Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen (1811)
“Two sisters, one heart of sense, one of sensibility — and Austen wants you to question which is worse.”
Language Register
Formal Regency prose — balanced periodic sentences, Latinate vocabulary, irony embedded in syntax rather than declared
Syntax Profile
Austen's signature balanced sentence: two clauses of equal length, one qualifying the other. 'Her abilities were in many respects quite equal to Elinor's. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.' The grammar performs the contrast it describes. Questions and free indirect discourse carry the novel's irony.
Figurative Language
Low-to-moderate — Austen avoids purple metaphor. Her irony operates through juxtaposition, anticlimax, and understatement rather than elaborate figures. When she does use imagery (Marianne 'reading' Willoughby like a text she invented), it is surgical.
Era-Specific Language
In 1811: emotional sensitivity and the capacity for feeling; not weakness but a prized quality — Austen's title places it in productive tension with 'sense'
Regency euphemism for 'married with an income' — to be 'not yet settled' is to be in a state of social and economic precarity
A church position providing income — what Edward requires before he can marry, entirely controlled by his family
Marriage to a person of means; 'a good establishment' means financial security via marriage
Correct social behavior — the standard by which Marianne is found wanting and Elinor excels, but which the novel repeatedly reveals as class-coded
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Elinor Dashwood
Measured, qualified, self-interrupting — constantly conscious of how she sounds and what she reveals
The speech of someone who has been trained that self-expression is a luxury she cannot afford
Marianne Dashwood
Declarative, superlative, allergic to qualification — 'I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own'
The speech of someone who has not yet learned that the world does not arrange itself around her feelings
Willoughby
Enthusiastic, literary, perfectly calibrated to its audience — shifts register effortlessly from passionate to formal
Charm as performance. The man who reads Cowper to you is the same man who wrote the cold dismissal letter. Same intelligence, different purpose.
Lucy Steele
Breathy, confiding, grammatically imprecise — she deploys intimacy as a social weapon, using the register of female friendship to deliver wounds
Austen's darkest portrait of intelligence without education — Lucy is as acute as Elinor and entirely without principle
Colonel Brandon
Spare, declarative, economical — the voice of someone who has learned to mean exactly what he says because he has paid the price of being misunderstood
Moral authority expressed through restraint; the anti-Willoughby, audible in every sentence
Narrator's Voice
Third-person limited omniscient, drifting primarily through Elinor's consciousness, with omniscient ironic commentary surfacing at key moments. The narrator is clearly on the side of intelligence and against self-deception — but the irony is so precise it catches everyone, including Elinor.
Tone Progression
Chapters 1-10
Satirical, establishes contrast
Social comedy, exposition, the Dashwood women in their new world. The prose is light, ironic, setting the terms of the debate.
Chapters 11-30
Anticipatory, escalating tension
Willoughby's courtship, Edward's ambiguity, London approach. The irony thickens; we see more than the characters do.
Chapters 31-45
Catastrophic, emotionally raw
Both betrayals land. Austen allows real grief. The comedy recedes and the pain is genuine.
Chapters 46-50
Elegiac, ironically satisfied
Resolution — not quite triumph, not quite elegy. The world is still the world. The right people got each other. Just.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Pride and Prejudice — more playful in tone, Elizabeth Bennet as a more extroverted Elinor
- Northanger Abbey — similar Gothic parody instinct, but S&S takes its social stakes more seriously
- Persuasion — the later novel asks what Elinor would feel if her restraint had cost her Edward permanently
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions