Analysis Of Sense And Sensibility By Jane Austen

Throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime her most treasured relationship was with her older sister, Cassandra. Neither sister was married, though both were engaged, and their correspondences provide Austenian scholars with many insights. Austen began working on her manuscript for Sense and Sensibility the same year that Cassandra’s fiancé, Tom Fowle, passed away. Although there is no evidence to prove that Jane wrote Sense and Sensibility with her sister in mind, it is evident that she writes of a familial bond that she certainly felt with Cassandra. Many readers think of Jane Austen as a writer with a penchant for constructing sparkling, but Sense and Sensibility goes against that framework, providing us with underwhelming romances, overshadowed by the sisters’ relationship. Claudia Johnson argues that the reason Sense and Sensibility was not a huge critical success was because, “Pride and Prejudice was the model for what a novel by Jane Austen ought to be, and, set against that model, Sense and Sensibility came short,’ (Johnson, Sense and Sensibility, ix). As its title suggests, Sense and Sensibility is a novel about the intertwining of sense and sensibility in life, love and family. According to Cassandra, the roots of Sense and Sensibility can be found in an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne, which, most likely written in 1795, documented the correspondences between two sisters separated by marriage (Pride and Prejudice 407). In the late 1790s Austen rewrote this novel into the third person. Sense and Sensibility was met with positive criticism, specifically in the “British Critic” and the “Critical Review,” and was praised primarily for the characters and the morality which governed the story. Widely regarded as the most d...

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...e, allowing the narrator to mirror the opinions and voices of our protagonists. By infusing the narrative voice - a typically trustworthy figure - with the same sarcastic sentiments Elinor and Marianne share, Austen aligns her opinions with theirs. Historically, this would shed light on why Austen decided to refashion Elinor and Marianne to be about two unmarried sisters; it also gives light as to why the aut Some critics have argued that “Austen at last broke into the world of publication by melting into the generic background rather than by asserting her difference,” but those critics are missing the subtle feminist beliefs, which Austen often uses, in the story of Elinor and Marianne. By positing the two sisters as our protagonists against the “target [of the] ‘unfeeling, unintelligent world’ in which the sisters have to live,” we understand that they are not f