THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF

JANE AUSTEN

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Cambridge University Press and the General Editor
Janet Todd wish to express their gratitude to the
University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen for
providing funding towards the creation of this edition.
Their generosity made possible the employment of
Antje Blank as research assistant throughout the project.

THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF

JANE AUSTEN

GENERAL EDITOR: Janet Todd, University of Aberdeen

EDITORIAL BOARD
Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
Alistair Duckworth, University of Florida
Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta
Claudia Johnson, Princeton University
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Deirdre Le Faye, independent scholar
Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
Juvenilia edited by Peter Sabor
Northanger Abbey edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye
Sense and Sensibility edited by Edward Copeland
Pride and Prejudice edited by Pat Rogers
Mansfield Park edited by John Wiltshire
Emma edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan
Persuasion edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank
Later Manuscripts edited by Brian Southam
Jane Austen in Context edited by Janet Todd

Forest scene from Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views (Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty): Illustrated by the Scenes of New-Forest in Hampshire, by William Gilpin (London, 1791), volume I, p. 5. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

JANE AUSTEN

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Edited by

Edward Copeland

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by
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© Cambridge University Press 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and
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no reproduction of any part may take place without
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First published 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Austen, Jane, 1775–1817.
Sense and sensibility / Jane Austen; edited by Edward Copeland.
p. cm. – (The Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen)
ISBN-13: 978-0-521-82436-1
ISBN-10: 0-521-82436-2
1. Inheritance and succession – Fiction. 2. Social classes – Fiction.
3. Young women – Fiction. 4. Sisters – Fiction. 5. England – Fiction.
6. Domestic fiction. I. Copeland, Edward. II. Title. II. Series.
PR4034.S4  2006
823′.7 – dc22   2005032569

ISBN-13 978-0-521-82436-1 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-82436-2 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

Jane Austen wrote to be read and reread. ‘[A]n artist cannot do anything slovenly,’ she remarked to her sister Cassandra. Her subtle, crafted novels repay close and repeated attention to vocabulary, syntax and punctuation as much as to irony and allusion; yet the reader can take immediate and intense delight in their plots and characters. As a result Austen has a unique status among early English novelists – appreciated by the academy and the general public alike. What Henry Crawford remarks about Shakespeare in Mansfield Park has become equally true of its author: she ‘is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. [Her] thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with [her] by instinct.’ This edition of the complete oeuvre of the published novels and manuscript works is testament to Austen’s exceptional cultural and literary position. As well as attempting to establish an accurate and authoritative text, it provides a full contextual placing of the novels.

   The editing of any canonical writer is a practice which has been guided by many conflicting ideologies. In the early twentieth century, editors, often working alone, largely agreed that they were producing definitive editions, although they used eclectic methods and often revised the text at will. Later in the century, fidelity to the author’s creative intentions was paramount, and the emphasis switched to devising an edition that would as far as possible represent the final authorial wishes. By the 1980s, however, the pursuit of the single perfected text had given way to the recording of multiple intentions of equal interest. Authors were seen to have changed, revised or recanted, or indeed to have directed various versions of their work towards different audiences. Consequently all states had validity and the text became a process rather than a fixed entity. With this approach came emphasis on the print culture in which the text appeared as well as on the social implications of authorship. Rather than being stages in the evolution of a single work, the various versions existed in their own right, all having something to tell.

   The Cambridge edition describes fully Austen’s early publishing history and provides details of composition, publication and publishers as well as printers and compositors where known. It accepts that many of the decisions concerning spelling, punctuation, capitalising, italicising and paragraphing may well have been the compositors’ rather than Austen’s but that others may represent the author’s own chosen style. For the novels published in Jane Austen’s lifetime the edition takes as its copytext the latest edition to which she might plausibly have made some contribution: that is, the first editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma and the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Where a second edition is used, all substantive and accidental changes between editions are shown on the page so that the reader can reconstruct the first edition, and the dominance of either first or second editions is avoided. For the two novels published posthumously together, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the copytext is the first published edition.

   Our texts as printed here remain as close to the copytexts as possible: spelling and punctuation have not been modernised and inconsistencies in presentation have not been regularised. The few corrections and emendations made to the texts – beyond replacing dropped or missing letters – occur only when an error is very obvious indeed, and/or where retention might interrupt reading or understanding: for example, missing quotation marks have been supplied, run-on words have been separated and repeated words excised. All changes to the texts, substantive and accidental, have been noted in the final apparatus. Four of the six novels appeared individually in three volumes; we have kept the volume divisions and numbering. In the case of Persuasion, which was first published as volumes 3 and 4 of a four-volume set including Northanger Abbey, the volume division has been retained but volumes 3 and 4 have been relabelled volumes 1 and 2.

   For all these novels the copytext has been set against two other copies of the same edition. Where there have been any substantive differences, further copies have been examined; details of these copies are given in the initial textual notes within each volume, along with information about the printing and publishing context of this particular work. The two volumes of the edition devoted to manuscript writings divide the works between the three juvenile notebooks on the one hand and all the remaining manuscript writings on the other. The juvenile notebooks and Lady Susan have some resemblance to the published works, being fair copies and following some of the conventions of publishing. The other manuscript writings consist in part of fictional works in early drafts, burlesques and autograph and allograph copies of occasional verses and prayers. The possible dating of the manuscript work, as well as the method of editing, is considered in the introductions to the relevant volumes. The cancelled chapters of Persuasion are included in an appendix to the volume Persuasion; they appear both in a transliteration and in facsimile. For all the manuscript works, their features as manuscripts have been respected and all changes and erasures either reproduced or noted.

   In all the volumes superscript numbers in the texts indicate endnotes. Throughout the edition we have provided full annotations to give clear and informative historical and cultural information to the modern reader while largely avoiding critical speculation; we have also indicated words which no longer have currency or have altered in meaning in some way. The introductions give information concerning the genesis and immediate public reception of the text; they also indicate the most significant stylistic and generic features. A chronology of Austen’s life appears in each volume. More information about the life, Austen’s reading, her relationship to publication, the print history of the novels and their critical reception through the centuries, as well as the historical, political, intellectual and religious context in which she wrote is available in the final volume of the edition: Jane Austen in Context.

   I would like to thank Cambridge University Library for supplying the copytexts for the six novels. I am most grateful to Linda Bree at Cambridge University Press for her constant support and unflagging enthusiasm for the edition and to Maartje Scheltens and Alison Powell for their help at every stage of production. I owe the greatest debt to my research assistant Antje Blank for her rare combination of scholarly dedication, editorial skills and critical discernment.

Janet Todd
University of Aberdeen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As Jane Austen wrote to her sister in October 1813, ‘Like Harriot Byron I ask, what am I to do with my Gratitude?’ When I review the long list of friends and colleagues to whom I owe thanks for their assistance with this edition of Sense and Sensibility, I find myself in the same position. A good place to begin, of course, is with David Gilson’s indispensable Bibliography, but also for generous offprints of recent work and for advice in the early stages of text collations. Likewise I have had not only the advantage of Deirdre Le Faye’s scholarship, but her ready advice. I am grateful, too, for Jocelyn Harris’ generous contributions to the explanatory notes and for Kathryn Sutherland’s steadying hand at the earliest stages of the collation of the two editions. Janet Todd, Linda Bree and Antje Blank have read and reread the Introduction and Explanatory notes with useful suggestions and remarkable patience. The unstinting assistance of Margaret Mathies in the collation of the first and second editions and in the organisation and recording of their variants has been invaluable. Her formidable editorial skills and her meticulous proofreading have provided a steady light at the end of the tunnel.

   Authors to whom I must register my gratitude for their previous work on Sense and Sensibility are, first of all, those previous editors on whose editions I have leaned heavily for support: R. W. Chapman, naturally, but also recent editors Claire Lamont, Ros Ballaster, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd and Kathleen James-Cavan. I owe great debts to Oliver MacDonagh and Gene Ruoff for their research into the social context of Sense and Sensibility; to Eileen Spring, J. H. Treitel, Barbara English and John Saville for their knowledge of wills and entails; to Jan Fergus for her accounts of the contemporary publishing business; to Jocelyn Harris and Claudia Johnson for their rich familiarity with Austen’s reading; to John Wiltshire for his knowledge of contemporary medical practice; and to Irene Collins for her account of the mysteries of the English church in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the countless debts I owe for help with the explanatory notes, Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (1993) has to be mentioned as one of the handiest sources of practical information.

   The following institutions provided generous access to their early editions of Sense and Sensibility: the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the William Clark Memorial Library and the Charles E. Young Research Library, both of the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. The librarians at these institutions could not have been more helpful in arranging times to examine editions and in finding discreet places where word-for-word collations could take place with a minimum of disruption to other readers. I would also like to express my special thanks to the librarians at the Honnold/Mudd Libraries of the Claremont Colleges for allowing massive raids on their collection of Austen criticism and for going out of their way to procure books from other collections when they were needed. Finally, I want to express my appreciation for the generous support of Pomona College with a sabbatical leave to commence work on the project.

CHRONOLOGY

DEIRDRE LE FAYE

INTRODUCTION

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was at least fifteen years in the making: first conceived and written as Elinor and Marianne in 1795 (a date from family tradition), converted into Sense and Sensibility beginning in November 1797 from its previous epistolary form (also family memory), revised twelve years later in 1809 and 1810 with a view to publication, accepted by the publisher Thomas Egerton in the winter of 1810, and published, finally, on 30 October 1811.¹ This lengthy gestation period is of some significance. For one thing, the ideas and opinions of a twenty-year-old woman writing for family readings and family scrutiny get mixed up with the seasoned thoughts of a mature writer preparing a manuscript for publication. Moreover, traces of its conception years, the turbulent 1790s, coexist in the novel with traces of the years that divide it from its final revision for publication in 1809–10.² Revision dates that can be verified are drawn from Marianne’s recourse to the two-penny post in London, increased from one penny to two pennies in 1801, and the mention of Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805. By inference, other revisions were made in the last years before publication. During this long period there were major shifts in Austen’s life: the break-up of the Steventon home in 1801 for Mr Austen’s retirement to Bath, a retreat into confirmed spinsterhood in the following years, the sudden death of Mr Austen in 1805, a period of financial uncertainty and moving about for the three surviving Austen women, the expedient of sharing lodgings in Southampton with Francis’ family in 1806, punctuated by visits to Edward’s grand estate in Kent, and, finally, the move to Chawton cottage, arranged by Edward in 1809, the event that enabled the completion of the novel.

   Unstable and shifting in its sympathies and issues, Sense and Sensibility has long been treated as disappointing and odd, the red-headed stepchild of the Austen canon. Lady Bessborough in its year of first publication confessed that although Sense and Sensibility had amused her, ‘it ends stupidly’; Henry Crabb Robinson noted on rereading it in 1839, ‘I still think it one of the poorest of Miss Austen’s novels’; and Reginald Farrer remarked in 1917, ‘nobody will choose this as his favourite Jane Austen’.³ Here is consistency of response that makes it all the more remarkable and gratifying to find that in recent years Sense and Sensibility has emerged from its shadowed position among the six novels to find both popular and special appeal, particularly among feminists, historians and reader-response critics.

PUBLICATION

Although Sense and Sensibility was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to reach publication, it was not the first to be offered for that honour. In previous tries, First Impressions, the initial version of Pride and Prejudice, was refused by Cadell and Davies by return post in November 1797, and Susan, the first version of Northanger Abbey, was sold in the spring of 1803, but never deemed worthy of publication by the publisher, Richard Crosby.⁴ Jane Austen’s determination to see Sense and Sensibility in print can be estimated by the financial risk she chose to ensure that it happened. There were four general ways to publication open to her: two of them – publication at her own expense and publication by subscription – were neither of them suitable, and the other two – publication on commission and sale of copyright – came with serious financial risks.

   Publication at the author’s expense had been famously successful for Hannah More, her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809) bringing the author £2,000 in a single year, but More, unlike Austen, had £5,000 of her own money to invest in costs, as well as influential friends and an established reputation as a public figure to promote the book.⁵ As for subscription publication, a process in which the buyer of the novel paid an elevated price to be listed in the first edition as a ‘Subscriber’, this had been a notably successful route for Burney’s Camilla (1796), clearing £2,000 for the author, but Burney had two successful novels behind her and, like Hannah More, she also had influential friends to forward the subscription.⁶

   The two more feasible routes for Austen, sale of the copyright or publication on commission, each had its own problems. Sale of copyright, the preferred and more prestigious scheme at the time, provided immediate funds, no waiting for profits and a guaranteed amount of money. But the copyright for first novels from unknown authors brought very little money. Crosby’s payment of only £10 for the copyright of Susan was not unusual – Lane’s Minerva Press paid as low as £5 for a first novel. Perhaps a publisher more accustomed to publishing and promoting novels than Thomas Egerton, the eventual publisher of Sense and Sensibility, might have seen the value of Sense and Sensibility and offered a more reasonable amount for the copyright, but Austen’s experience with Susan could not have been encouraging. There was also a risk that a novel could prove popular and surpass the price of the copyright in its sales. Frances Burney’s experience with Evelina (1778), her first novel, was infamous. She sold the copyright to the publisher Lowndes for 20 guineas and the novel cleared £800 in a single year, with this profit designated to Lowndes alone.⁷

   Austen’s decision to publish Sense and Sensibility on commission with Thomas Egerton was not an unwise way to put her first novel into print, and in the event the £140 that she received from the first edition of Sense and Sensibility was a highly respectable showing. The established novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) regularly received around £150 for the copyright to her novels, or £50 a volume, though she complained bitterly that others got more.⁸ Susan Ferrier (1782–1854) was paid by the publisher John Blackwood £150 for the copyright to her first novel Marriage (1818), but that was after Walter Scott had altered the price structures for novels, and even then it was a previously unheard of price for a first novel.⁹ Austen’s triumph, joyfully expressed to her brother Francis, had been stamped and certified by the market itself: ‘You will be glad to hear that every Copy of S.& S. is sold & that it has brought me £140—besides the Copyright, if that sh^d ever be of any value’ (6 July 1813).¹⁰ In her next venture, the publication of Pride and Prejudice, she did sell Egerton the copyright of the novel, having stipulated £150 as the fair price, a reasonable expectation, but for whatever failure of nerve she accepted only £110 for what turned out to be her most popular work.¹¹

   The proofs of the first edition of Sense and Sensibility were in Austen’s hands by April 1811, but its publication was not advertised until 30 October, price 15s., in an advertisement that appeared in the Star on 7 and again on 27 November, and was repeated in the Morning Chronicle on 31 October and on 7, 9 and 28 November. It is not known for certain how many copies were printed, though an earlier estimate of 1,000 copies has been revised downwards by recent research suggesting that from 500 to 750 copies of a first novel on commission would have been normal publishing practice for John Murray.¹² All three volumes of Austen’s novel were printed by Charles Roworth. The work was promoted as a ‘New Novel’, an ‘Interesting Novel’ (a love story) and an ‘Extraordinary Novel’, besides being written by ‘a Lady’, ‘Lady—’ and ‘Lady A—’. The first edition was sold out by July 1813, and by September of that year Austen had reported to her brother Francis that there was to be a second. Egerton advertised the new edition in the Star on 29 October 1813, at 18s. in ‘board’s; (pasteboard covers).¹³ Austen’s revisions and corrections to the text were made, possibly, as James Kinsley has suggested, from a copy of the first edition without the opportunity to make corrections from proof, a situation that may explain the large number of printer’s errors to be found in the second edition.¹⁴ Roworth was responsible for the printing of this edition as well. Austen greeted the second edition with an eye anxiously turned towards making its expenses, that is, towards covering the costs of paper and printing for which her brother Henry had either already paid Egerton or guaranteed him. ‘I shall owe dear Henry a great deal of Money for Printing &c.’, she writes, ‘I hope M^rs Fletcher will indulge herself with S & S’;¹⁵ and again later, ‘Since I wrote last, my 2^d Edit. has stared me in the face.—Mary tells me that Eliza means to buy it. I wish she may . . . I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable Duty to them, so as they do it’.¹⁶ Her first income from the second edition, about £30, was received in March 1815.¹⁷ Later payments are recorded in her note, ‘Profits of my Novels’, of £12. 15s. in March 1816, and, a year later on 7 March 1817, £19. 13s.¹⁸ This last influx of money stimulated her to something like giddiness in a letter to her niece Caroline: ‘I hope Edw^d is not idle. No matter what becomes of the Craven Exhibition [an Oxford scholarship] provided he goes on with his Novel. In that, he will find his true fame & his true wealth. That will be the honourable Exhibition which no V. Chancellor can rob him of.—I have just rec^d nearly twenty pounds myself on the 2^d Edit: of S and S—which gives me this fine flow of Literary Ardour’.¹⁹

RECEPTION

Jane Austen had placed her treasure on the same table of the circulating library with the products of Rachel Hunter, Charlotte Smith and the Mrs Sykes of Margiana (1808) whose novel she was reading, with pleasure, during her final revisions of Sense and Sensibility.²⁰ Her niece Anna’s casual rejection of Sense and Sensibility when she saw it at the Alton library, ‘rubbish I am sure from the title’, must have prompted some amused, if uneasy, reflections in the author.²¹ Those who actually read the novel, however, were impressed with its superiority to the usual stock of the circulating libraries. Princess Charlotte had ‘heard much’ of the novel by 1 January 1812, and reported on 22 January, ‘“Sence and Sencibility” [sic] I have just finished reading; it certainly is interesting, & you feel quite one of the company. I think Maryanne [sic] & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &c, however remain very like. I must say it interested me much.’²² Mary Russell Mitford’s ‘Literary Pocket-Book’ for 28 November 1819, simply notes: ‘Read Sense & Sensibility—very good’.²³ A French translation, Raison et Sensibilité, ou Les Deux Manières D’Aimer, by Isabelle de Montolieu (1751–1832) appeared in 1815 with an introduction filled with praise for the two heroines, especially for Elinor, the perfect model for ‘jeunes personnes’ and someone you would like to have for a friend. The minor characters are painted with such ‘vérité ’ that you think you know them.²⁴

   The two brief reviews in the English press were equally favourable. The earlier of the two appeared in the Critical Review in February 1812, three months after publication, and the second in the British Critic three months later, in May.²⁵ Both recommended Sense and Sensibility as above the customary fare of the circulating library – ‘a work which has so well pleased us’, said the critic for the Critical Review, and a ‘performance’ the reviewer for the British Critic admired so much as to lament his inability to include it ‘among our principal articles’ in the journal. The Critical Review valued the new novel on two counts, distinguishing the plot from the predictable formulae of the contemporary novel, where readers know, ‘after reading the first three pages’, ‘how they will end’, and separating it as well from novels where ‘something new’, or sensational, is pressed into service. Instead, Sense and Sensibility was ‘a genteel novel’, like a genteel dramatic comedy, with an author, ‘who displays a knowledge of character, and very happily blends a great deal of good sense with the lighter matter’, the good sense justifying it as ‘a most excellent lesson to young ladies to curb that violent sensibility which too often leads to misery, and always to inconvenience and ridicule’. The British Critic’s reviewer especially appreciated the characters, ‘happily delineated and admirably sustained’, but also felt it incumbent to offer the novel’s social and moral utility as the final recommendation: ‘We will, however, detain our female friends no longer than to assure them, that they may peruse these volumes not only with satisfaction but with real benefits, for they may learn from them, if they please, many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life, exemplified in a very pleasing and entertaining narrative.’ Paradoxically, as Clara Tuite notes, both these early reviewers of Sense and Sensibility seem mildly unsettled at not finding the clichés they had expected, hastening with their reassurances to prospective female readers, or their minders, of its socially normative status.²⁶

   The two best-known early reviews of Austen’s work, a review by Walter Scott (1771–1832) of Emma in the Quarterly Review (March 1816), and a review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Richard Whately (1787–1863) in the Quarterly Review (January 1821), bear very slightly on the critical history of Sense and Sensibility.²⁷ Scott’s review scarcely mentioned Austen’s first novel and Whately’s did not touch on Sense and Sensibility at all, but concerned itself with the issue of Austen’s realism, her fiction’s relation to the probable and the possible, topics however that surface repeatedly in later discussions of that novel. Scott, like the two earliest reviewers of Austen’s first published novel, takes note of Austen’s work as a break with the conventional fiction of ‘watering-places and circulating libraries’ through its introduction of the familiar appearances of every day life. In this, Scott argues famously, ‘she stands almost alone’. Despite his praise, however, the ‘ordinary life’ of Sense and Sensibility unnerves him. Austen’s rejection of the romantic Willoughby for Marianne’s other suitor, a ‘very respectable and somewhat too serious admirer’, causes Scott to turn aside from his main task, the review of Emma, for a wholly unexpected addendum concerning Sense and Sensibility. Here he registers his lingering disappointment in the conclusion of Austen’s first novel:

Who is it, that in his youth has felt a virtuous attachment, however romantic or however unfortunate, but can trace back to its influence much that his character may possess of what is honourable, dignified, and disinterested? . . . [They] are neither less wise nor less worthy members of society for having felt, for a time, the influence of a passion which has been well qualified as the “tenderest, noblest and best”.

(pp. 200–1)

   After Scott, the next resurgence of critical interest in Sense and Sensibility followed the reissue of Austen’s novels in Bentley’s Standard Novels in 1833. There had been no further printing of Austen’s novels in England after 1818 until Bentley’s series, his reprints costing less than half the original price for the three-volume sets. Sense and Sensibility was advertised on 28 December 1832, although dated 1833 on the title page. In Philadelphia in February 1833, Carey and Lea published Sense and Sensibility, probably 1,250 copies, but edited for an American readership with emendations of ‘Oh Lord’ changed to ‘Oh!’, ‘Good God’ to ‘Why!’, ‘Good heavens’ to ‘Is it possible’ and ‘Lord’ changed to ‘Truly’.²⁸ The next significant edition of Sense and Sensibility was issued by Routledge in 1849, and reprinted without change until 1883 when all six novels were reset. In 1892 J. M. Dent published a set of the novels in ten volumes, edited by Reginald Brimley Johnson, a landmark as the first edition of the novels to have any editorial matter and according to Gilson, the first ‘to acknowledge the existence of distinct early editions, and to make any attempt at serious consideration of the text’.²⁹ After the 1890s there was a proliferation of editions of the novels, many of them illustrated.

CRITICISM: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The general reaction to Jane Austen’s novels in Britain largely took the form of an appraisal and appreciation of her characters, but with the influence of the Reform Bill of 1832 weighing heavily on contemporary culture, the response was coloured by the sensibilities of a newly minted, politically empowered middle class. Readers of Sense and Sensibility, for example, signed on to membership in the upper reaches of this now highly self-conscious class in an article entitled ‘Miss Austen’, appearing in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (July, August 1866): ‘Jane Austen [wrote] like a cultivated lady’, claims the writer, and, ‘Miss Austen, though she may not be much read by the general public, is, perhaps, more completely appreciated than ever by minds of the highest culture . . . Who does not know Lady Middleton?’³⁰ W. F. Pollock, in Fraser’s Magazine (January 1861),³¹ makes a particular point of the moral suitability of Austen’s arrangements of class hierarchies:

Mr. Palmer, a gentleman when he pleases, but spoiled by living with people inferior to himself, and discontented, even to rudeness, with his silly wife, is brought out with much humour. We properly feel how objectionable are the Miss Steeles, with their vulgar cunning and admiration for smart beaux. We despise and shrink from the elder Mrs. Ferrars, with her pride, ill-nature, and narrow mind. We cordially respect and like the excellent Colonel Brandon . . .

(p. 33)

The marriage of Robert Ferrars to Lucy Steele, ‘his underbred’ wife, is ‘tolerably happy’, says Pollock wryly, ‘the two low natures suiting each other too well to be long separated’. Moreover, ‘This is as it all would be in real life’, he claims, ‘that transcript of an imagined portion of which she has selected for consideration’ (p. 33).

   On the other hand, there are other early Victorian critics, albeit at the margins of the critical establishment, who find in Sense and Sensibility literary powers beyond its recommendations of a specific social order. An American writer, J. F. Kirk (1824–1904), in an otherwise plodding echo of common British opinion, confesses in the North American Review (July 1853) that ‘Sense and Sensibility, the earliest of her stories, is the least pleasing of them all; yet in none does she exhibit so profound an insight into human nature; and we have never read the work without astonishment that the most subtle play of motives, and the most delicate traits of character should have been thus faithfully portrayed by a woman at the age of twenty-five.’³²

   Julia Kavanagh (1824–77) recognises the emotional intensity of this novel in her English Women of Letters (1863)³³ as well, but she also finds remarkable technical facility in Sense and Sensibility, a fresh concept in the critical consideration of this novel, ‘in some respects . . . unsurpassed by any of her works’. She praises in some detail the significance of Austen’s ‘really formidable powers’ in her presentation of character: ‘Miss Austen’s great forte [is] the delineation of commonplace foolishness, especially distinct from eccentricity . . . Observe foolish people. They never speak otherwise; the simplest logic of conversation is unknown to them . . . What analogy does Mrs. Jennings see between cholicky gout and disappointed love? By what obscure mental process does she come to the conclusion that what is good for the one must be good for the other?’ (p. 201).

   Such attentive analysis of Austen’s novelistic skill, however, is interrupted in 1870 by the publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen by Austen’s nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh (1798–1874), the son of Austen’s eldest brother James and his second wife Mary Lloyd.³⁴ Austen-Leigh’s Memoir assumed a critical transparency in the work of his aunt – ‘all is the unadorned reflection of the natural object’ (p. 197) – that gave readers of her novels the happy licence to identify with Austen and her characters as though they were all friends.³⁵ This tendency, it must be said, was already in evidence as early as 1833 when Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy writing in her Boston diary, described a particularly trying excursion to a rainy night party: ‘Dire was the debating & . . . therefore literally packing up our clothes in a bandbox, (tho’ no Dashwood was at hand to receive—or rather deceive us,) we bade adieu to Sophia.’³⁶ But after the publication of the Memoir in 1870 (enlarged in 1871), Austen-Leigh’s version of his dear Aunt Jane – that her novels were ‘a genuine home-made article’ (p. 142), that they were ‘like photographs’ (p. 197) and that they were written solely ‘for her own amusement’ (p. 172) – supplied the foundations for a profitable and dominant genre of Austen popularisation that Henry James, who was himself an occasional adherent, termed ‘pleasant twaddle’.³⁷

   For those critics who took up their pens against this fantasy, Sense and Sensibility proved a highly useful weapon. Richard Simpson (1820–76), though he makes an obligatory bow to ‘Aunt Jane’, rejects Austen-Leigh’s version of the amateur writer in his review of the Memoir in the North British Review (April 1870).³⁸ He makes use of Mrs Palmer, of all people, to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of Austen’s craft as a novelist, ‘how to represent the realities of the natural scale in the imitations of the artificial scale – how to imitate the song of birds on the gamut of the pianoforte’. As a ‘fool simple’, he explains, Mrs Palmer’s ‘nullity is represented first by her total want of intellectual discrimination . . . in her failure to see the contradiction of contradictories’. He cites her indignant speech concerning Willoughby’s betrayal of Marianne (vol. 2, ch. 10) as ‘the foolish sayings of which a clever man might be proud’, noting that ‘if any real Mrs. Palmer could in fact string together contradictions so readily she would soon lose her character as a mere simpleton’ (p. 146). Only Miss Bates from Emma, he says, can surpass Mrs Palmer.

   Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) also resists the charms of the Austen-Leigh Memoir in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1870),³⁹ suggesting that Jane Austen’s character as an author is not as ‘it appears at the first glance, but one full of subtle power, keenness, finesse, and self-restraint’, and noting with some asperity of her own that Austen’s ‘feminine cynicism’ reveals itself as, ‘the soft and silent disbelief of a spectator who has to look at a great many things without showing any outward discomposure, and who has learned to give up any moral classification of social sins, and to place them instead on the level of absurdities’. Austen’s quiet acceptance of this state of affairs, suggests Oliphant, ‘is not charity, and its toleration has none of the sweetness which proceeds from that highest of Christian graces . . . but [is] the faculty of seeing her brother clearly all round as if he were a statue, identifying all his absurdities, quietly jeering at him, smiling with eyes without committing the indecorum of laughter’ (p. 295). Nevertheless in Sense and Sensibility she finds an edge of satire that she considers thoroughly repellent: ‘The Miss Steeles are simply vulgar and disagreeable, and we can scarcely be grateful for the vivid drawing of two persons whom we should be sorry ever to see again, and who really contribute nothing to our amusement’ (p. 302).

   Attempts made by Henry Morley (1822–94) in an essay in Nineteenth-Century Literature (1877) and George Pellew (1859–92) in his study Jane Austen’s Novels (1883) to place Austen’s work in the context of contemporary intellectual traditions fell on deaf ears.⁴⁰ Even the most perceptive of critics continued to focus almost solely on Austen’s characters. Agnes Repplier (1855–1950), after making the usual disclaimer for Austen’s first novel in her Essays in Miniature (1892),⁴¹ that Sense and Sensibility is ‘by no means the best of Austen’s novels’, makes John and Fanny Dashwood’s treatment of his half-sisters in the second chapter of Sense and Sensibility the keystone of her larger argument about Jane Austen’s representation of character, that she reveals ‘to us with merciless distinctness the secret springs that move a human heart’. John and Fanny, she writes, ‘betray themselves at every word, and stand convicted on their own evidence’ (p. 62). The subtle malice of Fanny Dashwood’s mind also occupies Alice Meynell (1847–1922) in the Pall Mall Gazette (16 February 1894)⁴² where she cites Fanny’s debate with herself as to whether or not to offer a carriage ride to her sisters-in-law in London: ‘Who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be her’s. But that was not enough’ (vol. 2, ch. 14). In the end, however, Austen’s unsparing rigour of judgment, her ‘exceeding cynicism’, as Meynell terms it, causes her, very much like Margaret Oliphant, to draw back from Sense and Sensibility with profound distaste. The steady harshness of this novel, specifically the scene with Lady Middleton’s spoiled little Annamaria and its sugar plums and apricot marmalade (vol. 1, ch. 21), becomes too much: ‘The novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little girl of three’, she complains, ‘She sharpens her pen over the work’ (p. 66).

CRITICISM: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

With the First World War and changes in social mores, the sexual psychology of characters in Sense and Sensibility attracted the critics. In marking the centenary of Jane Austen’s death in the Quarterly Review (July 1917),⁴³ Reginald Farrer claims that the fate of Marianne Dashwood proves, ‘that she could tear a passion to tatters with the best of them’. The novelist George Moore marvels at Austen’s representation of Marianne’s sexual frustration: ‘We all know how terrible these disappointments are, and how they crush and break up life, for the moment reducing it to dust; the sufferer neither sees nor hears, but walks like a somnambulist through an empty world . . . [And] it is here that we find the burning human heart in English prose narrative for the first, and, alas, for the last time.’⁴⁴ William Empson agrees: ‘Marianne can “scream with agony” and be convincing about it’, he writes.⁴⁵ As for the restraint and social decorum so valued in her novels by her nephew in his Memoir, Moore presents his new perspective on her work in deliberately confrontational terms: ‘We do not go into society for the pleasure of conversation, but for the pleasure of sex, direct or indirect. Everything is arranged for this end: the dresses, the dances, the food, the wine, the music! Of this truth we are all conscious now, but should we have discovered it without Miss Austen’s help?’ (pp. 60–1).

   The beginning of the twentieth-century academic critical tradition of Austen studies, however, must be dated to R. W. Chapman’s edition of her novels, published in 1923, and to Mary Lascelles’ study of the next decade, Jane Austen and her Art (1939). Chapman’s edition with its scholarly apparatus gave Austen the status of a literary monument. As for Sense and Sensibility, Lascelles’ sympathetic account of its composition drawn from family records, internal evidence and social and literary contexts gave fresh impetus to reassessing its usual position as last among the favourites of Austen readers.⁴⁶ Lascelles’ great contribution was to situate Sense and Sensibility in relation to Austen’s other works, comparing its literary satire, for example, with that in Northanger Abbey: ‘Now the mockery of the world of illusion in Sense and Sensibility has not this pretty intricacy, and variety of pattern, but it is subtler, more allusive, and it is more closely interwoven with the fabric of the story’ (p. 64).

   For galvanic effect however, Marvin Mudrick’s post-war study, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952),⁴⁷ can hardly be overestimated for its influence on mid-century criticism of Sense and Sensibility. D. W. Harding’s essay ‘Regulated Hatred’ (1940)⁴⁸ had opened the way for Mudrick’s revisionist thesis, but had not dealt with this novel. Mudrick’s opening salvo takes issue with the delighted discovery of passion in Sense and Sensibility by the Edwardians to argue exactly the opposite position, to insist on Jane Austen’s ‘decisive remoteness from feeling’ in the novel. The significant shift in emphasis, away from Jane Austen’s characters onto Jane Austen herself and her own emotional shortcomings set the cat among the pigeons. Whether by virtue of Sense and Sensibility’s first place chronologically in the Austen canon or, perhaps, by its own edgy attractions and as his most powerful example, Sense and Sensibility was suddenly catapulted into a pre-eminent importance in the ensuing discussion of Austen’s work. ‘Irony’, writes Mudrick, is ‘Jane Austen’s defense against feeling’, the evidence of her own narrow, embittered spinster’s life, and the very spirit that informs Elinor’s repressed personality. Marianne’s passionate character rises unbidden and unwelcome, from ‘an unacknowledged depth of her author’s spirit’ (p. 91). Hence, argues Mudrick, ‘Marianne must be humiliated and destroyed’ by a vengeful author. In effect, it is Austen’s own psychological deficiency that governs the perverse emotional life of the novel. At the conclusion of this work, ‘Marianne, the life and center of the novel, has been betrayed’, he claims, ‘and not by Willoughby’ (pp. 91–3). The significance of Mudrick’s provocative challenge lies in the variety of critical responses it produced, especially in relation to future approaches to Sense and Sensibility.

   One of its first effects was to return the consideration of Sense and Sensibility to the origins of its philosophical and literary traditions in the eighteenth century. Ian Watt, one of the earliest of Mudrick’s critics, rejects the centrality Mudrick grants to Marianne in the emotional plot of the novel to argue that ‘Jane Austen was not a Romantic’, but the child of eighteenth-century rationalism, and that rather than any alleged sexual repression the philosophical antithesis of the title held the key to the novel’s emotional conflict. Critics swept into the space announced by Watt to focus their arguments on the importance of the conventions of the oppositions of the title, or, in a different direction, on the complexity of Austen’s deconstruction of the title. Such literary and philosophical contextualisation threw surprising new lights on the heroines, bringing Elinor, Mudrick’s repressed and mean-spirited sister, into the central position as the passionate, emotional heroine, a heroic figure thoroughly conscious of the nature of her own suffering, and sending Marianne off to the margins of the novel as the secondary sister. Elinor is the stoical Christian heroine of vaguely ‘Classical’ virtue; Marianne is pathologically ill, her fever the symbolic mirror of her psychological state. Elinor’s control of language provides her with a route to self-knowledge; Marianne’s abuse of language demonstrates her tenuous hold on reality. Elinor controls and manipulates social convention; Marianne is its helpless victim. Or, in another approach, the title’s seeming antithesis invites a mixing of opposites, a conundrum that must be worked out through an investment by each heroine in both more and less of sense and sensibility.⁴⁹

   This line of discourse was altered significantly in the early 1970s by two seminal works, Alistair Duckworth’s The Improvement of the Estate (1971) and Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). Both works were electrifying in their introduction of political contexts for Austen’s novels, a dimension that had never been so forcefully argued before, or with such breadth of reference.⁵⁰ Duckworth’s study places Marianne’s sensibility in the company of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s sentimental rationalism, David Hume’s empiricism, Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy, and J.-J. Rousseau’s influence as a philosopher of ‘natural goodness’ (pp. 106–7). On the conservative side, Elinor, Austen’s favoured sister, is allied with Edmund Burke, supporting the validity of ‘received principles of ethical and social conduct’ (p. 111). Against these, Marianne’s misplaced sympathies, associated with radical principles, are shown to be in error.

   Butler, whose study also reads Austen’s novel as politically conservative, sets Sense and Sensibility directly in the company of the anti-Jacobin novels of the 1790s, with their formulaic dual heroines, the one unstable and sentimental, the other rational and religious, the two set in a didactic opposition. Marianne’s fate follows from the enforced contrasts between the two heroines that the genre demands, but Butler also argues that the feelings of Elinor are tested as well through a political ideology that understands the encouragement of private feelings as inherently subversive of public order. Butler’s work has continued to provoke and sustain interest in political explorations of Sense and Sensibility, especially through the influence of her work on feminist studies of this novel.

   During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sense and Sensibility was arguably the Austen novel most frequently to come under the scrutiny of feminist scholars. This novel with its awkward conclusion presented a challenging text for examination. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) described the author as a proto-feminist presenting an argument against patriarchy in Sense and Sensibility, but one much hampered in its articulation. Austen, they argue, disguises her dissent with patriarchy in the novel through a strategy of ‘radically ambiguous’ ironies that express profound criticism, but in the end fail to sustain the attack. Sense and Sensibility, they conclude, remains a ‘painful novel to read . . . because Austen herself seems caught between her attraction to Marianne’s sincerity and spontaneity, while at the same time identifying with the civil falsehoods and the reserved, polite silences of Elinor’ (p. 157). Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), also addresses the unresolved ambiguities in Sense and Sensibility, but considers the social and economic conditions in the novel to express a transitional period of cultural history. Austen thus masks ‘the complex relationship between a woman’s desires and the imperatives of propriety’ because she herself ‘is ambivalent towards both realism and romance’ (p. 98). Similarly, Terry Lovell recognises Sense and Sensibility as containing Austen’s sharpest criticism of patriarchy, but suggests that women’s novels of the time, including Austen’s, fail in their resistance because they all reproduce the ambiguities of ‘the middle-class woman’s relationship to patriarchal capitalism’ in their plots. In effect Sense and Sensibility can be read, she argues, as both conservative and subversive or conciliatory and resentful – it can be ‘neither unambiguously subversive, nor unambiguously conciliatory’ (p. 71).⁵¹

   Though Tory and Whig are sufficiently doubtful in political coherence in Austen’s time to be of much value in characterising Austen’s sympathies, critics have continued to respond to Marilyn Butler’s political characterisation of Austen as a conservative, most frequently in opposition to Butler. Undoubtedly the most persuasive voice to argue for Austen’s radical allegiance has been that of Claudia Johnson. In Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988),⁵² Johnson finds that of all Austen’s novels Sense and Sensibility is ‘the most attuned to progressive social criticism’ (p. 49) in its exposure of the institution of the family as ‘the mainspring . . . for the love of money, the principal vice’ (p. 53). Patriarchal power in Sense and Sensibility, writes Johnson, is capricious and arbitrary and by no means benevolent, regardless of its political colours. Marianne is genuinely a heroine for her resistance to a cold, calculating materialist world and Elinor’s romantic fantasies are as much an illusion as Marianne’s. But as Margaret Kirkham remarks prudently in the introduction to a second edition of her book on Austen and feminism, ‘feminism’ must necessarily be understood in terms of plural feminisms.⁵³ Other feminist critics direct the reader towards a more middle ground of social dissent in Sense and Sensibility, towards the community of women, noting the last sentence of Sense and Sensibility in particular as compelling evidence for that position. More recently Peter Knox-Shaw in Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (2005) has challenged Butler’s conservative reading by arguing for the influence of Enlightenment scepticism on Austen’s intellectual development.⁵⁴

   In the last years of the century, specialised studies of contemporary contexts of Austen’s novels have played an important role in expanding our knowledge of the social and material worlds of Sense and Sensibility. Jan Fergus’ Jane Austen: A Literary Life (1991) provides an invaluable account of the finances involved in the publication of the novel. Oliver McDonough’s Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds (1991) usefully unravels the inheritance and financial arrangements of the characters. John Wiltshire’s Jane Austen and the Body (1992) includes a section on the contemporary diagnosis of fevers that focuses light on the ideological significance of Marianne’s medical condition. Irene Collins’ Jane Austen and the Clergy (1993) lays out the details of Elinor and Edward’s domestic comforts in her explanation of the business of clerical livings, their distribution and the potential income to be derived from tithes, farming and such church services as weddings, christenings and funerals. Michael Giffin in his Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England (2002) explores the relationships of clergy and gentry classes in the novel.⁵⁵

   Most recently, the eye of theory has been trained on Sense and Sensibility. D. A. Miller early initiated Sense and Sensibility to such exploration in his Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981), where he argues that Austen’s indulgence and denial of ‘transgressivity’ in her heroines release meanings that escape the ‘mechanics of control’ that she sets in motion in the final paragraphs of the novel. Julie Shaffer’s more recent Bakhtinian study of the novel argues that Austen by reifying both sense and sensibility as ‘natural’ invites a questioning of the value of either for meeting the social, economic and emotional needs of her characters.⁵⁶ David Kaufmann, recognising the language of jurisprudence in judging and estimating manners in this novel, finds Sense and Sensibility deeply immersed in a contemporary ideological conflict of bourgeoisie, gentry and aristocracy. Austen, he writes, places herself as a ‘scion of the gentry’ through this language. Her later eager reception as a spokesperson for the middle class, ‘to which she most probably did not belong, is a rewriting of history’.⁵⁷ As to historical dislocations of Austen by the critics, Deidre Shauna Lynch and Barbara M. Benedict agree, though from different perspectives. Lynch locates Austen’s first novel at the commercial intersection of two kinds of fiction: popular page turners with flat characters, on the one hand, and reflective novels with round characters on the other. Elinor’s interiority of character, says Lynch, is hollowed out from the white noise of commercial culture as distinct, round and reader-identified, and is to be understood as opposed to flat characters, who respond to print culture with unreflective zeal, Marianne’s great danger. Benedict addresses the circulating library as well, noting that Austen finesses a distinction between high literature and popular literature by combining the orientation to female education, marriage, social ritual and elite settings of library novels with qualities that belong to high literature, that is, with ‘parody, moral seriousness, topicality’. Austen follows the demands of the market, notes Benedict, even to the extent of providing dramatic hooks at the ends of her volumes to bring the reader back to the library for the next instalment. It is only in the next generation, according to Lynch and Benedict, that Austen’s work was elevated and purged of its low origins in popular culture in order to better suit it for the marketers of high literature.⁵⁸

   Clara Tuite and William H. Galperin reflect on the many years it took Austen to produce Sense and Sensibility and on the complications presented by her revisions and second thoughts. The great success of Sense and Sensibility, according to Tuite, lies in its simultaneous participation in the anti-sentimental politics of the 1790s and its conscious escape from the issue through parody, a condition that made the novel’s later bourgeois acceptance into the literary canon possible. Galperin focuses on the effects of Austen’s revisions of the novel from its original conception in epistolary form to its final publication as authorial narrative. In the move from the letters of Elinor and Marianne to authorial narration of the published novel, claims Galperin, a surprising surplus of realistic domestic detail, customary in epistolary fiction, survives from its first version. This is the striking everydayness of Sense and Sensibility that Austen’s earliest readers invariably comment on. In the excess or surplus of such detail, says Galperin, there remains a trace or witness of the authorial ‘silence’ of epistolary fiction, best remembered from Richardson’s novels, a condition that grants the reader of Sense and Sensibility (as it does Richardson’s readers) free licence to entertain oppositional readings of the novel’s normative, authorised conclusion.⁵⁹ Galperin’s voice has been an impressive contributor to the long-standing debate over the interpretative problems of Sense and Sensibility, but if history has its lessons after all, his will not be the last word on the subject.

SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Sense and Sensibility is the novel where the idiosyncratic hand of a young author is most profoundly felt. Its youthful status appears in two ways, both of them closely associated with its production within the Austen family. First, there is the social and economic context of her own ambitious family, their anxieties about class, money and status that appear with little disguise in the issues that affect the Dashwood family. Second, there is Austen’s keen probing of the moral complexities of these values, assumptions that are, in effect, the foundation of the Austen family fortunes.

   The perplexities of Austen’s situation may be understood in the light of a general transition in the model of society that began in the 1790s. As David Cannadine and Dror Wahrman argue, the middle class as a distinct politically empowered class had not yet defined itself in Austen’s time. That potent version of respectability was to emerge after her death, when in the mid-to-late 1820s the push to produce and justify the Reform Bill of 1832 made the political concept of a unified middle class an expedient construction.⁶⁰ Her early Victorian critics were alert to details in the Austen texts that would confirm the social boundaries of the new political dispensation. But for Austen, the gradations of society in 1790 seemed infinitely more vexed by signs of status that were paradoxically both non-negotiable and, of course, already under covert negotiation. For those women boasting an attachment to families in the traditionally recognised genteel professions – the officer ranks of the navy and army, the law at its higher levels and, in the case of the Austen family, the church, the source of their income and position – the potential death of the breadwinner of the family presented a troubling problem of social identity to his survivors. Almost by definition the women dependent on these genteel professionals were destined to be left not only with a reduced income and lessened standard of life, but with a sorely strained attachment to their former consequence as well. How were novelists to articulate the condition of single women with pretensions to genteel status who had become, in effect, distinct economic liabilities to their families and the social rank to which they laid claim?

   On the one hand, Jane Austen in life dutifully ministered to the patriarchal web of connections that had brought her family their moderately advanced degree of genteel prosperity. Her father was indebted to wealthy relations for his education and his church livings; her two naval brothers Francis and Charles found promotion in the navy through the patronage of family connections; another brother, Edward, was adopted by wealthy relations in the landed gentry; Henry, her favourite brother, took up a banking career on the sureties of his gentry-adopted brother and a rich uncle; and James, the eldest brother, was set to inherit his father’s church livings.⁶¹ Whenever it is time for the family to go into mourning for even the most distant relation of consequence, Jane Austen weighs in with black lace, ribbons and every accoutrement needed to maintain the family connection. When a niece or nephew needs prompting to produce a gift or a letter for one of the living worthies, Austen is ready with the reminder. When she must attend on the demands of her unpleasant but very rich aunt she grumbles, but makes her plans accordingly. Her letters, or at the least the letters that Cassandra thought proper to save for the family, could serve as a diary of pseudo-gentry survival practices: mourning duties to be observed, gifts to be bought, responses registered, social duties to be performed at no matter the personal cost.⁶²

   Jane Austen, however, chose to enter the competitive cash economy in a courageous assertion of self, to write novels as a source of ‘Pewter’ that would make her independent of the meagre resources available to her through traditional patriarchal custom.⁶³ Her decision to appear on the title pages of her novels as ‘By a Lady’ may well have emerged from a family whose attachments to genteel patronage and whose particular aspirations to status were too fragile to risk a publicity so nearly allied to commerce. James, the eldest brother, wrote a celebratory poem to the ‘gentle Lady’ on the publication of her first novel hedged with coy recognition of his sister’s accomplishment, but designed only for circulation within the family, ‘To Miss Jane Austen the reputed Author of Sense and Sensibility a Novel lately written’, signing it, ‘A Friend’.⁶⁴ Henry revealed her name to some people in Scotland, much to her consternation, though Austen candidly confesses to Francis in the same letter, ‘the truth is that the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now—& that I beleive whenever the 3^d appears, I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it’.⁶⁵ It is hard not to sense a double life in Sense and Sensibility, a questioning of the social and moral certainties of patriarchal society and at the same time a dutiful genuflection before its powers. At almost every point there is the uneasy feeling of a private agenda at work.

INTERTEXTUALITY

The wealth of intertextual relations in Sense and Sensibility appears to be attached to the conditions of the communal reading practice of the Austen family. The authors that Austen mentions specifically in Sense and Sensibility, Shakespeare, Pope, Scott, Cowper and Gilpin (by inference), have received their fair share of critical attention, and over the years many more have been added as significant to Austen’s first novel. These include, among the many, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Burton, Dryden, Thomson, Swift, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Locke, Chesterfield, Burke, pre-eminently Johnson, as well as Rousseau and Goethe, and the canonical British novelists, most significantly Richardson, but also Fielding, Mackenzie, Sterne, Smollett and Goldsmith. Among dramatists other than the obvious Shakespeare, there are Congreve, Goldsmith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hugh Kelly and Sheridan.⁶⁶ In recent years, as already mentioned, feminist critics have expanded the list to include popular women novelists: Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Regina Maria Roche, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Mary Brunton, Maria Edgeworth, as well as the radical women writers Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick and Mary Wollstonecraft.

   The mixture is enough to cause confusion. It represents a generous accumulation of reading over the thirty-six years of her life prior to the publication of Sense and Sensibility. Attempts to provide a consistent interpretation from echoes of this reading are likely to founder on irrecoverable shifts in significance that any specific intertextuality would have had at a given point in its composition. Dr Johnson’s obvious presence in Sense and Sensibility, for example, offers a case in point in the keenly persuasive but opposite interpretations of his influence offered by Jan Fergus and Claudia Johnson. As feminist scholarship has shown, the radical politics reflected in the works of Hays, Fenwick and Wollstonecraft grew from positions that in earlier decades had formed part of a non-politicised Christian discourse. There are of course uses of literary allusions in Sense and Sensibility that seem traditional and familiar, the potent analogies of Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’ to the lock of hair that Willoughby takes from Marianne, or to the lock of hair held in Edward’s ring. Lucy and Nancy Steele’s relation to the Branghton sisters from Burney’s Evelina provides a rich intertextual enlargement of vulgarity for the Steele sisters. In their names, too, there is a nod to Richardson’s Lucy and Nancy Selby in Grandison, two girls equally stricken with an interest in beaux. In fact, Richardson’s novels may well be the most pervasive intertextual presence in Sense and Sensibility, as Jocelyn Harris has argued.⁶⁷ But it must be noted as well that Sense and Sensibility is marked, like the juvenilia, by its resistance to the intertextual materials it employs.

   For example, Sense and Sensibility’s debt to the contemporary didactic novel has long been noted by critics, the oppositions of the novel’s title frequently compared with the structure of such novels by Maria Edgeworth and Jane West. There is nothing that makes a teacher’s heart sink lower than to find yet another student essay in the stack claiming that Elinor represents ‘Sense’ and Marianne represents ‘Sensibility’, or some variation on the theme. The dead hand of this oppositional structure is an irresistible lure. Unfortunately, it is a reading that is legitimately in the cards: Colonel Brandon appreciates sensibility in Marianne; Elinor deprecates it. Readers have been left to choose and make the best of it. As a moral code, sensibility and its associations with nature and feeling, benevolence and candour, sentiment and impulse, takes its origins historically in reaction to a harsh seventeenth-century puritanical view of human nature and in response to Hobbes’ representation of human nature as essentially selfish. The implied oppositions in Austen’s title, however, follow the argument as it developed in the late eighteenth century and as it was employed by Maria Edgeworth in her Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795). In Edgeworth’s novel one sister is assigned the role of considered rationality and the other the role of uncontrolled sensibility. The rational heroine finds her reward in love and material wealth at the conclusion; the sister with acute sensibility falls into a series of bad decisions, disappointments and punishments. Austen resists such a set of simple oppositions. Elinor, the rational heroine, is nearly as receptive to sensibility as Marianne. In addition, Elinor’s hard-earned acceptance of her loss of Edward to Lucy Steele is undermined by a hysterical outburst of tears at his return. Her rational condemnation of Willoughby is weakened, and for some readers erased, by her unexpected susceptibility to the persuasions of sensibility.

   As Clara Tuite argues, Austen’s novel, with the help of its later critics, aesthetically seals off the raging political debates that centred around the associations of sensibility with 1790s radicalism, that complex of social and political concepts that Marilyn Butler exposed as the ideological focus of the arguments of conservative authors like West and Edgeworth and radical authors like Wollstonecraft and Hays. It is fair to say however, that even with the politics of sensibility altered by the next generation to a focus on ‘sensitivity’, the emotional sensibilities of Marianne and Elinor penetrate their social structures with keen effect. Even today in classroom discussions of this novel where there are students from cultures in which arranged marriages take place in the normal course of things, Marianne’s alleged bliss in marriage with Colonel Brandon becomes politicised once again, giving point to what Lady Bessborough with experience herself in an unhappy arranged marriage may have meant when she said the novel ‘ends stupidly’.

   An equally significant presence in Austen’s first novel must also include the popular fiction of the 1790s. Charlotte Smith’s novels from the higher end and Minerva Press novels like Mrs Sykes’ Margiana or Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey from the lower reaches, along with fiction in the Lady’s Magazine, find ambivalent space in Sense and Sensibility. This is particularly true of the disinheritance plots of 1790s fiction in which Sense and Sensibility is only one among hundreds of novels to share that pilgrimage. In its more egregious form the disinheritance novel is known from its first paragraph: the heroine will be cheated of her patrimony, made dependent upon the kindness of strangers, obliged to travel, subjected to the attentions of a designing rake, have her reputation endangered and, in the last pages, find happiness and fortune through marriage to a man very much the image of the responsible father or the caring brother she never had. An explanation for the high frequency of such plots during the last decade of the eighteenth century might possibly be based on the economic uncertainties brought on by the high inflation of the war years, together with the added domestic burden of new and increased taxes. Moreover the obvious prosperity of people with land and ready capital in these years – the war made agriculture enormously profitable – and the utter impoverishment of those without it may go some way towards accounting for the proliferation in popular fiction of the gloomy ruins and humble cottages in which heroines seek shelter from the economic storm. The burst of consumer display that follows Fanny and John’s accession to Norland – a seal for Fanny from Mr Gray’s, an expensive new greenhouse, trips to London for the season – pales next to the unprincipled extravagance of wealthy landowners lamented by the heroines of so many contemporary novels.

   Austen, however, makes the general economic disenfranchisement of women more terrifying than her sister novelists by substituting the precise legal details of the ‘old Gentleman’s’ will for the vaguer machinations of their lords and barons. The will that deprives the Dashwood women of their inheritance is modelled deliberately on a common arrangement in English law, ‘strict settlement’, invented for the aristocracy, copied by the gentry and possessing two major aims: to keep an estate intact by holding it in the patrilineal line and to prevent a fond father from diminishing its value for the sake of any younger children. In this arrangement, the maker of the will leaves the estate, for life only, to the first male heir, ‘entailing’ the possession of the estate on the life tenant’s son, the heir ‘in tail’, who is expected when he inherits to make another will according to ‘strict settlement’ that in its turn will keep the estate intact for yet another generation in the male line. The ‘old Gentleman’, however, is able to extend his control over three generations by entailing the estate on Henry Dashwood’s grandson, leaving Norland first to his nephew Henry Dashwood as a life tenant, second to Henry’s son John, also as a life tenant, and finally to John’s son, poor little Harry, as heir ‘in tail’. The Dashwood girls are deliberately cut out, not an unusual case in real life by any means, and also barred from any other provision for their future by the specific prohibition of the sale of the woods of the estate, again not an unusual practice. What is remarkable, however, is the small sum – ‘he meant not to be unkind’ – that the ‘old Gentleman’ actually leaves them, only £1,000 apiece. Custom in contemporary English inheritance law maintained that an estate worth £4,000 a year could afford to grant between £3,000 and £4,000 each to three younger children without any damage to itself.⁶⁸ John Dashwood’s happy thought that his sisters will each have £3,000 when their mother dies (the sum their mother brought to her marriage plus the £1,000 each left them by the old Gentleman), whenever that might happen, typically costs him and the Norland estate absolutely nothing. The brutal exclusion of the Dashwood girls from even the minimum expectation of English inheritance law and custom, plus the diminishment of any hope for amelioration through their brother’s sense of justice makes for a bitter draught indeed.

   It is generally the case in Sense and Sensibility, in contrast to Austen’s practice in her later works, that intertextual debts are cloaked and unacknowledged. In Mansfield Park, for example, literary allusions are out in the open. A named and well-known play is set in a central action. Citations from Shakespeare and Cowper are quoted specifically. In Sense and Sensibility, however, the allusions to other literary texts, though far greater in number than in Mansfield Park, are much less easy to establish with confidence. In this respect Sense and Sensibility becomes the most intimate reading experience of all Austen’s novels, the closest analogy to reading her personal letters. By necessity we submit to the private codes she shares with Cassandra, in which the in-jokes and literary allusions buried deep in family reading practices only occasionally break surface for positive identification. Even when such allusions can be identified in Sense and Sensibility, their larger function in the novel’s patterns is not always apparent.

   In Austen’s letters, for example, we have to wonder what it signifies when Austen describes a cap to Cassandra as having ‘a little white flower perking out of the left ear, like Harriot Byron’s feather’.⁶⁹ Or, her thanks to Cassandra for a long letter, ‘Like Harriot Byron I ask, what am I to do with my Gratitude?’⁷⁰ Both references to Grandison are private or semi-private gestures: they affirm the closeness of the sisters through their reading and, conversely, also act as a manoeuvre for distance, a little joke to mask some other hovering but not articulated issue – perhaps a little guilt over the price of the cap, or a feeling of gratitude for ‘a long letter’ that can only be laughed at for its intensity. What then to make of the phrase Elinor uses when she opposes Willoughby’s gift of a horse to Marianne, ‘from a man so little, or at least so lately known to her’ (vol. 1, ch. 12). This echo of the first line of Dryden’s famous elegy, ‘To the Memory of Mr. Oldham’, tolls an odd sort of bell: ‘Farewel, too little and too lately known.’⁷¹ Is this familiar echo of Dryden’s poem no more than the casual mark of a precocious young writer looking for an appreciative nod from the family reading circle, is it a jokingly modest claim to gravitas, is it an allusive device warning the reader of Willoughby’s pending dismissal, or is it simply an automatic turn to literature for expression, either Elinor’s or the author’s, which in this context may be no more than a tag or a flourish?

   Allusions to distant texts in Sense and Sensibility frequently shimmer into the reader’s consciousness as an almost, but not quite, articulated reference. Marianne’s impulsive and insistent identification of ‘a man on horseback’, for example, ‘It is he; it is indeed; I know it is’ (vol. 1, ch. 16), uncannily calls up the obsessive and repeated misidentification of men on horseback by Charlotte Lennox’s fantasist heroine in The Female Quixote (1752). Or in another example, Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) rises into partial view when Elinor and Colonel Brandon discuss Marianne’s fixed opinions on unpardonable ‘second attachments’: ‘But how she contrives it’, says Elinor, ‘without reflecting on the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not’ (vol. 1, ch. 11), a remark that may recall the comic failure of Goldsmith’s equally unobservant vicar, a ‘strict monogamist’ like Marianne, to remember that Mr Wilmot, his son’s future father-in-law, was now courting his fourth wife. This allusion to Goldsmith, if it is one, is only tweaked into consciousness by the wry sweetness of Elinor and Colonel Brandon’s conversation, an echo of the same tone in Goldsmith’s work, but it is only a nod, not a pointer. In the same way, lurking beneath the author’s mild remark that Lady Middleton, ‘like a well bred woman’, resigned herself to Sir John’s impromptu invitation for the Steele sisters to stay at Barton, ‘contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times a day’ (vol. 1, ch. 21), there lies a distant echo of Fielding’s Mr Tow-wouse in Joseph Andrews (1742) who for a more serious misstep must submit, like Sir John, to ‘quietly and contentedly bearing to be reminded of his Transgressions, as a kind of Penance, once or twice a Day, during the Residue of his Life’ (vol. 1, ch. 17).

   Non-canonical works present even more challenging puzzles. The names Willoughby and Brandon, for example, are found together in ‘The Shipwreck’, a tale from the Lady’s Magazine (‘Supplement’, 1794), a thoroughly dismissible work published at the time of the composition of Austen’s Elinor and Marianne. This story also produces the exact cliché that Margaret Dashwood uses to characterise Willoughby as ‘Marianne’s preserver’. Miss Brandon, the heroine of the Lady’s Magazine, is swept in a storm from the deck of the ship taking her to Bristol for marriage with a wealthy Irish gentleman chosen by Mr Brandon, her father. Her rescue from the waves comes at the hands of a Mr Willoughby, the very man for whom she has long held a distinct preference and who has also loved her, though in vain: ‘Her preserver appeared, and announced himself to be Willoughby, that Willoughby who . . . would not hesitate to encounter a thousand times the same danger he had now braved to shield her from harm.’ Mr Brandon, chastened by the near loss of his daughter, instantly accedes to her long desired match with her ‘preserver’ and gives his permission for the marriage. The echoes of Colonel Brandon’s Eliza stories are unnerving, but the purpose of an allusion so thoroughly buried in the oblivion of the Lady’s Magazine turns on a point that can only be guessed at. One way of reading the matched names might be to take them as Jane Austen’s private acknowledgment of collusion in the same market culture as the magazine, possibly a private joke with Cassandra. Or the paired names could also serve, if pressed, to prompt in the reader an ironic comparison between the stories, though if this is the purport of such a humble footprint, it is faint indeed. More likely, the allusion, if it is one, is a manoeuvre of intimacy with the reader, not unlike Harriet Byron’s cap and little white flower in the letter to Cassandra, a comparable distancing gesture, one designed to inoculate Sense and Sensibility against the very market it participates in. In other words, if the reader misses the connection of the names shared with the Lady’s Magazine, that is nothing more than expected, but if she gets the allusion, so much the better – she has joined the author’s own reading group.

   There remains, however, the need to account for the presence of patches of oddly undigested styles that also appear in the novel. Colonel Brandon’s long narrative of the two Elizas, for example, could almost pass as a similar inset story in Grandison or even Clarissa. The device is also one of the most frequent strategies in women’s popular fiction. Jane Austen mocks it both early and late in her career: in ‘Jack and Alice’ (1787–90), ‘You mentioned Madam something of your having yourself been a sufferer by the misfortune you are so good as to wish me to avoid. Will you favour me with your Life & Adventures?. . .’ ‘Willingly my Love’; and in ‘Plan of a Novel’ (c. 1816): ‘The Father to be induced, at his Daughter’s earnest request, to relate to her the past events of his Life. This Narrative will reach through the greatest part of the 1^st vol.’ Willoughby’s confession of guilt to Elinor during his final appearance in the novel invokes a style so like the melodramatic effusions of the Minerva novel that Austen actually has him apologise for it. Marianne’s speech to Elinor after her illness and reformation, unlike anything in her previous style, has often been noted as a departure from tone, like something from another fiction, resembling perhaps the solemn conversion of Charlotte Lennox’s heroine in The Female Quixote. These passages appear to be allotted the transparent status of an unexamined style, thoroughly unlike the sharply parodic turn of the early chapters of the novel, or, for that matter, anything that was to appear in later Austen novels. They bridge crises in the narrative that at the moment seem outside Austen’s imaginative or technical grasp. We have to assume from internal comparative evidence that these passages mark an early stage of work, in the analogous way that we assume that the brilliance of the dialogue between Fanny and John in the second chapter belongs to Austen’s mature style. In that respect at least, such borrowings become indicators of the strong intertextual energy that runs beneath the surface throughout Sense and Sensibility, perhaps the most characteristic feature of Austen’s first novel.

   Nature in Sense and Sensibility, for example, is highly literary, utterly different from the later novels when heat is felt as ‘insufferable’ or sea breezes bring ‘bloom’ to the heroine’s cheeks. In this early novel nature is associated with the politics of land embedded in the picturesque theories of Gilpin, Repton, Price and Knight. Though both Elinor and Marianne particularly admire the views from the door of Barton cottage, Austen also suggests that the picturesque aesthetic is more than an innocent theory with the sole design of encouraging a greater sensibility to nature. For Marianne, Norland’s landscape resides in her imagination as the nostalgic memory of childhood; for John Dashwood, the same landscape offers an opportunity to display his ownership of the land with the picturesque proof of it, albeit in a corrupted taste, of a flashy new greenhouse for his wife Fanny. For Mr Palmer, the shrubbery at Cleveland does double service as well. It announces his status as a prosperous and fashionable squire with its canonically picturesque trees, ‘the fir, the mountain-ash, and the acacia . . . tall Lombardy poplars’, but, as Austen also notes, the trees have the practical purpose of screening ‘the offices’, the working areas, from view (vol. 3, ch. 5) and the further task of disguising the economically revealing fact that Cleveland has no park. In contrast, Colonel Brandon’s Delaford estate, decidedly not planned as a modern picturesque landscape, delights Mrs Jennings and her daughter with its highly practical walled garden, its old-fashioned fruit trees, its useful fish ponds set unfashionably near the house and the house’s equally unfashionable convenience to the road, the church and the village butcher, ‘exactly what I call a nice old fashioned place’, she says (vol. 2, ch. 8).

   Consumer comforts are strikingly abstract in this novel, nothing like the baked apples so enjoyed by Miss Bates and her mother in Emma. Mrs Jennings’ memory of fruit in Colonel Brandon’s garden is of an Edenic Past. We hear about Sir John Middleton’s love of picnics, but no one goes on one. We learn of John and Fanny’s ‘gift’ of a dinner for the Middletons, but nourishment has nothing to do with this event. The Dashwood women actually send a dinner away, ‘they had always been careless in their meals’ (vol. 3, ch. 11). The Constantia wine offered by Mrs Jennings is a medicine, a restorative for the gout or a broken heart. Sugar plums and marmalade are ‘applied’ for a bruised temple (vol. 1, ch. 21). The pint of porter and cold beef taken by Willoughby at Marlborough are not a measure of appetite, but of time spent at the inn for a change of horses (vol. 3, ch. 8).

   Similarly, the map of London functions as a textual substitute for first-hand experience. The addresses of the various families in London are presented as designations in the social topography of the city, and are in no way evocative of London atmosphere or street life. Ambitious Mrs Ferrars, the richest of the characters, is housed in Park Lane, the most aristocratic and exclusive of London addresses; the Palmers in Hanover Square, a more moderately ambitious Mayfair address; the Middletons in Conduit Street nearby, and Mrs Jennings very carefully placed outside ultra-fashionable Mayfair proper, in Berkeley Street, situated north of Oxford Street, near Portman Square, a respectable neighbourhood of upper gentry and wealthy merchants where, in 1801, Austen’s brother Henry had taken a house. The John Dashwoods are on the north side of Oxford Street too, but in Harley Street, a Marylebone address notorious in Austen’s day for housing nouveau-riche aspirants to fashion.

CONFLICTS

As far back as Butler’s and Duckworth’s seminal studies, and more recently in those of Lynch, Benedict, Tuite and Galperin, Sense and Sensibility has been seized upon for what might be called the forensic possibilities opened by its repeated refusals to resolve interpretive conflicts. For example, does Marianne suffer a Clarissa-like decline or does she exhibit a set of symptoms that belong to contemporary medical descriptions of ‘putrid fever’? William Buchan’s account of remittent fever in his Domestic Medicine, 14th edition (1794) sounds very much like Marianne’s disease: ‘The remission is commonly preceded by a gentle sweat, after which the patient seems greatly relieved, but in a few hours the fever returns. These remissions return at very irregular periods, and are sometimes of longer, sometimes of shorter duration.’ He also confirms the dangers of walking in the wet grass: ‘Remitting fevers prevail in low marshy countries abounding with wood and stagnating water’ (p. 210). William Cullen in his Nosology (1800) concurs: intermittent fevers arise ‘from marsh miasmata’ and produce paroxysms sometimes once a day, or, for ‘tertian’ intermittent fevers, every forty-eight hours, ‘attended by drowsiness, spasms and convulsive motions’ (pp. 24–35). On the other hand, William Falconer, a prominent Bath physician, maintains emphatically in his Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body, 2nd edition (1791) that, ‘Scarcely any disease exhibits stronger marks of the influence of the imagination and passions, than the intermittent fever. It is well known that numerous cures of this disorder have been performed by medicines of little, or even of no medical efficacy whatever in themselves’ (p. 49). Marianne’s self-diagnosis fits Falconer’s medical opinion. Elinor’s description of her condition matches Buchan’s and Cullen’s.

   Marianne and Edward’s argument over the picturesque follows an analogous pattern. Edward states his opposition to picturesque theory in his opinions of the Barton countryside: ‘It exactly answers my idea of a fine country because it unites beauty with utility . . . I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of the picturesque’ (vol. 1, ch. 18). His opposing examples recall an icon of picturesque taste that Austen would have known well, the introductory plate of Gilpin’s Forest Scenery (1791), reproduced as the frontispiece to this volume. Gilpin’s plate presents a pictured version of Edward’s argument. His plantation of timber, ‘tall, straight and flourishing’ appears on the left side of the Gilpin plate, and Marianne’s ‘crooked, twisted, blasted’ tree on the right side of the plate. Gilpin directs the reader to the ‘correct’ choice – ‘What is more beautiful, for instance, on a rugged foreground, than an old tree with a hollow trunk? or with a dead arm, a drooping bough, or a dying branch?’ (p. 8) – but Austen refuses. ‘Elinor only laughed’ at what she terms Edward’s ‘affectation’, by implication Marianne’s as well, her laughter becoming – if it is understood as Lauren Goodlad argues in a recent essay – an emancipating act, a gesture of ‘self-making’.⁷² Thus, whether Elinor sides with Edward or Marianne, and it is not clear in the passage that she sides with either, her judgment is left free – and if Elinor is free in that respect, so is the reader. William Empson’s well-known Kenyon Review essay, ‘Tom Jones’ (1958), may provide a more contextually appropriate insight into the unresolved conflicts. Empson’s analysis of the ‘habitual double irony’ in which Fielding’s narrator repeatedly articulates two opposite positions while undermining both (possibly even ‘A plague on both your houses’), describes a reading experience that would have been familiar to Austen and the family reading circle.⁷³

   Emendations of the 1811 text of Sense and Sensibility in the second edition of 1813 suggest a general softening of the first energy of Austen’s satiric impulses. In a revealing comparison with Austen’s first published novel the two unpolished fragmentary pieces, The Watsons, begun in 1804 and abandoned in 1805, and Sanditon, begun and broken off in 1817, both feature passages that display the same unsparing vigour that we find in the first edition of Sense and Sensibility, a force of anger and mockery unlike anything to be found in her five other novels. In the first edition Austen notes that the ‘old Gentleman’ made no provision for the Dashwood women by any ‘division of the estate’; in the second edition, she changes the expression to, ‘by any charge on the estate’ (vol. 1, ch. 1), thus, it could be argued, reducing the moral issues of fairness and justice implied in ‘division’ to legal points about estate inheritance. The first edition includes a reference to John’s wife Fanny’s fortune, ‘His wife had something considerable at present, and something still more to expect hereafter from her mother, her only surviving parent, who had much to give’ (vol. 1, ch. 1), a sentence which is omitted in the second edition. The effect is to consign the issue of Fanny’s fortune to the implications of plot, though Austen’s first instinct had been to hammer in the nail of John and Fanny’s rapacity. And, in a third example, there is the deletion of Lady Middleton’s first edition shock at Mrs Jennings’ mention of Colonel Brandon’s supposed illegitimate daughter: ‘Lady Middleton’s delicacy was shocked; and in order to banish so improper a subject as the mention of a natural daughter, she actually took the trouble of saying something herself about the weather’ (vol. 1, ch. 13). It may be that Austen chose to omit the sentence because Lady Middleton had used this conversational gambit in the previous chapter, but in deleting it she also forfeited the opportunity to score a point against Lady Middleton’s elegant morality.

   In spite of Kathryn Sutherland’s useful warning in her introduction to the Austen-Leigh Memoir that Austen’s novels will not necessarily lead us back to the author (p. xviii), it remains hard not to succumb to the temptation to see biography in Sense and Sensibility. As in the fragmentary pieces, The Watsons and Sanditon, there remains enough harshness of judgment in Sense and Sensibility to alert us to the suspicion that we are getting more of the unpolished, uncensored Jane Austen in this novel than we find in her later published works. There are obvious biographical associations attached to the two fragmentary pieces. The Watsons features a family of single women about to be impoverished by the death of their clergyman father, not too far from the Austen women’s own situation in 1805. Fanny Dashwood’s infamous description of the financial state of her female relatives, ‘Altogether, they will have five hundred a-year amongst them, and what on earth can four women want for more than that?’ comes suspiciously close to the phrasing of Henry Austen’s self-congratulatory letter to his brother Francis on the financial arrangements to be enjoyed by his recently widowed mother and two sisters: that the three women will be ‘in the receipt of £450 per Ann.’, he writes, which will be ‘very comfortable’, concluding that, ‘a smaller establishment will be as agreeable to them, as it cannot but be feasible’ (28 January 1805).⁷⁴ Henry’s happy opinion no doubt had full circulation in this family of letter sharers. Austen’s sharply expressed resentment of the hasty appropriation of the Steventon property and its household effects by her brother James and his wife Mary after Mr Austen’s retirement – ‘[E]verything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner’⁷⁵ – finds an echo in Mrs Dashwood’s smouldering anger at Fanny’s similarly ungracious action with the Norland domestic establishment: ‘earnestly did she despise her daughter-in-law for it’ (vol. 1, ch. 1). As a final example, John Dashwood’s satisfied parade of poverty before the Dashwood sisters in Mr Gray’s shop resembles a similar indulgence of James’s wife during a visit to the somewhat straitened lodgings in Southampton that the Austen women shared with Francis’ young family for reasons of economy: ‘Mrs. J. A. does not talk much of poverty now’, Austen reports acidly, ‘though she has no hope of my brother’s being able to buy another horse next summer’.⁷⁶ In her last fragment, Sanditon, Austen focuses on financial speculation in a seaside resort with the strong suggestion that the project is about to founder. This work followed the failure of her brother Henry’s bank in the spring of 1816, a financial catastrophe in which members of the family, her brother Edward and her uncle Mr Leigh-Perrot, lost considerable sums. Moreover, the tyrannical Mrs Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and the miserly, also tyrannical Lady Denham in Sanditon make excellent stand-ins for ‘my Aunt’, Mrs Leigh-Perrot, whose great wealth gave her an arbitrary power over the Austen women that surfaces repeatedly as a source of long-standing resentment in Austen’s letters.⁷⁷

   The obvious question inevitably arises: how could family members not see themselves in these pictures? Though it is true that Sense and Sensibility was nobody’s favourite in the Austen family, except Jane Austen’s of course, for whom it was her ‘sucking child’, the answer may lie in the powerful intertextual life of Sense and Sensibility. The Austen family might well see nothing personal, only recognising these characters as familiar types from novels they had all read together. Frances Burney, among others, furnished more than one older woman outrageously irresponsible with her wealth. Women who had become unexpectedly impoverished were available in popular novels by the hundreds. Greedy, heartless relatives lurked on the tables of every circulating library. On the other hand, it is impossible for us to read innocently the smug remark in Sanditon made by Mr Heywood about the picturesque cottage at the top of the hill near his house: ‘a spruce air at this distance’, says Mr Heywood, but in fact, ‘as indifferent a double tenement as any in the parish . . . [M]y shepherd lives at one end, and three old women at the other’ (ch. 1).

   Margaret Anne Doody’s suggestion that ‘culture’ in Jane Austen’s short fiction ‘often is anarchy’⁷⁸ attaches itself with equal propriety to Sense and Sensibility and to the fragmentary pieces The Watsons and Sanditon. These three works share too much common energy in their unexpected explosions of ludic anger to let their kinship pass without comment. Moreover, the unresolved conflicts in the intertextual life of Austen’s first novel are not by any means a matter of her inattention. In this respect, Sense and Sensibility bears witness to the profound ironies that continue to haunt her later novels, though appearing in those works with less scent of fresh blood. William Faulkner’s more famously violent fiction may offer an insight into the repressed violence running under the surface of Austen’s first novel. In his tale ‘Old Man’ (1939), Faulkner’s protagonist, a convict suddenly freed by a major flooding of the Mississippi river from the routines of his regular and predictable life in prison, becomes a bemused witness to the supposedly immutable symbols of his civilisation – houses and hencoops, men and mules – as they go rolling and tossing about on the violent waves of the river. He pauses in awe to reflect on the paradoxical revelation before him: that the river was doing just what it liked to do – that the real aberration was when it stayed peacefully within its banks.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

This edition of Sense and Sensibility reproduces Thomas Egerton’s second edition of Sense and Sensibility (1813) from a copy in the Cambridge University Library (classmark Syn.7.81.102–4), which, except for some inconsequential variations in inking during the printing run, is identical to three other copies of the second edition examined at this library, a fourth at the British Library and two more at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Independent collations were made of the Cambridge University Library copytext (1813) with copies of the first edition (1811) at the British Library, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and at the Charles E. Young Research Library, both of the University of California, Los Angeles. Comparisons of printing anomalies confirmed that these editions were identical to each other and also to a fourth copy of the first edition examined at the Cambridge University Library.

   All variations between the texts of the 1811 edition and the 1813 edition will be found at the foot of the page. The first reading there is the 1813 reading, reproducing the text above, followed by the 1811 reading. On the few occasions where the 1811 reading is preferred to the 1813 reading this is indicated by the direction of the square bracket. On the occasions (pp. 133, 301 and 312) where neither the 1811 edition nor the 1813 edition variant is preferred, the original versions are given in the footnotes separated by a vertical line rather than a bracket. These corrections are also included in the list of corrections and emendations on p. 432. The vast majority of the variants are differences in punctuation: the presence or absence of commas, variations of commas and semi-colons and the erratic uses of dashes, question marks and exclamation marks. Some of these are likely to be authorial, for example, daughter’s to daughters’ (pp. 16, 19), or the addition of commas to clarify meaning, but since there is no surviving manuscript or proof copy it is impossible to know for certain the hand of the author from that of the printer. In both the first and second editions, M-dashes are occasionally represented by three hyphens although their use is erratic and seems to have no significance. Longer dashes (2M) are sometimes represented by two adjacent M-dashes or by six hyphens. In volume 3, chapter 8, there are five instances in which four hyphens are employed to indicate a single M-dash. All dashes in this edition have been rationalized to appear as either single M-dashes or double M-dashes where appropriate. The first and second editions of Sense and Sensibility show all their dashes unspaced with one exception in both editions (volume 1, chapter 3), ‘distinguished — as — they hardly knew what’ (p. 19), which because of its unique repetition could be arguably an authorial preference. The first paragraph of each chapter has been rationalised to appear without indentation. There are a number of spelling differences in the two editions, some of which seem to reflect systematic changes in the second edition, either by Austen or by the printer: for example, ‘encreased’ to ‘increased’, ‘enquiries’ to ‘inquiries’, ‘stile’ to ‘style’, ‘surprize’ to ‘surprise’, ‘independance’ to ‘independence’, ‘expences’ to ‘expenses’ and others. The five occasions where Mrs Jennings uses ‘wo’nt’ for the contraction ‘won’t’ have been left unchanged as a usage of the period. Obviously misspelled words in the second edition (‘hume’, ‘ther’, ‘herfelf’) must be considered printer’s errors. These are noted and corrected to the first edition (1811) spellings. The more interesting variants, those clearly imposed by Jane Austen, such as the addition or omission of words, phrases or even complete sentences, are noted without comment as variants as they occur.

   Emendations to the copytext are conservative and have been made only in those cases where the presence of a gross printer’s error, a misspelled or omitted word, or incorrectly placed or omitted quotation marks were felt to present some barrier to the reader, a confusion or an interruption of flow. All emendations are listed in the appendix, ‘Corrections and emendations to 1813 edition’.

The title page of the 1813 edition of Sense and Sensibility, used as the copytext for this edition. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.