When it comes to a discussion of Sense and Sensibility, order of publication is not a reliable indicator of order of conception. In its greater seriousness it belongs, with Mansfield Park, to a middle period of development. There is enough evidence to suggest that Pride and Prejudice, at least in its earlier manifestation as ‘First Impressions’, predates Sense and Sensibility; its ‘light, and bright, and sparkling’ atmosphere is closer to the juvenilia and Catharine. Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh have a good deal of the burlesque about them. There is nobody like them in Sense and Sensibility; much of the broad-stroke caricature is harsher and more threatening – Fanny Dashwood and her mother, for instance, are treated with irony, but are powerful and dangerous figures who cannot be neutralised as easily as Lady Catherine is by Darcy and Elizabeth. There is much to support the idea that in Sense and Sensibility Austen no longer found the simple moral dichotomies of contemporary fiction merely funny. The novel probes deeper into the mores of contemporary society to find, not the obtuse but ultimately impotent snobbery of Lady Catherine, but selfish greed and malice prepense, which are rendered both respectable and potentially destructive by the support of the society within which they operate.