Techniques

Abstract

In reading Jane Austen’s novels, we need to bear in mind that above all Jane Austen is a comic writer. By saying this, I am not implying that the subjects treated within the text are light-hearted: the preceding discussions of Section 3 show that Jane Austen deals with very serious issues indeed. Rather when we talk about comedy, we are usually referring to the distanced stance of the writer who controls the characters and plot in such a way that the underlying seriousness does not become too intense. So in looking at the techniques used by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility, we need to appreciate the demands of the comic vision that informs the whole. Not only is Sense and Sensibility a marvellously funny book with its acid ironic commentary and its hilarious portraits of ridiculously affected characters, but it is a work conceived within an artistic framework that imposes its own rules, and this is something more difficult to grasp.