Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

The principal theme of Sense and Sensibility (1811) is how to achieve an appropriate balance of reason and feeling, within the individual, within the parish, and within the estate. According to the evidence presented in this novel, and in Austen’s other novels, the appropriate balance is slightly different in the religious sphere among the clergy and the secular sphere among the laity. The ending of Sense and Sensibility mirrors an idealised, but merited and hard-won, unity between the two classes that predominate in all of Austen’s novels: the class she firmly belonged to, the clergy; and the class she was strongly associated with by marriage and social intercourse, the gentry. The novel describes, as all of her novels describe, the two-way movement between these classes that was occurring in the late Georgian period.^2,6,7