My Head Is Full of Books: Austen25: Sense and Sensibility -- I Begin

Friday, January 17, 2025

Austen25: Sense and Sensibility -- I Begin

Joining Austen25 to honor a favorite writer as we near her 250th birthday, this month we are reading Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published work. I joined the project just this week, so I am behind and will have to play catch up in order to finish the book by the end of the month.

My plan is to read a set number of pages a day. The edition I am reading was published by Barnes and Noble Classics in 2004 with an introduction by Laura Engel. It has 312 pages. Dividing up the days left means I need to read a minimum of 21 pages each day through the end of the month. Doable.

In the introduction, Laura Engel describes Sense and Sensibility as "a coming-of-age novel and also a work that chronicles Austen's own 'coming of age' -- her development as a writer" (xi). When Austen began working on "Elinor and Marianne" she was only twenty and surely thought she had the possibility of marriage and motherhood ahead of her. By the time the book was finally completed fifteen years later, her circumstances were quite different. She'd been disappointed in love, lost her father, moved two times and now lived in Chawton with her mother and sister, Cassandra.

In the early parts of the novel, Marianne and Elinor, though close-knit sisters, struggle to communicate openly with one another. In Austen's world women were not encouraged to reveal too much about themselves. Rather they had to "perfect the art of innuendo, leading questions, and disguised sentiments. The slippery properties of language became a heroine's greatest weapon" (xiii). I'm only on page 42 and already I've seen example after example of the ways women attempted to find out information without asking directly or being very frank with one another. Throughout the story, Engels tells us, women characters had trouble understanding Elinor and Marianne and this was likely due to the misuse of misunderstanding of language. One has to wonder if this is the way people misunderstood Austen herself.

Austen played a lot with the theme of both sense and of sensibility throughout the book. It is generally thought that Elinor is full of sense, leading with her head. While Marianne, who is much more emotive than her older sister, always seemed to lead with her heart. But other characters show off their sense and sensibility, too. "It is the characters with the least sense who got the most airtime and those with the most important news who are ignored" (xx). For example, Willoughby makes fun of the more staid Col. Brandon by saying "whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to" (42). And Marianne recognizes her faux-pas in speaking too frankly and openly. "I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved" (40).

This is a reread of Sense and Sensibility for me. I first read it in 2013 where I decided to read and write a reflection on my blog once a week after reading a minimum of 50 pages. I invited other readers to join me, but no one did and I think few people even read my weekly posts about the book. I am posting links to them below, in the event you want to take a peek at any of them. For each entry I summarized the action from that week's reading, reacted to something surprising in the text, and then posed a question which sometimes I attempted to answer. This process of summary and questioning helped me read the book to its completion. A year earlier I had attempted to read Emma and found myself floundering until I changed tactics and challenged myself to stay on a reading/examining schedule. If you find yourself having a similar problem you may want to adopt a similar tactic to read the Austen or other classic books.

Oddly, in all my updates from 2013, I never mentioned the introduction by Laura Engel. I bet I didn't even read it then. Since that time I find myself always reading the introductions included with classic book editions, finding insights I know I would have missed without them. One more piece of advice from me to you -- read the introductions. Tee-hee.

Now I am off to read my daily page installment.

-Anne