He’s a mama’s boy, he has never accomplished anything in his life and there is no sense of his having a vocation as a minister – that just seems to be what he ends up doing. Edward, unlike any of the male protagonists of the other Jane Austen books, appears to be a seriously depressed man. But Elinor’s marriage is also not very attractive. But thinking of the marriages at the end, there’s been a lot been written about Marianne’s marriage to a much older man, an anti-romantic marriage. There is nothing like it elsewhere in any Jane Austen books (except the family of origin of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, which is even more horrifying, I suppose). In the first place, because of the very real sense of financial danger which hovers around the characters, or at least the characters one likes. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th-century novels that I’ve read. I am currently writing a book about rereading, so I’m thinking a lot about what happens when you reread things. But I’m fascinated by it, because it has changed shape over the years for me as I reread it. I wouldn’t even say that I loved it as much as I loved Northanger Abbey, which I didn’t put on the list. Sense and Sensibility is a different kind of choice from the others. Foreign Policy & International Relationsĭo you want to start by telling me what you love about Sense and Sensibility?.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen