Sense and Sensibility

Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of tragic love provide the theme for Jane Austen’s dramatically human narrative, Sense and Sensibility. Elinor, practical and conventional, is the perfection of sense. Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the embodiment of sensibility. To both comes the sorrow of unhappy love. Elinor desires a man who is promised to another. Marianne loses her heart to a scoundrel who jilts her. Their mutual suffering brings a closer understanding between the two sisters—and true love finally triumphs when sense gives way to sensibility, and sensibility gives way to sense. Jane Austen’s authentic representation of early nineteenth-century middle-class provincialism, written with forceful insight and gentle irony, makes her novels the enduring works on the mores and manners of her time.