better from the kindness of strangers. John Dashwood, 'cold hearted and selfish', is encouraged by his even 'more narrow-minded and selfish' wife to prefer his own child's interest, and to do in effect nothing at all for his sisters. The dialogue between this couple in the second chapter of the book is a satiric study of avarice, as John is moved from his first plan of offering the girls £1,000 each, through various stages to the point where he can be satisfied with the idea of sending the widow and her daughters occa- sional 'presents offish and game, and so forth' (p. 10). Unlike poor Mrs Bennet, who can never be got to understand the nature of an entail (not feeling that the law can be so unjust to women as to keep all real property away from them), Mrs John Dashwood understands very well the nature of inherited property and the value of the sys- tem of primogeniture for her little son. She tries to have Norland treated as if it were a traditional entailed estate (although it is not), 6 See e.g. her argument that 'if conservative novelists held that the patriarchial family regulated and improved the passions, in Sense and Sensibility the family tends to be the focus of venal and idle habits. When we read the novel exclusively as a discussion of female propriety . . . we overlook just how much material it devotes to the manners of men of family' (Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 55).

Introduction xi and she succeeds. Mrs John Dashwood is very careful to insinuate in her strong babble the point that the widow must find another place to live; she will approve John Dashwood's 'looking out a comfortable small house for them' (p. 10). Mrs John Dashwood treats the widow and her three girls as vis- itors who are expected to go. But they have nowhere to go. Fortu- nately, the widow's own relation offers her the use of Barton Cottage 'on very easy terms' (she does not get it absolutely rent-free, evi- dently). Barton Cottage is at a distance, 'in a county so far distant from Sussex as Devonshire', as the text reminds us at the end of Chapter IV (p. 18). Far from being 'long settled in Sussex', the family in which we are to place our interest—the family consisting of Mrs Dashwood, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret—is nomadic, and, in the main action of the story, is newly arrived in the West Country, far removed from the fat lawns of Sussex, a long way from the 'centre of their property'. They are exiled and can never return. Much discussion of the novel has centred upon the relative merits or demerits of its two leading female characters, Elinor and Mari- anne. But the novelist is concerned to establish that each of these young women exists in a particular situation. Those first chapters are not to be hurried over while we try to get to the 'love-story'. Elinor and Marianne are equally constricted and abused by an unjust prop- erty system. Both Elinor and Marianne (and their younger sister Margaret too) are taught by society the importance of a man to the comfort of a woman, not because men are good or lovable in them- selves but because they are the means to money and houses. In order to be moral beings, they must resist agreeing with what society so emphatically tells them. Lucy Steele is outrageously blatant in acknowledging the necessity of pursuing and catching a man in order to achieve material success. But everyone in Sense and Sens- ibility knows that that is the case. We readers too must acknowledge that readerly perceptions of the male characters—Edward Ferrars, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon—are tinged by our acquaintance with their income and the kind of houses they have at their disposal or in prospect. Given a social and financial system which is so systematically heartless in its treatment of women, and in which marriage must seem first of all important as a step towards material prosperity or its reverse, the question whether a young woman has 'sense' or

xii Introduction 'sensibility' itself becomes touched with irony. Too deep a sensibility would be so affronted by the whole arrangement that its possessor would turn against the world. Young women are repeatedly warned in the conduct books, as Alison Sulloway points out, not to indulge 'sensibility', although 'sensibility' is often urged as a good thing in male writings for males.7 'Sensibility' may be a feminine attribute in some respects, but it would be socially inconvenient for women to possess too much of it, for they would not then fit in with what was required of them or put up with what they had to endure. But 'sense' could be equally dangerous, if it led the sensible woman (notice how the two words coalesce in the word 'sensible') either to make strong antagonistic judgements of the world or to try cleverly to manipulate others to her advantage. 'Sensibility' leads to fantasy or withdrawal; 'sense' to satire or to machinations. All of these responses to life can be found among the Dashwood girls. It is, of course, very easy to take Elinor and Marianne as simple and exemplary characters—Elinor of a virtue, Marianne of a vice. The title teases us with an opposite: Sense vs. Sensibility. Yetthe two words are intimately related, philologically and philosophically. 'Sense' in expressions such as 'good sense' and 'common sense' is in some respects a metaphor, for 'sense' means basically sense- impressions, which Locke insists on as the first of the two grand means of human knowledge. According to Locke, everything we know or think comes either from sense-impression, or from our regard to the operations of our own minds. 'Sensibility', that teasing word which the eighteenth century could not do without, means, at one level, the capacity of discriminating sense-impressions. A refined sensibility sees and hears with finer discrimination, with more acute enjoyment or suffering. The eighteenth century made sensibility a sort of moral platform; to possess sensibility is to pos- sess the capacity of human sympathy, as well as the capacity for aesthetic responsiveness. 'Sensibility' valuably registers the interface between public self and private reaction. It is sensibility that allows one to guess at the internal processes of another's mind, and to bring help or sympa- thetic relief, just as it is one's own sensibility that reveals itself in blushes, tears, swoons, or other involuntary physical manifestations 7 Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 126-7.

Introduction xiii of emotion. The Enlightenment needed to think that the world was knowable, and the individual both predictable and uniquely valuable. We needed to reassure ourselves in the West—needed to reassure ourselves very deeply, perhaps—that the new world of changing structures and geographic and social mobility would be a humane and a safe world. We might all have to live a large part of our lives among strangers, far from where we were born; it was vital to that change in society (and to the enterprise of colonialism) that we be assured that strangers are like ourselves, that human beings (even of other races) are knowable and can be appealed to, can shed the sym- pathetic tear. The eighteenth century was nothing if not emotional. There were, however, many problems with applied sensibility. In Samuel Richard- son's Clarissa (1747-8), the heroine remarks of Lovelace that 'he wants a heart: And if he does, he wants everything'.8 But Lovelace, who knows the theatre of emotional display, is able to pretend to sensibility, to feign hiding his heart. If a practised deceiver like Love- lace can take in even the intelligent Clarissa, it is not very wonderful that an experienced man of the world like young Willoughby can muddle an inexperienced girl like Marianne. If 'sensibility' seems peculiarly 'feminine', so that any man assuming it is partly feminiz- ing himself, it poses particular dangers for women. Mary Woll- stonecraft had inveighed against the cultivation of sensibility in women, in the process outlining a scenario remarkably like the beginning of Austen's novel. Far from sensibility constituting a source of power and protection for a female, a delicate gentlewoman has no armour against the world: Girls who have been thus weakly educated are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision, and, of course, are dependentnot only on the reason, but the bounty of their brothers. These brothers are,to view the fairest side of the question,good sort of men, and give as a favour what children of the same parents had an equal right to. In this equivocal humiliating situation a docile female may remain some time with a toler- able degree of comfort. But when the brother marries . . . from being considered as the mistress of the family, she is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house and his newpartner. 8 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (yd edn., 6 vols., 1751), i. 274; Everyman edition (Dent/Dutton, 1962), i. 202.

xiv Introduction Who can recount the misery which many unfortunate beings, whose minds and bodies are equally weak, suffer in such situations—unable to work, and ashamed to beg? The wife, a cold-hearted, narrow-minded woman—and this is not an unfair supposition, for the present mode of education does not tend to enlarge the heart any more than the under- standing—is jealous of the little kindness which her husband shows to his relations; and her sensibility not rising to humanity, she is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister. . . . The consequence is obvious; the wife has recourse to cunning to undermine the habitual affection . . . and neither tears nor caresses are spared till the spy is worked out of her home, and thrown on the world . . . or sent, as a great effort of generosity . . . with a small stipend, and an uncultivated mind, into joyless solitude.9 Wollstonecraft might be describing Austen's John Dashwood, 'rather cold-hearted, and rather selfish', and his wife, 'more narrow- minded and selfish'. Neither Marianne nor Elinor has to endure the joylessness of solitude, and both possess cultivated minds, but that is their good fortune and has nothing to do with the care of the relatives who are so glad to send them into the wilder- ness. Austen and Wollstonecraft both see that delicate feminine sensibility as a mark of upper-class pretension may only mask serious economic disability, and can impede or even damage the female who cultivates it. Economically a cripple, but trained to focus her attention on the flutters of emotion, the young female of sensibility is also a prime target for seduction. For 'sensibility', the capacity for delicate rushes of emotion and enthusiasm, connects itself in the observer's mind with sexual 'sense'—the powerful 'sense' and 'sensibility' hovering behind Austen's pages. Marianne possesses sexual appetite and sensitivity, and she chooses the man she could prefer, blind to the social likelihood that a man in Willoughby's position might truly wish her for a sexual partner for a time, without wishing to marry her. Marianne is spared the trials of the seduced woman—the Elizas stand in for her, in undergoing those traumas. But her heart was seduced, and, in her ability ultimately to put that past episode behind her and to move on, 9 Mary Wollstonecraft, in 'Observations on the State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes', Ch. 4 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), I57-8-

Introduction xv Marianne is one of the strong-minded women presented by liberal or radical writers. Although Austen jokingly complained about the heroine of Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788) breaking off her engagement to the dashing, impetuous Frederic Delamere, and finding another love, she had obviously taken note of that circum- stance. And Smith was a predecessor of the female Jacobin novel- ists (Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays among them) who strongly argued a woman's right to find a second love. Austen does not go so far as to argue for the right of the woman already seduced or violated or sexually experienced to find the second love, but she is looking in that direction, and, in making Marianne bid farewell to a fantastic constancy, she is definitely joining in an argument about female sexuality. A complication of the novel is the amount of feeling Austen encourages the reader to have for Marianne. Marianne's name sig- nals some danger; it was the name used in revolutionary France at the time to signify a female figure of liberty, in deliberate replace- ment of the Virgin Mary; this fact probably also explainsJane West's choice of'Marianne' as the name for Louisa Dudley's selfish sister in A Gossip's Story (1796), a novel that some have seen as an influence on Austen's. If Marianne is a mistaken revolutionary, she is neverthe- less a sympathetic one. In her position as the younger of two sisters, as in her tastes in poetry and music, Marianne strongly resembles Jane Austen, who had to play second to her beloved elder sister Cassandra, who seems to have been somewhat prim, and who did not lack some elder-sisterly bossiness. Jane, like Marianne, was the only musician in her family—her sister, like Elinor, was a graphic artist (and drew the only portrait we have of the novelist). In the novel Austen may develop situations from the standpoint of a Cassandra, but the sympathy for the younger of the two girls remains, a sym- pathy at times even heightened by the fact that Marianne is the object of satiric humour. She is over-ardent in her enthusiasm, and very absolute in her judgements. She talks rather too decidedly and authoritatively for such a young lady, and is fond of making final pronouncements, as on the lack of love to be expected in a marriage between a man of thirty-five and a woman of twenty-seven (p. 29). She lives in a world created by her reading of poetry, especially Cowper, and is always looking for the sublime or the pathetic. Yet her taste is always sound; Jane Austen herself was devoted to

xvi Introduction Cowper.10 Marianne is genuinely affectionate to Elinor, and notices when others are being rude to her sister (p. 177). She is by no means always wrong in what she says, though she is often naive. The lan- guage of the narrator tells us the degree to which she is cultivating her sentiments overmuch: Marianne 'rejoiced in tears of agony to be at Cleveland' (p. 228). One of the comic ironies delicately surrounding Marianne is the fact that she cannot see for herself how lacking in originality she is, how slavishly she is following a certain set of conventions. Her own genuine 'sensibility' has been bent to rules, stipulations of romanti- cism which Marianne accepts, not recognizing that she is merely duplicating someone else's prescription. Her aesthetic sense, her love for wild trees, rugged hills, and dead leaves, is a mediated and artificial sense (like that of Henry Tilney, who has learned the pic- turesque jargon). Marianne proclaims herself against all that is 'hackneyed'—and she does stand against some abuse of language, as Willoughby ruefully recollects when he hears himself saying 10 William Cowper was still a living poet when the first version(s) of the novel were written in the 17905; Marianne's taste is up to date. Austen, who gave Marianne many of her own tastes in both poetry and music, refers to Cowper in her letters, and says that his description of flowers would affect her own choice in a garden (Letters, p. 178). Cowper was a poet who celebrated rural retirement and domestic pleasures (which should have pleased Edward Ferrars); he was also a powerful religious poet, something of avisionary, and one of the chief voices of the Evangelical party against slavery. When Marianne wishes that Edward could read 'those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild' (p. 14) with more fire and not in his own flat manner ('how spiritless, how tame'), she may not be referring to passages celebrating natural beauty; it is just as likely that she alludes to some of Cowper's passionate critiques of slavery, e.g. 'Hast thou, though suckl'd at fair freedom's breast, | Exported slav'ry to theconquer'd East,' or 'Nature imprints upon whate'er wesee | That has a heart and life in it, be free': see 'Expostulation', 11. 364-5 fif., or 'Charity', II. 169—70 if., both in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, i (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 306, 341. Edward might also have been reading from The Task, published in 1785, which contains impassioned praise of liberty and a moving description of the poor prisoner in the Bastille in Book V, as well as powerful sections reflecting on the sense of the divine in nature. In a ridiculous television dramatization of Sense and Sensibility in the 19705, Mari- anne is made to forgo her love of Cowper and is instructed by Colonel Brandon in love of John Donne. This gives away the cultural era of the dramatist and director, but in seeing Cowper as a fusty poet they showed their ignorance. This favourite poet of Austen, of Marianne Dashwood, and of Fanny Price deals with cultural matters affect- ing the community at large—that he is not a love poet dealing with personal eroticism (as Donne can be seen to be) but a poet of the larger life as well as of personal feeling is important to Austen's statement.

Introduction xvii 'Thunderbolts and daggers!' (p. 246). But much of the time Marianne is following regulations: 'Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby' (p. 63). She pushes her own sensibility until it becomes something perilously close to affectation, while never quite being that. She has a vital core of real spontaneity, and we appreciate it eagerly and painfully during the chapters describing the crisis of Willoughby's desertion. Her protesting cry, 'He did feel the same, Elinor—for weeks and weeks he felt it' (p. 141), has enormous pathos, and we sympathize terribly, even while we are sure that she was deluding herself. (If we think that, we turn out to be wrong too.) The Princess Charlotte cannot have been the only contemporary female reader to feel a strong identification with Marianne: ' \"Sence and Sencibility [sic]\" I have just finished reading; it certainly is inter- esting, & you feel quite one of the company. I think Maryanne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &c, however remain very like.'11 Readers do sympathize with Marianne, and, if she told her own story, as she must have done at least to some degree in the earlier epistolary novel, then we might be drawn in to sympathize with her even more. There is, however, a distance between Marianne and the reader. The story is largely told through the narrative's staying close to Elinor's point of view, and the reader sees and hears Marianne much as Elinor does. We thus have the impression that Marianne's social persona is fairly trans- parent, revealing her inner self quite reliably (partly because it is such an unformed social persona). Elinor is the character opaque to others, whom we see and observe in the course of thoughts, specula- tion, calculation, and hidden flinching reaction. I suppose many female readers in search of example and 'maxims for the conduct of life' have felt that they are always trying to be Elinors, and always falling into Mariannes. Yet to be an Elinor has a fairly high price attached. It is not only the price of suffering silently, but also the price of knowing without being able to do anything with one's knowledge—a Cassandra's fate, in fact. Elinor comes danger- ously close to flirting with her own good sense, her stoical com- prehension, and denaturing it into something vicious. We see this in \" The 15-year-old Princess wrote this in a letter on New Year's Day 1812; quoted in Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life, 289-90. At that time the Princess thought the author of the novel was the Lady Augusta Paget.

xviii Introduction her second long interview with Lucy about Edward Ferrars, an interview that Elinor has sought (pp. 108-12). She tortures herself with her own strength here, in a kind of perverse self-admiration, and she has an inner unholy glee in provoking all Lucy's vulgarity. Her discretion has its demonic side, and, if the worst came to pass and she were left loveless, such reliance upon her own strength is in danger of warping her kinder judgement. She is often remarkably un-sunny. She snubs Marianne very quickly as soon as Marianne and Edward get into anything like a conflict. Elinor, at times, knows to what an extent she herself is prone, if she were to give way, to fall into meanness and discontent. She suffers as much as her sister does from the sensibility of love—a sensibility that seems oddly devoted to an unpromising object. One may guess that Edward Ferrars becomes Elinor's object because she does not really rate herself as high as Marianne does. Marianne expects to have someone like the dashing, handsome Willoughby. Elinor feels grateful to have a shy young man to whom, it appears, no other woman has ever attended—and then there is the shock of finding that Elinor has a very sturdy and obstructive rival. In her falling in love, Elinor is as absurd as Marianne. Marianne finds in Willoughby tastes miraculously similar to her own—not realizing how easily those tastes or responses are assumed. But Elinor makes up her own Edward Ferrars, endowing him with talents and poten- tial that exist only in her own mind: 'I assure you he is by no means deficient in natural taste, though he has not had opportunities of improving it. Had he ever been in the way of learning, I think he would have drawn very well' (p. 15). Marianne is right to smile inwardly at her sister's 'blind partiality'. Marianne says nothing more absurd. These are the very tones of Lady Catherine de Bourgh praising her own and her daughter's putative but non-existent tal- ents at the keyboard: 'If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her health had allowed her to apply' (P&P, p. 133). Elinor's attitude to Edward is very often that of a mother defending and praising her child; she seems unconsciously to be stepping into the place of Edward Ferrar's grim and unloving mother, offering him the mother-love that has always been lacking in his life. That, unromantically, is why she will win him from Lucy, for Lucy feels nothing like maternal towards Edward, and has in general no impulses of protectiveness towards

Introduction xix others. She is much better suited to the fop Robert, all the more because he has been so much petted and feels need less of mother- love than of flirtatious admiration, such as Lucy well knows how to administer. Elinor does not see that there is a resemblance between herself and the unreasonable mothers who surround her—Mrs Ferrars, Lady Middleton, and even her own indulgent and self- indulgent mother Mrs Dashwood. Motherhood is one of the novel's themes—motherhood critically and unsentimentally treated. Mothers are responsible for the education of daughters (according to conservative and progressive moralists, and in everyday fact); the propagation of error is their responsibility. Austen here shares an interest with other women writers of the 17905 who concern themselves with women's educa- tion, even, as Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth did, writing stories for both parents and children. In Austen's novel the word 'mother' frequently occurs, and motherhood in various aspects is actively displayed. Mrs Jennings, a grandmother several times over, indelicately alludes to her daughter's pregnancy and assists her daughter after delivery; Charlotte's developing pregnancy is a reminder of the physical fact of motherhood, while Charlotte's stupidity reminds us that not all mothers are well equipped to edu- cate their children in facts, judgement, or morality. The matriarch within the novel is a powerful source of error. Lady Middleton bases her dull existence on her motherhood: Sir John was a sportsman,Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children; and these were their only resources. Lady Middleton had the advantage of being able to spoil her children all the year round, while Sir John's independent employments were in existence only half the time. (p. 25) The Steele girls immediately perceive Lady Middleton's self- definition as a mother, and grossly flatter her children and thus herself. Austen comments, 'Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is like- wise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing' (p. 91). Worming their way into the family, the sponging but determined Steeles put up with the Middleton child- ren's 'incroachments and mischievous tricks' (p. 91). The reader is

xx Introduction shown a scene illustrating in detail maternal fondness and want of sense as 'sweet little Annamaria' (whose name is Marianne's reversed) screams and cries her way into attention offered dotingly by her mother and with ulterior motives by Nancy and Lucy Steele. 'With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease crying' (p. 92). It would not require knowledge of Rousseau's Emile or Mary Wollstonecraft's strictures on the education of girls to see why Lady Middleton's behaviour is mistaken. She is a bad mother who thinks she is a good one. In this one detailed scene of child- spoiling, she is palpably guilty of the miseducation of her girl child. The lot of the female is hard enough without her being educated into hysteria and dependency. Taught by the presents of sweetmeats for her tears that she is effective when she cries, little Annamaria is already a sad creation of mock sensibility, made 'feminine' to a dan- gerous point, owing to Lady Middleton's conspicuous lack of sense in this matter. Lady Middleton, however, is not afflicted with imagin- ation or sensibility; she is quiet, cold, complacent. She is, however, an efficacious bad educator because she never feels as important to her- self as when she is visibly being motherly, and she can act the mother best when her children are creating scenes in which she can figure. Mary Wollstonecraft said if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects . . . 'Educate women like men' saysRousseau, 'and the more they resemble our sex the less power they will have over us.' This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.12 Annamaria is learning power over others through cultivated lack of self-control. Austen's treatment of children in Sense and Sensibility has elicited adverse comment, and has sometimes been taken as proof of her cold-heartedness; her defenders point to her real kind- ness to both nephews and nieces and most enchantingly to her beguiling a young niece with fascinating fairy-tales of her own inven- tion.13 Austen is either dear Aunt Jane or a disappointed misan- 12 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication oj'the Rights oj'Woman, 154. 13 The best source for Austen's playfulness with her nephews and nieces can be found in Caroline Austen's My Aunt Jane Austen, first published in 1867 (repr. 1952); it is more spontaneous and less formal and defensive than James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir, first published in 1870.

Introduction xxi thrope. Either attitude misses the point. The treatment of children in Sense and Sensibility is an indicator of what has gone wrong in society in general, that is, in that cultural world in which Elinor and Marianne have only just grown up. Marianne has, after all, only just emerged from childhood—she is seventeen. The younger Dashwood girl, Margaret, is between childhood and adulthood, at age thirteen. All three are products of an education, as are visibly all the other characters. Mrs Jennings, who presides over the novel as its grand matriarch, is one of society's educators. She is a valuable counterfoil to that other great matriarch, high-born malicious and perverse Mrs Ferrars, the proud mother of sons who renders both sons helpless. Mrs Jennings, the mother of two daughters, is unfeignedly bour- geois, cheerfully vulgar in her middle-class way. Likeable herself, Mrs Jennings grows upon the reader's affection, as she perhaps did upon Austen's. Yet her defects as a mother are apparent. She has not educated her daughters in spirit or conduct. Charlotte was sent off to a boarding school, which taught her nothing of use, and which did not develop what little intellect she had: 'over the mantlepiece still hung a landscape in coloured silks of her performance, in proof of her having spent seven years at a great school in town to some effect' (p. 119). Mrs Jennings is capable of appreciating the Dashwood girls, who are visibly (to us, not to Mrs Jennings) superior to her own offspring, but she cannot share their intellectual interests nor under- stand the subtle moral considerations that activate their attention. She has no capacity to instruct, no ability to help Marianne achieve that fortitude she so badly requires. Finding that her poor young guest has been thrown over by a young man, Mrs Jennings's responses are (especially in Elinor's eyes) 'often distressing, and sometimes almost ridiculous': Their good friend saw that Marianne was unhappy, and felt that every thing was due to her which might make her at all less so. She treated her therefore, with all the indulgent fondness of a parent towards a favourite child on the last day of its holidays. Marianne was to have the best place by the fire, was to be tempted to eat by every delicacy in the house, and to be amused by the relation of all the news of the day.(p. 144) Cosiness, snacks, and gossip are the only stores in her magazine of comfort. Elinor perhaps seems harshly critical in noting the comic

xxii Introduction nature of 'Mrs Jennings's endeavours to cure a disappointment in love, by a variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire' (p. 144). These comforts are close to the sugar plums and marmalade offered to crying little Annamaria. The indulgences offered (the words 'indulgence' and 'child' figure frequently in Sense and Sensibility) merely treat woman as physical and trifling, and collude in her weak- ness. The same course of action was seen in Lady Middleton's treatment of fractious little Annamaria, and we see where Lady Middleton has learned this behaviour. 'Damn braces—bless relaxes.' Marianne needs bracing, and cannot get it. The large mother-figure that is good Mrs Jennings here fails her—a kinder turn on the author's part than having Mrs Dashwood fail her daughter in this crisis, as she has in effect already done by her own style of idealistic indulgence. Marianne needed to understand the truths of the world she is dealing with—though it is no easy matter to introduce Marianne to such truths, and her assumed romanticism is a way of evading what she does not want to know. Yet a mother might have been able to instruct her as a sister cannot, to explain that no man has proposed marriage until he has proposed marriage, that marriage is a social contract uniting not only hearts and sensibilities but the personal with the public world. Marianne's independence was an aerial illu- sion as long as she was not sufficiently informed. Mrs Dashwood, however, though talkativein general, is silent on the subject, offering very idealistic reasons (p. 65). Elinor (like Austen evidently) thinks this a 'romantic delicacy', but it is a delicacy indulgent to Mrs Dashwood herself. She spares herself any distressing scene with Marianne, and is left free to cultivate her own rosy hopes about Marianne's future happiness. Mrs Dashwood is always extravagant and always sanguine. Her perpetual cheerfulness gives her a decided resemblance to the cheerful Mrs Jennings. Marianne's capacity for pleasing hopes and fantasies may be traced to her mother's influence, at least in part; Marianne has not, however, her mother's saving gift of optimism under all difficulties, and Mrs Dashwood has not recog- nized Marianne's tendency to depression. It is Edward Ferrars, the novel's arch depressive, who begins to recognize in Marianne the tendencies like his own, when he notes that she is 'grown a little more grave than she was' (p. 70). Analytical Elinor remarks the resemblance between them. Edward says 'gaiety never was a part of

Introduction xxiii my character', and Elinor elaborates: 'Nor do I think it a part of Marianne's . . . I should hardly call her a lively girl—she is very earnest, very eager in all she does . . . but she is not often really merry' (p. 71). Mrs Dashwood may have thought Marianne's lively eagerness signified a 'merry' nature. Even within families mistakes may be made as to character, as we see in this novel which delves into the errors and misunderstandings that can arise within the greatest intimacies. Austen's satiric wit examines what is wrong with motherhood, with the Mothers. That is one of the reasons why the novel some- times seems so harsh. In Pride and Prejudice the bad mothers are softened into comic caricature, and the male world is presented more reassuringly in Elizabeth's affection for her father and in the real decency and virtue of Darcy and Mr Gardiner; the bad mothers seem to be under control, and unalarming. (It takes quite a mature reader to see that a case may be made for Mrs Bennet, and that her husband is an egregiously bad father and poor provider.) Sense and Sensibility holds no brief for the patriarchs, or for a system ensuring that women are deprived of house, lands, money, and control over their own lives, as well as of professional interests. Thus uneducated in any reasonable power over their environment and prospects, women can seldom be expected to be reasonable. When individual women are suddenly granted power—which means to be granted financial control—they do not do very well with it. Mrs Jennings and Mrs Ferrars have a position in the world because they are— unusually—in control of money. Their matriarchal rule (benign but limited in one case, tyrannical in the other) is backed by male- derived economic support. Lady Middleton, Charlotte Palmer, and Mrs John Dashwood are examples not of matriarchy but of mater- nity; they are compelled to accommodate the wishes and styles of the males. Jane Austen creates an interesting comic antithesis when she jok- ingly describes that mediocre couple, the Middletons: 'Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother' (p. 25). If the male occupa- tions are sports, motherhood (defined as humouring her children) is trivialized into a sport or game too. Figures that are opposed, yet related, throughout the novel are 'Mother' and 'Hunter'. If the women are mothers (actual or potential), the men are 'hunters'—a definition of course pertaining literally to English gentlemen of the

xxiv Introduction upper classes. Men are hunters and shooters. That is their metier. That is what they do. Willoughby first appears to Marianne in an attractive ultra-virile guise: 'A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him, was passing up the hill' (p. 32). He thus presents himself as a romantic hero, in a sense which reflects the first appearance of the hero in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho: a horn sounded, that made the mountains ring. He [the heroine's father] . . . then saw a young man spring from the bushes into the road, followed by a couple of dogs. The stranger was in a hunter's dress. His gun was slung across his shoulders . . ,14 Valancourt comes to the rescue of the heroine and her father, if by the commonplace expedient of informing them of their way. Willoughby is Marianne's 'preserver'—according to Margaret's inaccurate description. Marianne ought, however, to beware. If Willoughby comes upon her like Harriet Byron's 'preserver' Sir Charles Grandison, he is also (as Jocelyn Harris argues) a villainous rake like Sir Hargrave Pollexfen.15 If he appears as a Valancourt, he has some of the dangerous qualities of a money-loving Montoni— the villain with whom Catherine too literally identified General Tilney. Willoughby's name echoes that of a character in another novel. In Frances Burney's Evelina the heroine is accosted at her second ball by Sir Clement Willoughby, who 'began a conversation, in that free style which only belongs to old and intimate acquaint- ance'.16 Evelina's reduced situation in the world, combined with her refined education, elegant manners, and beauty, would seem to point her out to this handsome Willoughby as ideally qualified to be the mistress of a fashionable man—a danger not remote from one in Marianne Dashwood's situation. As we see, this is a danger which 14 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree and Terry Castle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. 15 Alvin C. Metcalfe, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation 'Sense and Sensibility: A Study of its Similarity to The History of Sir Charles Grandison', has elaborated on all the connections between the two novels (doctoral diss. Kent State, 1970). Jocelyn Harris summarizes his argument in appendix I of Jane Austen's Art of Memory, 222-7, and adds points of her own, pp. 48—55. 16 Frances Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 40. R. Brimley Johnson saw Burney's work as a strong influence on Austen's in Jane Austen: Her Life, her Work, her Family and her Critics (London:Dent, 1930), and other critics, most recently Jocelyn Harris, have seen the connectionof the two Willoughbys.

Introduction xxv overtook Colonel Brandon's bastard ward, Eliza, a less fortunate Evelina. Marianne lives in a world in which a man is certainly not thought less of for being the rakish father of a bastard (as Willoughby actually is and as Colonel Brandon is unjustly reputed to be). Men are hunters. They carry guns. Sometimes their sports injure others. The men in this novel have on a most literal level a great regard for sport—so much so that Marianne can console herself for her supposedly ardent lover's absence by thinking he is detained by field sports. Male friendships are cemented by talk of dogs, game, and guns. John Dashwood thinks of sending his sisters game in season. All that Sir John Middleton can say of Willoughby is that he is 'A very decent shot, and there is not a bolder rider in England.' This sentence can be read as having an erotic significance, and really answers Marianne's question about Willoughby's character, man- ners, and pursuits more fully than either she or Sir John is aware. Middleton can only add that 'he is a pleasant, good humoured fellow, and has got the nicest little black bitch of a pointer I ever saw' (p. 34). This wanton hunter, this indecent shot (one remembers John Thorpe's significantly perverse judgement that Tom Jones and The Monk are the only 'decent' books: NA, p. 32), has made another woman (a bitch?) a mother. 'He had left the girl whose youth and innocence he had seduced . . . he neither returned, nor wrote, nor relieved her'^P- 157). Colonel Brandon's response to the situation includes fighting a duel—he is himself a military man, a gun-carrier and something of a hunter too. Marianne has no idea of what she is getting into, of the antithesis and antagonism between mothers and hunters. During Willoughby's courtship, Marianne begins dangerously to collude with the hunt- ers—as is symbolized when Willoughby tries to give her the horse significantly named 'Queen Mab' (p. 45). Queen Mab, according to Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, is 'the fairies' midwife'. Driving her chariot of a hazelnut with traces of spiders' web, 'she gallops night by night | Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love'.17 Queen Mab incites flattering or fearful dreams, chiefly connected with sexual desire or avarice. This is a figure of illusion, and the hope of possessing this Queen Mab—which she 17 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, i. iv. 54-71. This allusion is also noted by Harris, Jane Austen's Art of Memory, 82.

xxvi Introduction believes will be hers upon her marriage to Willoughby—stimulates Marianne to ally herself imaginatively with the hunters. The ideal household cannot survive, she says, on less than two thousand pounds a year: 'A family cannot well be maintained on a smaller . . . servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.' Edward exclaims in surprise, 'why must you have hunters? Every body does not hunt.' Marianne, embarrassed, retorts, 'But most people do' (p. 69). This is quite untrue, as Marianne should know. 'Most people' do not hunt. Only the upper classes engage in hunting, and keep 'hunters'—i.e. horses on which to follow the hunt. And it is the gentlemen of that class who hunt; a few women may be permitted hunting by indulgent fathers and husbands, but most advice-givers consider hunting an unsuitable occupation for a lady. Marianne is taking on Willoughby's coloration, no less than he (much more consciously) is taking on hers—exhibiting a taste for picturesque landscapes and for Cowper. In her phase of existence as a would-be hunter or accomplice of hunters, Marianne becomes greedy and predatory. She goes with Willoughby to look over the mansion of his relative Mrs Smith—uninvited by the absent mistress of the establishment. She prowls about noting the details of the 'charming house': 'There is one remarkably pretty sitting room up stairs; of a nice comfortable size for constant use, and with modern furniture it would be delightful' (p. 53). Marianne is consistently harsh about Mrs Jenning's vulgarity, but is here sadly unaware of her own. Calculating the value to herself of this property that is sure (she thinks) to fall to Willoughby, she can happily assume the death of a woman whose demise will give Marianne (as Willoughby's wife) the enjoyment of the 'pretty sitting room'. Marianne exactly calcu- lates the capabilities of the place for her own enjoyment, contemptu- ously dismissing all of Mrs Smith's furniture—'nothing could be more forlorn' (p. 53). Never for a second here does Marianne consider that to Mrs Smith the Allenham of the present might have all the grace and emotional resonance that the Norland of her own time has for Mari- anne. Those who take over Norland are greedy improvers, sweeping away the life of their predecessors. Elinor is shocked to hear of the John Dashwoods' plan for 'improving' Norland by cutting down its trees in order to create a flower garden and a greenhouse. As John Dashwood tells Elinor (who can only be thankful that Marianne does

Introduction xxvii not have to hear this news): 'The old walnut trees are all come down to make room for i t . . . We have cleared away all the old thorns that grew in patches over the brow' (p. 170). Vulgarand wanton improvers are the proper objects of detestation in the eyes of those of true sensibility. In The Mysteries of Udolpho the heroine's father, St Aubert, is shocked to hear the vulgar M. Quesnel's 'intended improvements' to the old family estate: 'Cut down the trees too!' said St. Aubert. 'Certainly. Why should I not? they interrupt my prospects. There is a chesnut [sic] which spreads its branches before the whole south side of the chateau . . .' 'Good God!' exclaimed St. Aubert, 'you surely will not destroy that noble chesnut, which has flourished for centuries, the glory of the estate! . . . How often, in my youth, have I climbed among its broad branches |>18 The estate is hallowed not only by the simple fact of its age but by the enrichment of personal associations. So Marianne can claim that Norland is hers in some sense because of associations and memor- ies—as she does in her dramatic apostrophe to 'Dear, dear Norland!' on her leave-taking. She is in fact in error in thinking that the 'well- known trees' would continue the same: 'No leaf will decay because we are removed' (p. 21). Once her family is gone, the John Dashwoods bring in their improving axes. Marianne is not wrong in her attach- ment to the estate—Elinor shares the feeling, as we see when she has to bear the news of the John Dashwoods' 'improvements'. Feeling as she does about Norland makes Marianne all the more culpable at Allenham, in her ruthless seizing upon what she imagines to be her own opportunity to dispossess and to possess. She would sweep away all trace of the former mistress of Allenham without a qualm. She bears in this instance a horrid likeness to her half- brother. This example of Marianne's behaviour offers a salient instance of the untruth of her loose and Shaftesburyan supposition that feelings are sufficient moral guide, that 'we always know when we are acting wrong' (p. 52). Not only does she offend against the sexual properties in going off alone with Willoughby (thus making her own position later all the more difficult); she also falls into very unromantic sins of insensitivity, greed, and callous calculation— 18 Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 13.

xxviii Introduction commonplace qualities that she despises in others. It is not true that the Dashwood girls never descend to the level of the Steeles—the redeeming fact is that they do not stay at that level. Marianne's happiness in this sequence is the kind of happiness that a Willoughby enjoys—sunshiny, arrogant, complacent, and cal- lous. She tacitly joins with Willoughby in treating Mrs Smith as a mere old lady, ignorable because she is female. Marianne does not realize that Mrs Smith has the power to determine Willoughby's future, and thus her own. Mrs Smith does not forget the solidarity with women that Marianne herself ignores in treating the owner of the house as a cypher. Mrs Smith is about to find out about Willoughby's seduction of the unfortunate Eliza and his abandon- ment of her and her child. She has the matter out with Willoughby, as Willoughby much later describes the scene to Elinor. 'In the height of her morality, good woman! she offered to forgive the past, if I would marry Eliza' (p. 244). Willoughby treats that offer as ridicu- lous, the sort of thing that would be said by a woman with no know- ledge of the world. But poor Mrs Smith, invisible to us, is a presence in the novel nevertheless, as Claudia Johnson points out. 'Against her [Mrs Ferrars], detail for detail, Willoughby's aunt stands in perfect opposition as a model of radical authority attempting unworldly and morally corrective coercion.' Mrs Smith is the one matriarch who is really 'an exemplary version of authority'.19 This absent Mrs Smith—whom Marianne does not meet—offers the novel's one example of true and idealistic independence of the world's views. Ironically, true independence of mind exercised by a woman in the cause of other women proves the wreck of Marianne's own dreams. It is easy to romanticize the romantic Marianne—as I think Tony Tanner does: 'we surely respond very positively to Mari- anne's guileless sincerity, and we cannot fail to find attractive her generous capacity for feeling . . .'20 It is, of course, also easy to over- state Elinor's virtue, sense, and tact, overlooking the moments when she is bossy or shrewish (elder-sisterly faults which bring her peril- ously into line with Fanny Dashwood and Mrs Ferrars). But if we talk of Marianne's 'capacity for feeling', we have to acknowledge that 19 Johnson, Jans Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, 70. 20 Tony Tanner, Introduction to Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969), 29; this essay is reprinted, very slightly altered, as 'Secrecy and Sickness: Sense and Sensibility\\ in Tanner's^anf Austen: Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1987), 75-102.

Introduction xxix she often shows a capacity to feel for herself, and that such a capacity is not more 'generous' than Willoughby's or Lucy Steele's prefer- ence for their own comfort over other people's happiness. Marianne has some of the 'gross and illiberal' tendencies she so energetically and rightly reproves in the language and actions of other people (P- 35)- Marianne is forgivable because there is such a great deal she does not know. Knowing and not knowing are among the great subjects of Sense and Sensibility. All of Jane Austen's novels express a profound epistemological interest, and their plots are sustained adventures in modes of knowing. The very title of Sense and Sensibility betrays the epistemological concerns at stake, for our senses (our five senses) and our sensibility (whether considered as primary sentiment, or the power of responding to and connecting experiential data) constitute, according to the philosophies of the Enlightenment, our chief—or only—modes of knowing. Sense and Sensibility together promise perceptive activity, apprehensions, synthesis, recombinations—i.e. mind, thought, consciousness. A modern philosopher, J. L. Austin, paid tribute to Austen's philosophical title and concerns when he named his own book Sense and Sensibilia.21 The adventures in a world presumed to be knowable are, however, fraught with torment- ing problems in Austen's second novel. Nonhanger Abbey may be taken as Jocelyn Harris has taken it, as a lesson in the Lockean Mode of reason and rational discourse.22 Henry Tilney would see the world as answerable to reason (as he can define the reasonable) and yet there are less happy ways of looking at the world and responding to it, views in which Henry himself becomes part of the problem. Yet Northanger Abbey does -propose some certainties; the contents of a cedar chest or a japanned cabinet can be ascertained. Sense and Sens- ibility exhibits a world where there is very little certainty and almost everyone is misled. There are no certain modes of ascertaining any- thing, and all perceivers are fallible. As Claudia Johnson says, 'even ordinary inferences are too audacious',23 pointing out one of 21 See J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (reconstructed from the manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock; London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Austin is arguing against particular formulations of contemporary sceptics such as A. J. Ayer regardingthe nature of perception. J. Austin was doubtless stimulated by the similarity of his name to that of J. Austen into seeing some resemblance in their concerns. 22 Harris, Jane Austen's Art of Memory, 1—26. 23 Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, 62.

xxx Introduction Austen's comic examples: when a visitor in London supposes that Elinor and Marianne must be residing with their brother, Austen mockingly comments that 'the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgments of our conduct' (p. 186)— an ironic reproof of the acquaintance's flight in 'imagining' that John Dashwood would show ordinary kindness and hospitality to his orphaned sisters. The friend reasoned on the basis of a probability that is always fictional. It is not imagination that is astray here, as it can be said to be in Nonhanger Abbey, but the world. The perverse- ness of human nature as well as the incalculable nature of accident are against imagination, intuition, knowledge of the world, or strict reason ever arriving at real or full human truth. The characters in the novel constantly try to form and direct the world so that it falls in with their wishes or hopes, and they fre- quently do this by making assumptions of knowing. Zelda Boyd has dealt with Jane Austen's refined and comic use of modal verbs, espe- cially in the mouths or minds of her characters.24 Words like 'must', 'might', 'would', 'should', spring readily to characters' minds, reflecting efforts to establish certainty and control. But everything is conjecture. Elinor finds fault very rationally with her mother for rushing into assumptions, particularly in presuming that Marianne and Willoughby are engaged. Mrs Dashwood argues, 'Are no prob- abilities to be accepted, merely because they are not certainties?' (p. 60). Elinor argues here for doubt, and against certainty, but she reasonably accepts certain standards of proof. She cannot yet believe in her sister's engagement to Willoughby, but, 'If we find they cor- respond, every fear of mine will be removed' (p. 61). Mrs Dash- wood mocks her eldest daughter for insisting on a redundant proof: 'A mighty concession indeed! If you were to see them at the altar, you would suppose they were going to be married . . . But / require no such proof (p. 61). Mrs Dashwood is of course wrong. But so too is Elinor. Marianne and Willoughby do correspond, and they are not engaged. (And young people may even stand at an altar, and yet not be about to be married—see MP, p. 70.) Supposed certainties— like Elinor's 'He must and does love her' (p. 61)—should be doubted and the doubts may then be overthrown in their turn. 24 Zelda Boyd, 'The Language of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sens- ibility', in Janet Todd (ed.),j[ane Austen: New Perspectives (Women and Literature, NS3; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 142-52.

Introduction xxxi The words 'certain', 'conjecture', 'doubt', 'proof echo through- out the novel. Every character is misled. The senses are not to be trusted—any more than is 'common sense'. 'Knowing' something is very suspect. 'It is he; it is indeed;—I know it is!' cries Marianne (p. 65), hastening to meet the approaching gentleman on horseback whom she 'knows' to be Willoughby. But it is Edward Ferrars. A short time later, Elinor is misled equally with her sister. Marianne notes the new ring on Edward's finger, a ring with a lock or hair in it (p. 74). He blushes and announces that the hair is his sister's—even though Marianne also noticed it seemed darker than his sister's. Both of the Dashwood young ladies feel immediately convinced that the hair is Elinor's, although Marianne thinks of it as given and Elinor, more erotically, as stolen. (Willoughby's seizure of the lock of Marianne's hair is, as several commentators have noted, a Rape of the Lock.25) The true conclusion cannot occur to either Marianne or Elinor—that the hair in the ring belongs to Lucy Steele. Edward's own lie muddles the matter, but only as showing that something is concealed. The two Dashwood ladies see at once that he is lying— they are at least too well advanced in scepticism to believe merely what he says. They just do not realize how far his mendacity can extend. Edward Ferrars often acts the part of an abject liar and a cad—he is so very miserable, so undashing in the process, however, that he always wins Elinor's prejudiced and protective forgiveness. Lucy Steele who has, in the vocabulary of Sir John Middleton, 'set her cap' at Edward and gone about 'catching' him, senses his new attrac- tion to Elinor and is determined to nip any development of it in the bud by telling Elinor very plainly that Edward is her property. In a highly charged scene, the climax of the first volume, Lucy informs Elinor of her engagement. This is a calculated gamble on Lucy's part. Shrewder than most of the other characters, Lucy perceives that Elinor's standards of conduct will prevent her from making any attempt to take Edward once she knows he belongs to another woman—a piece of honour with which Lucy would never trouble 25 Jean Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 269; Juliet McMaster, Jane Austen on Love (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1978), 69, and Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, 45, all deal with this resemblance; Harris, in Jane Austen's Art of Memory, on the contrary suggests Edward Ferrars's resemblance to the Baron, in his play with the scissors (Harris, p. 63).

xxxii Introduction herself. Lucy knows, however, that rational Elinor will require to be convinced. Lucy comes to their meeting armed with objects, like a Laputan philosopher. She takes out and displays Edward's mini- ature, then shows a letter from him, and makes Elinor ascertain that it is in his hand. Her trump card is the description of the ring that she gave him on his last visit (a fetter, in fact, with which she has secured him). Elinor has to realize that all the details add up—that Lucy's account makes sense of Edward's life by filling in the blanks Elinor has chosen to ignore; she now sees where he spends his time in the intervals when he has not been with her or with his mother. Elinor 'dared not longer doubt'; Lucy's assertion is supported 'by such probabilities and proofs, and contradicted by nothing but her own wishes' (p. 103). Elinor, once alone, runs over the evidence like a lawyer and sees in this summation nothing to comfort her. She must believe. She knows. Yet her mind begins to comfort her, almost at once, with the sort of certainties she rejects when proffered by her mother or by Marianne. 'His [Edward's] affection was all her [Elinor's] own. She could not be deceived in that' (p. 103). Elinor has no better reason to believe this, strictly speaking, than her own sensibility, her wishes, her own love. She cannot argue from her knowledge of Edward, for she has just learned that she really did not know him. He was engaged when she made his acquaintance, and has been as Marianne charged (p. 72), 'reserved' beyond the point that everyone had imagined possible. The first paragraphs of the first chapter of Vol- ume II contain a good deal of style indirect libre—rare in this early novel, if a hallmark of Austen's mature style. We follow Elinor's mind summing up, registering reactions, comforting her. She is of course ultimately right about Edward's love for her, although Elinor in the middle of the novel decides that Willoughby had had no real love for Marianne. Being right about Edward's love—while he is engaged to another and has been both bungling and deceitful—may seem a cold comfort. (What is Edward's 'love' worth anyway? one might ask.) But it is all that Elinor has. And she always has some fractional belief, born of fantasy, that he will get free and come to her. That is not a reasonable hope, though it is what she has to live on. The abrupt loss of such a hope, and her total rejection by the man she has loved, plunge Marianne into a sorrow which seems almost too much to bear. It is true that Elinor never has to bear

Introduction xxxiii what Marianne does. The sensible woman ironically has more comfort from delusive hope—as long as Edward is not actually married. The work of trying to make sense of the world, of trying to under- stand, to comprehend, to know—and to accept the fruits of this knowing—is'a very hard work in Sense and Sensibility. As Joseph Wiesenfarth says, 'the very structure of the novel attempts to engage and develop the total personalities of Elinor and Marianne by pre- senting them with a series of mysteries that must be solved'.26 The characters are all detectives trying to put together this piece and that piece of information, and required also to set a value on the informa- tion. Henry Tilney, in Nonhanger Abbey, spoke of a world of'volun- tary spies' (NA, p. 159). Here we see spying at work—even on the part of those who are not actively hostile. Mrs Jennings can declare exultingly to Marianne, 'I have found you out in spite of all your tricks': she knows of the visit to the house of Mrs Smith with Willoughby because, 'in her resolution to know where they had been, she had actually made her own woman enquire of Mr Willoughby's groom' (p. 52). The more interested characters are in what goes forward, the more attentively they spy, piece together, and conjecture. Something seems always in the process of being detected, even if never fully found out. Indeed, the process of learning to know is fraught (as Catherine Morland under the influence of Gothic fiction believed) with cruelty and violence. The cruelty of the John Dashwoods sends the young women into the wide world where they must look about them. The cruelty of Colonel Brandon's uncle and cousin led them to imprison and ill-treat a woman—the first Eliza was locked up, though in Northanger Abbey we are asked to laugh at the idea that General Tilney could have locked up a woman. Forced into an unhappy marriage, deserted and abused, falling into adultery, thrown out into the streets—the first Eliza in Colonel Brandon's story embodies (in traditional ways) the crimes against women and the suffering to which they are subjected. Commentators have seen the influence of Clarissa in the 'Eliza' passages. Colonel Brandon's rescue of the first Eliza, now a prostitute, echoes scenes in Henry 26 Joseph Wiesenfarth, 'The Mysteries of Sense and Sensibility', in his The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen's Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967), 35.

xxxiv Introduction Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and the whole episode has some echoes of Albany's story in Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782).27 The first Eliza dies— she is the corpse at the centre of this story of detection. Her daughter lives to repeat the pattern, to be seduced by Willoughby, and to have a child in her turn. The mysterious behaviour of the Colonel in excusing himself abruptly and thus put- ting an end to the promised excursion is at last explained (pp. 1 56—7). Willoughby never does anything to help his own child. Marianne is nearly another victim of Willoughby's rakishness— in her self- fostered grief over her loss of him and of her idea of him. Marianne, who wishes to imagine herself as outside the circle of society arid its demands, does not see that one of its demands may be that she be a victim either of her own sexuality and the law (as a seduced woman) or of her own sense of superfluity — a lovely woman abandoned has nothing to do but die. Marianne, a young woman without fortune and now cast off by a suitor, would make a very touching victim. She is tempted into suicide. The crimes that the novel detects touch the central characters very closely. Marianne has some imaginative feeling of self-identification with that which is superfluous, unwanted, and decaying. She rhapsod- izes not only about the lost home, but about the dead leaves of Norland: 'How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.' 27 For comments on the connection of the Elizas' stories to Clarissa, see B. C. Southam, 'Jane Austen and Clarissa'', N & jJzoS (1963), 191-2; E. E. Duncan-Jones, ibid. 350; Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1966), 86, and, most extensively, Harris,Jane Austen 's Art of Memory, 55-71. But other works, themselves influenced by Richardson, were also part of what Austen knew. Compare Emily Atkin's story in Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers, Stephen Bending, and Stephen Bygrave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40-55. Frances Burney's Evelina is a story of two generations, in which there is some danger that the fate of the heroine's mother may be repeated in that of the daughter. Even closer to the narrative manner of Brandon's tale is Albany's story of his lost beloved in Burney's Cecilia; see Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 704—9. Albany's com- pulsive sense of guilt contrasts interestingly with Brandon's defensive repudiation of guilt throughouthis narrative.

Introduction xxxv 'It is not every one,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.' (P. 67) Autumnal feelings are romantic feelings—but in the case of a male (most notably but not only Shelley) the leaves and wind together make an image of re-creation and power. A woman meditating on dead leaves is in danger of identifying herself with powerlessness. Elinor's rather snippy reply here is partly a healthy reaction, partly a snub resulting from her own sense that all the Dashwood women have been 'seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off. . .'. Indeed, the Dashwoods seem to bear an autumnal name, to be leaves dashed from the wood. (And, in a novel where a character alludes to a friend as 'Lord Courtland' (p. 188) and in which the rakish hero-villain was to be given the significant identifying gift of 'one of Folly's puppies' (p. 161), we cannot say that such an analysis of terms is out of the question.) Marianne, for all her hopeful egotism, has a crude but strong elegiac sense that plays into her affection for dead leaves and stunted or dead trees. She tells Edward solemnly that she loves to be reminded of 'the past' (p. 70), a phrase significantly ridiculous from the lips of a seventeen-year-old. Yet, after all, the past when she could look forward to life at Norwood in perpetuity is very different from the present. Marianne channels her sense of exile and her unhappiness with the social conditions of her life into her romantic tastes. Edward Ferrars, more consciously unhappy and given to melancholia, rejects Marianne's tastes too emphatically— even rudely. We may, however, guess that Edward's suspicion of his own depressive nature makes him stoutly assert a love only of happy, smiling, and useful objects. As soon as he refers to 'utility' as a criterion (p. 73), however, he returns himself to his sense of his own uselessness, about which he broods and complains to no avail (pp. 77-8). There is a danger in the novel of seeing too far into the world of deprivation and death. Austen's artistic inventiveness and strong aesthetic sense have prevented the novel from seeming too wintry. Part of the effect lies in what might be called the folding structure, whereby the novel is divided into two—like a hinged toothpick-case, one might add, though perhaps the story might also be compared to the 'scissars' (sic) which Edward picks up aimlessly but erotically (p. 273). The novel tells two stories, which work against and with each

xxxvi Introduction other. Yet we have to go through one to get to the other. This double- natured narrative exhibits the structure of the detective story as a genre, as Todorov noted.28 There must be the story of the crime (hidden) and the story of the detection. The First Story, or Story A, in Sense and Sensibility may be called the story of Primacy, as well as the Primary Story. It is this story that the novel's first sentence sets out to tell, for this can be a story of families long settled in Sussex. This is a story of inheritance and primogeniture, the story of John Dashwood as eldest male, and the story of Edward Ferrars as the elder of two sons, and even the story of Elinor in her right as eldest of three sisters. It is also a story of propri- eties and acceptances, rules and social regulations. It is the story of social organization along set lines, as a Lady Middleton understands such things. Reading this story, we can see that Marianne is foolish, Elinor intelligent but helpless. According to this 'proper' level of things, if lovely woman stoops to folly, she should die, and men should not and will not commit themselves to financially weak partners. The novel then advocates, as an early reviewer wishes it to do, 'discreet quiet good sense' in bearing with the ordering of things. In this world of concealment the detective is placed, and the investigation begins here. The detective is hampered by the neces- sity of apparent conformity to the social rules; her detecting pres- ence reanimates this dull world and affords an opportunity of change through a chain of revelations. The reward of the detective is chiefly the pleasure of knowing in itself, but also the painful extension of possibility and alternatives revealed by an excavation of the past and of hidden connections. The Primary Story or inert story of primacy proves to be compli- cated by Story B, which might be called the Story of the Second 28 Tzvetan Todorov draws upon the earlier Russian Formalists' identification of the difference between the fable (story) from the sujet (plot) of a narrative. In a detective story, the story of the investigation is the subject. The story of the crime is known through its absence, the second story serves 'as a mediator between the reader and the story of the crime'. If we compare Elinor to a fictional detective, she is, of course, not like a Sherlockean consultant but rather resembles what Todorov terms 'the vulnerable detective', as in Chandler (or, we might add, Sarah Paretsky). Of a story involving such a vulnerable detective, Todorov remarks, 'Its chief feature is that the detective loses his immunity, gets beaten up, badly hurt.'Just so, metaphorically, Elinor gets badly hurt by her experienceof investigation, which is also the centralstory. See Todorov, 'The Typology of Detective Fiction', trans. Richard Howard, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 42—52.

Introduction xxxvii Comer. The novel is not a Cinderella story, but the plot structure raises the lowly and puts down the mighty. Almost everything and everyone must arrive in pairs. Families come to our attention bearing prominent sets of twos. The sets may alter as we look at them: Fanny Dashwood and her brother Edward make a set of siblings until we focus upon the other brother, and then Robert and Edward become the major Ferrars pair. Elinor and Marianne are a set of two, and so are Nancy and Lucy Steele. There are two Elizas—this pair in a sequence—in Colonel Brandon's story. And Colonel Brandon also had an elder brother to whom the father gave all, and whom poor Eliza the First was forced to marry. Colonel Brandon, although he made the effort to abduct his ladylove, did not succeed, and had to see her given to the prime claimant, the eldest born. Once we notice all these sets, we begin to see that the second of a pair is regularly preferable to the first. Elinor is saved from the invidious position of coming first by being second in the set of two consisting of herself and her elder brother, but we are always aware of Marianne's position as second daughter. (Austen seems to have created Margaret, third daughter, chiefly to break the spell, to reduce the power of the sets of two—Margaret also makes Marianne an elder in their set of two.) Jane Austen herself was of course the second daughter. Through the pattern of secondariness comes almost everything which is interesting, perturbing, active, lively. (Even Elinor's virtues would not shine so bright without Marianne as agent and foil.) Firsts of sets, like first attachments, produce social duty and social conformity. Primogeniture is a deadening system. Second attachments are more attractive, interesting, and profitable than first attachments—even if, according to the world's standard, they signify a failure. The Dashwood girls were the product of their father's second marriage. It is ridiculous of Marianne to decry second attachments, since (as Elinor points out) she owes her birth to one. To come to understand the novel's understory, the mysteries to be uncovered (like Eliza's fate, Willoughby's bastard, Edward's entrapment), is to come to understand the second story, to see the possibilities of what is usually subjugated, glossed over, or ignored in polite society. The first edition of the novel exhibits the stifling of the truth in the sentence showing Lady Middleton's suppression of ref- erence to Colonel Brandon's natural child: 'Lady Middleton's deli- cacy was shocked; and in order to banish so improper a subject as the

xxxviii Introduction mention of a natural daughter, she actually took the trouble of saying something herself about the weather' (see p. 310, note). In the 'detective story', of course, Austen must have her detecting Elinor uncover what a Lady Middleton wishes to conceal. Austen focuses our attention on the detection, and on the submerged activities of the Elizas, Lucy, Edward, Willoughby. That story eventually rises into prominence over the first, signified in Edward's abrupt loss of his position as the elder of two sons. Mrs Ferrars arbitrarily and 'naturally' takes control over 'nature' and reverses the ordering of sets, swinging them about on the pivot or hinge of her will, as John Dashwood announces: 'his mother has determined, with a very nat- ural kind of spirit, to settle that estate upon Robert immediately, which might have been Edward's . . . Can any thing be more galling to the spirit of a man . . . than to see his younger brother in posses- sion of an estate which might have been his own?' (pp. 202—3). Mrs Ferrars's wilful action demystifies the laws and proprieties of primo- geniture, and sets the characters' energies free. The untimely revela- tion by Nancy Steele of Edward's engagement to Lucy, and Mrs Ferrars's reaction, at least rouse Edward from that lethargy of which he has complained—a lethargy aggravated, we may believe, by his living such a large part of his life under cover; he is not a Frank Churchill and has not found a secret engagement stimulating. When his mother disinherits him, he shows his spirit at last. Resisting the demands made upon him in the name of the duties of an elder son, he renounces that position, and at last finds a profession. Robert the fatuous, asJohn Dashwood says, 'will now to all intents and purposes be considered as the eldest son' and he should now marry the Miss Morton his mother formerly designed as a wife for Edward. Elinor is amused at the assumption that 'it must be the same to Miss Morton whether she marry Edward or Robert' because it is the position of 'eldest son' she is expected to espouse (p. 224). Mrs Ferrars shows her commitment to the undifferentiated world of genealogy and settlement. She and her son-in-law reveal how deeply and sincerely they reverence the story of Primacy. But both of Mrs Ferrars's sons escape her plot for them. Robert, the new 'eldest', promptly imitates what his brother did when Edward was the 'eldest' and falls for Lucy Steele; he indulges not only in a secret engagement but in arunaway marriage. Taking on, without knowing it, the most onerous duty of Edward's position in marrying Edward's former fiancee, Robert as

Introduction xxxix new 'eldest' leaves the way clear for Edward to act as a free younger brother, carving out his own modest fortune with Elinor as his wife. Lucy, though herself a strong Second, believes ultimately (like Mrs Ferrars) so devoutly in the story of Primacy that she enters the world of primacy and primogeniture, accepting the undifferentiated 'eldest son'. The story of eldests and primacy is a story of limitation and inner decay. 'Miss Morton' is a name with death (mart) in it. Willoughby leaving his real love for Marianne (his second attach- ment in the chronology of the novel, taking Eliza as his first) bolts for the world of Primacy for the sake of inheritance; his shadowy bride in self-destruction is the appropriately named Miss Grey. Vig- our and activity are to be found at the second level, and all who are important or lovable contract a marriage based on the second attachment of one of the parties. Each good union also creates a new pair, one member of which is a second child. Colonel Brandon and Marianne turn out to be suited after all because they are both second children (the younger in a same-sex pair) and both are marrying a second attachment. Edward is now an honorary second, rescued from the world of narrowness which is primacy. Robert is really a scapegoat, and Edward an escapee. The sorrows and fears arising not only out of human desire and weakness but also out of the social context which abuses desires and creates weakness are at an end, at least for this story. The story enacts a subversion by turning the order of things over, and telling us that there always is much more going on than history or genealogy—the tales of families 'long settled in Sussex'—can account for. The selfish and strong who opt to live on the first (but inferior) level of inheritance, power, and control (mixed in with however much boredom and obsequiousness) are not punished, apart from living as themselves; only Willoughby among this crowd is wise enough to regret this fate to any degree. Others who changed in their love changed for the better. Marianne 'could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby' (p. 288). Hearts mend; life moves. Flexibility and grace are needed, not hopeless ideal constancy. The knowingsense that sees the inadequacy of human society and the terrible greed evoked by manyof its institutions and practices must be tempered by the sensibility that can appreciate the opportunity of loving—even of loving again. M. A. D.

NOTE ON THE TEXT Sense and Sensibility, first drafted in epistolary form as Elinor and Marianne, began to take its final shape in November 1797. It was published at the author's expense by Thomas Egerton, Whitehall, in November 1811 (Jane Austen was reading proofs in April 1811; the novel was advertised between 31 October and 28 November). This edition (155. in boards; c. 1,000 copies) sold quickly enough; it is exhausted, says Austen on 3 July 1813, and 'has brought me £140, besides the copyright, if that should ever be of any value'. A second edition, corrected by the author, appeared in November of that year. There are, however, so many new errors in 1813 that the corrections must have been made only on a copy of 1811 and not also on a proof for 1813. A bad French version, in which the story is rehashed for foreign taste by Mme de Montolieu, appeared as Raison et Sensibilite in 1815 and 1828. Carey and Lea of Philadelphia published the first American edition in 1833 (1,250 copies), after their successful issue of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park in the latter half of 1832. All six novels were included in Bentley's cheap Standard Novels series (6s. a volume) in 1833 (repr. 1866, 1869, 1878-9, 1882). Since the first Everyman's Library edition introduced by R. Brimley Johnson (London 1892; rev. edn. Mary Lascelles, London and New York, 1962-4), the six major novels have been reissued in cheap collected editions in (for example) Oxford World's Classics, Every- man, Penguin, Virago. The standard edition of the novels is that of R. W. Chapman (illustrated; 6 vols.; Oxford, 1923-54; rev. Mary Lascelles, 1965—7), with commentaries and appendices. The Oxford English Novels series issued the six major novels in 1970—1, based on the standard edition, in which Chapman's textual apparatus was revised and his emendations reconsidered by James Kinsley (see Textual Notes, p. 299). The present edition reproduces the Oxford English Novels text, which is based on the second edition collated with the first.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Letters and Biography Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd edition, collected and ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Austen-Leigh, James Edward, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Austen-Leigh, William, and Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur, Jane Austen: A Family Record (1913), revised and enlarged Deirdre Le Faye (London: The British Library, 1989). Fergus, Jan, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Honan, Park, Jane Austen: Her Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). Nokes, David, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). Tomalin, Claire, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997). Tucker, George Holbert, A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983). Historical and Literary Contexts Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Copeland, Edward, Women Writing About Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987; rpt. London: Routledge 1994). Guest, Harriet, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Herzog, Don, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1998). Kelly, Gary, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (London: Longman, 1989). Pearson, Jacqueline, Women's Reading in Britain 1750—1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I994)- Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emer- gence of Separate Spheres'? (London and New York: Longman, 1998).

xlii Select Bibliography Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). Critical Works on Jane Austen Brown, Julia Prewitt, Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Byrne, Paula, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London: Hambledon and London, 2002). Collins, Irene, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London: Hambledon Press, I994)- Copeland, Edward, 'What is a Competence? Jane Austen, her Sister Nov- elists, and the 5%'s', Modern Language Studies, 9 (1979), 161—8. and McMaster, Juliet (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Duckworth, Alistair, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Favret, Mary, 'Jane Austen and the Look of Letters', in Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Galperin, William H., The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Gay, Penny, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2002). Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan, 'Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's Tenants of Possibility', in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979). Grey, David, Litz, A. Walton, and Southam, Brian (eds.), TheJane Austen Handbook: With a Dictionary of Jane Austen's Life and Works (London: Athlone Press, 1986). Harding, D. W, 'Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen', Scrutiny, 8 (1940), rpt. in Monica Lawlor (ed.), Regulated Hatred and Other Essays onJane Austen (London: Athlone Press, 1998). Harris, Jocelyn, Jane Austen's Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Johnson, Claudia L., Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the ijgos: Wollstonecraft, Radclijfe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Select Bibliography xliii Jones, Vivien, How to Study a Jane Austen Novel, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997). Kaplan, Deborah, Jane Austen Among Women (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Har- vester Press, 1983). Lascelles, Mary, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). Looser, Devoney (ed.), Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (Basing- stoke: Macmillan, 1995). Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 'Jane Austen and the Social Machine', in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). (ed.), Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). Miller, D. A., 'The Danger of Narrative in Jane Austen', in Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Moler, Kenneth L., Jane Austen's Art of Allusion (Lincoln, Neb.: Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1968). Monaghan, David, Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision (London: Macmillan, 1980). Morgan, Susan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception inJane Austen's Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 'Why There's No Sex in Jane Austen's Fiction', Studies in the Novel, 19 (1987), 345-56. Mudrick, Marvin, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1968). Phillipps, K. C., Jane Austen's English (London: Deutsch, 1970). Piggott, Patrick, The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (London: Douglas Cleverdon, 1979). Poovey, Mary, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Sales, Roger, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994). Southam, B. C.,Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novel- ist's Development through the Surviving Papers (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1964). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, 1987).

xliv Select Bibliography Southam, B. C., Jane Austen and the Navy (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000). Stafford, Fiona, 'Jane Austen', in Michael O'Neill (ed.), Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Stewart, Maaja A., Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Tanner, Tony, Jane Austen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). Tave, Stuart, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Thompson, James, Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). Tuite, Clara, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Waldron, Mary, Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Wallace, Tara Ghoshal, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Wiltshire, John, Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Websites http://www.pemberley.com/ The Republic ofPemberley. http://www.jasna.org/ The Jane Austen Society of North America. http://www.ils.unc.edu/~mohas/austenpathfinder.htm Mohanty, Suchi, Jane Austen: A Pathfinder. Critical Works on Sense and Sensibility Boyd, Zelda, 'The Language of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sensibility', in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen: New Perspectives (Women and Literature, NS3; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), 142— 52- Clark, Robert (ed.), 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' (New Casebooks; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). Fergus, Jan, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel: 'Nronhanger Abbey', 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' (Basingstoke: Macmil- lan, 1983). Johnson, Claudia L., 'A \"Sweet Face as White as Death\": Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility', Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 22 (1989), 160-74.

Select Bibliography xlv Kaplan, Deborah, 'Achieving Authority: Jane Austen's First Published Novel', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1983), 531-51. Kaufmann, David, 'Law and Propriety, Sense and Sensibility: Austen on the Cusp of Modernity', ELH 59/2 (1992), 385, 408. McKillop, A. D., 'The Context of Sense and Sensibility', Rice Institute Pamphets, 44/1 (April 1957), 65-78. Watt, Ian, 'On Sense and Sensibility', rpt. of introduction to Sense and Sensibility (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), Ian Watt (ed.), Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 41-51. Film Version and Commentaries Sense and Sensibility, writer Emma Thompson, director Ang Lee, producer Lindsay Doran; with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet; Mirage-Columbia, 1995. Casey, Diana M., 'Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility as Gateway to Austen's Novel', in Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds.), Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 140-7. Gooneratne, Yasmine, 'Making Sense: Jane Austen on the Screen', in Heinz Antor and Kevin L. Cope (eds.), Intercultural Encounters (Stud- ies in English Literatures; Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1999), 259—66. Harris, Jocelyn, review of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Clueless, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 8 (1996), 427-30. Samuelian Kristin Flieger, ' \"Piracy is our only option\": Postfeminist Intervention in Sense and Sensibility', in Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds.), Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 148—58. Thompson, Emma, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film (with an introduction by Lindsay Doran; New York: Newmarket Press, 1996). Further Reading in Oxford World's Classics Austen, Jane, Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Emma, ed. James Kinsley and Adela Pinch. Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley and Jane Stabler. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, ed. John Davie and Claudia L. Johnson. Persuasion, ed. John Davie and Deidre Lynch. Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley and Fiona Stafford. Austen-Leigh, James Edward, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland.

A CHRONOLOGY OF JANE AUSTEN i?75 Life Historical and Cultural Background (16 Dec.) born in Steventon, American War of Independence begins. 1776 Hampshire, seventh child of '778 Revd George Austen (1731- American Declaration of 1779 1805), Rector of Steventon Independence; James Cook's third and Deane, and Cassandra Pacific voyage. 1781 Austen, nee Leigh (1739— France enters war on side of American 1782 1827) revolutionaries. '783 Frances Burney,Evelina Birth of youngest brother, Britain at war with Spain; siege of Charles (1779—1852); eldest Gibraltar (to 1783); Samuel brother James (1765-1819) Crompton's spinning mule goes to St John's College, revolutionizes textile production. Oxford; distant cousin Thomas Knight II and wife Warren Hastings deposes Raja of Catherine, of Godmersham in Benares and seizes treasure from Kent, visit Steventon and take Nabob of Oudh. close interest in brother Edward (1767—1852) Frances Burney, Cecilia Cousin Eliza Hancock William Gilpin, Observations on the (thought by some to be natural River Wye daughter of Warren Hastings) William Cowper, Poems marries Jean-Francois Capot American independence conceded at de Feuillide in France Peace of Versailles; Pitt becomes Prime Austens put on first amateur Minister. theatricals JA, sister Cassandra (1773— 1845), and cousin Jane Cooper are tutored by Mrs Cawley in Oxford then Southampton until they fall ill with typhoid fever; death of aunt Jane Cooper from typhoid; brother Edward formally adopted by the

Chronology xlvii Life Historical and Cultural Background Knights; JA's mentor, Anne Lefroy, moves into neighbourhood 1784 Performance of Sheridan's India Act imposes some parliamentary The Rivals at Steventon control on East India Company; Prince Regent begins to build Brighton Pavilion; death of Samuel Johnson. 1785 Attends Abbey House School, William Cowper, The Task Reading, with Cassandra 1786 Brother Francis (1774—1865) William Gilpin, Observations, Relative enters Royal Naval Academy, Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty . . . Portsmouth; brother Edward particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of on Grand Tour (to 1790); JA Cumberland, and Westmoreland and Cassandra leave school for good 1787 Starts writing 'Juvenilia' (to American constitution signed. 1793); cousin Eliza de Feuillide visits Steventon; performance of Susannah Centlivre's The Wonder at Steventon 1788 The Chances and Tom Thumb Warren Hastings impeached for performed at Steventon; corruption in India; George Ill's first brother Henry (1771—1850) spell of madness. goes to St John's College, Oxford; brother Francis sails to East Indies on HMS Perseverance; cousins Eliza de Feuillide and Philadelphia Walter attend Hastings's trial 1789 James and Henry in Oxford Fall of the Bastille marks beginning of produce periodical, The French Revolution. Loiterer (to MAT. i79o);JA begins lifelong friendship with Martha Lloyd and sister Mary when their mother rents Deane Parsonage 1790 Qune) completes 'Love and Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Freindship' Revolution in France [Mary Wollstonecraft], Vindication of the Rights of Men 1791 Brother Charles enters Royal Parliament rejects bill to abolish slave Naval Academy, Portsmouth; trade. Edward marries Elizabeth James Boswell, Life of Johnson Bridges and they live at Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Rowling, Kent Forest

xlviii Chronology 1792 Life Historical and Cultural Background 1793 Writes 'Lesley Castle' and France declared a republic; Warren 1794 'Evelyn', and begins Hastings acquitted. 'Catharine, or the Bower'; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the 1795 Lloyds leave Deane to make Rights of Woman 1796 way for James and first wife, Clara Reeve, Plans of Education 1797 Anne Matthew; cousin Jane Cooper marries Capt. Thomas Williams, RN; sister Cassandra engaged to Revd Tom Fowle Writes last of 'Juvenilia'; birth Execution of Louis XVI of France and of eldest nieces, Fanny and Marie Antoinette; revolutionary Anna, daughters of brothers 'Terror' in Paris; Britain declares war Edward and James; brother on France. Henry joins Oxford Militia Probably working on Lady Suspension of Habeas Corpus; Susan; Cousin Eliza de 'Treason Trials' of radicals abandoned Feuillide's husband by government when juries refuse to guillotined in Paris convict; failure of harvests keeps food prices high. Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho Writes 'Elinor and Marianne' George Ill's coach stoned; Pitt's 'Two (first draft of Sense and Acts' enforce repression of radical Sensibility); death of James's dissent. wife; JA flirts with Tom Lefroy, as recorded in first surviving letter Visits Edward at Rowling; Frances Burney, Camilla (Oct.) begins 'First Regina Maria Roche, Children of the Impressions'; subscribes to Abbey Frances Burney's Camilla Jane West, A Gossip's Story Marriage of James to Mary Napoleon becomes commander of Lloyd; (Aug.) completes 'First French army; failure of French attempt Impressions'; Cassandra's to invade by landing in Wales; mutinies fiance dies of fever off Santo in British Navy, leaders hanged. Domingo; begins revision of Ann Radcliffe, The Italian 'Elinor and Marianne' into Sense and Sensibility; George Austen offers 'First Impressions' to publisher Cadell without success; Catherine Knight gives Edward possession of Godmersham; marriage of Henry and Eliza de Feuillide

Chronology xlix Life Historical and Cultural Background 1798 Starts to write 'Susan' (later Irish Rebellion; defeat of French fleet Nonhanger Abbey)', visits at Battle of the Nile; French army lands Godmersham; death in in Ireland; further suspension of driving accident of cousin Habeas Corpus. Lady Williams (Jane Cooper) Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers' Vows, translation of play by Kotzebue 1799 Visit to Bath; probably Napoleon becomes consul in France. finishes'Susan'; aunt, Mrs Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern Leigh-Perrot, charged with System of Female Education theft and imprisoned in Jane West, A Tale of the Times Ilchester Gaol 1800 Stays with Martha Lloyd at French conquer Italy; British capture Ibthorpe; trial and acquittal of Malta; food riots; first iron-frame Mrs Leigh-Perrot printing press; copyright law extended to Ireland. Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 1801 Austens move to Bath on Slave rebellion in Santo Domingo led George Austen's retirement; by Toussaint L'Ouverture; Nelson James and family move into defeats Danes at Battle of Copenhagen; Steventon Rectory; first of Act of Union joins Britain and Ireland. series of holidays in West Maria Edgeworth, Belinda Country (to 1804), during one of which thought to have had brief romantic involvement with a man who later died; Henry resigns from Oxford Militia and becomes banker and Army agent in London 1802 Visits Godmersham; accepts, L'Ouverture's slave rebellion crushed then the following morning by French; Peace of Amiens with refuses, proposal of marriage France; founding of William Cobbett's from Harris Bigg-Wither; Political Register. revises 'Susan' 1803 With brother Henry's help, Resumption of war with France. 'Susan' sold to publishers Crosby & Co. for £10 1804 Starts writing The Watsons', (Dec.) death of Anne Lefroy in riding accident 1805 (Jan.) death of George Austen; Battle of Trafalgar. stops working on The Watsons Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel 1806 Austens leave Bath; visit French blockade of Continental ports relations at Adlestrop and against British shipping; first steam- Stoneleigh; Martha Lloyd powered textile mill opens in becomes member of Austen Manchester.