To excite or moderate passions

The portrait of the shallow Isabella in Northanger Abbey displayed sensibility as a cultural fad that allowed manipulative and morally trivial people to appropriate a rhetoric of feeling so as to further their own selfish schemes. But in Sense and Sensibility, a novel conceived earlier, Austen chose as one of two heroines a genuine and very young woman whose inner thought processes and perceptions of the exterior world were thoroughly permeated and shaped by the serious assumptions and moral values of sensibility.

As a result of its long gestation, when published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility struck novel-readers as revealing a ‘want of newness’. It seemed to belong to its moment of conception rather than to its time of publication during the Regency. Echoing such schematic works as Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796), its title of contrasting abstractions evoked the anxious dualities of the 1790s, reason and feeling, liberty and slavery, revolution and restraint. Its two heroines recalled pairs of contrasting girls from the period, in Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) and Jane West's A Gossip's Story (1796), the latter opposing the lovely, romantic, and indulged Marianne to the sensible and reserved Louisa. The revisions that transformed the epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into the third-person Sense and Sensibility were no doubt considerable but apparently had not tampered with the basic structure and tone. As a result, the novel feels politically conservative in the polarised terms of the 1790s: providing a cure for romantic excess and mocking the emotional spontaneity which to many appeared the essence of sensibility, source both of French revolutionary intemperance and of failing British fortitude.

Yet the appearance is deceptive and, with careful or repeated reading, Sense and Sensibility avoids crude, schematic interpretation, collapsing the easy antithesis of self-control and emotionalism: after all the conjunction in the title is ‘and’ not ‘or’. Instead of simply contrasting Elinor and Marianne, it works with the structural possibilities of two heroines to investigate how a person can live in the world without giving it too much and without growing alienated by its demands and indifference.