Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen’s most characteristic themes are recognizable as they are not in Northanger Abbey, and she begins to develop methods to embody them which foreshadow the techniques of her later fiction. Sense and Sensibility is, as a result, far more interesting and mature than Northanger Abbey, although both are still ‘bookish’ works, calling attention to the literary conventions which they exploit and expose. In Northanger Abbey, Austen seems to be frustrating, jolting and manipulating her readers’ conventional expectations and responses largely for fun. Judging and responding to the characters is never problematic, for either they are as transparent as Isabella Thorpe, Captain Tilney and Catherine herself, or speculation about them is confined to plot: will General Tilney’s actions be like life or like literature? In Sense and Sensibility and the later novels, however, Austen elicits and manipulates the responses of judgment and sympathy, with a moral intention: to exercise, to develop and finally to educate these responses in her readers. As literary responses, judgment and sympathy differ from suspense and distress principally by engaging and implicating a reader more formidably: exercising judgement and sympathy challenges and tests a reader’s perceptions, emotions, intelligence and moral sense. To elicit these requires a more complex world and subtler discriminations than those of Northanger Abbey, and in Sense and Sensibility Austen learns to obtain these effects almost entirely by constructing elaborate parallels and contrasts between characters.