The Last Eighteenth-Century Novel (Sense and Sensibility, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Austen's Sense and Sensibility, we welcome editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow to discuss Austen's biography, including some misconceptions about her; the place of Sense and Sensibility in Austen's bibliography; the meaning of the novel's title in its context; and some of the work's major characters.

Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and eighteenth-century culture. She is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel. She lives with her family in Jersey City, New Jersey.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Sense and Sensibility, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/SenseandSensibilityNL.

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Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/senseandsensibility/part1/transcript.

Transcript

[Music] 

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading Scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Canon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Jane Ausen's classic novel Sense and Sensibility, as we interview its editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow. In part one, we discuss how Austen's life led to the writing and publishing of her first novel, how the novel relates to the sentimental tradition, how the themes of sense and sensibility are presented in the narrative, and much more! Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an associate professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and the 18th-century culture. She is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel and the editor of the Norton Library Edition of Jane Austen's Emma, for which she already appeared on the Norton Library Podcast! Stephanie Insley Hershinow, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast! 

[Stephanie:] Hi, Mark, it's really great to be back! I am honored to be a repeat guest! 

[Mark:] Well, we're honored to have you back! And here we're going to be talking about Sense and Sensibility. Of course, we encourage all of our listeners to listen to our previous episode treating Jane Austen's Emma. Well, with all of that in mind, Stephanie, maybe you can remind us of a little bit about Jane Austen and what a reader could usefully know as they were approaching Sense and Sensibility. What do we need to know about the writer and this first text of her career? 

[Stephanie:] In some ways, Austen is so well known that people think they know her life already. She was a spinster, meaning she never married. She was a prolific writer, publishing six novels but starting to write at a very young age. But there are also things that, I think, sometimes people get wrong about her that I always try to emphasize. She's the daughter of a clergyman, so she's from a respectable family, but they don't have a ton of money. She's one of eight siblings, so she's got this very kind of bustling home life. And one thing that's really important to me, I think, is that her family is really supportive of her writing career. There's a kind of myth around Austen that she was kind of furtively writing in corners and hiding her work and that, you know, women weren't allowed to be writers and that kind of thing. But most of that is really at least exaggerated and sometimes just totally a myth. She has this, again, a family where her father is a clergyman, but he also runs a boarding school out of his house, so they have this house filled with books. Her older brothers are always kind of writing. They make a little literary magazine, they're putting on skits all the time, and they're reading books out loud to each other. From a very young age— we think, from her 11 or 12 —she starts writing to entertain her family and performing these little parodies of the books that they were reading together, and she gets a lot of support from them. They really love it. Not too long after—maybe in the early 18s—the family kind of conspires to try to get her writing published. They're not successful at first, but her father tries to get her a publishing contract. She's just really a gifted reader, writer, and thinker, and that's really recognized in her family life. She's born in 1775 which means next year is going to be the big 250th anniversary year for Austen. It's gonna be all Austen all the time next year. I especially, in thinking about Sense of Sensibility, I like to think about the fact that she's writing at the end of the 18th century, at the turn of the 18th century into the 19th century. The 1790s are a really tumultuous time politically—you know, in England's responding to the French Revolution. So, she's really in this kind of both exciting and also somewhat unsettling time politically when she's starting to really turn to writing longer pieces, more serious pieces, and that's part of what we get here in Sense and Sensibility, I think. 

[Mark:] Your edition of Sense and Sensibility has, as a frontispiece, the original title page, and it says, “by a lady”— “written by a lady.” What was that meant to indicate in 1811? And how are we now, years later, looking back on it to interpret it? 

[Stephanie:] Sure, like I said, plenty of novels are written by women in this age, so we shouldn't take that to mean that she's worried about what it would look like for a woman to write. A lot of the novelists that she's reading are women, and some of them are quite famous, like Francis Burney or Ann Radcliffe. But they still got a lot of, let's say, unwanted attention—you know, their tabloid fodder. I think, it's very common for a woman to seek out a writing career but also want to retain some anonymity and some privacy. I mean, she's still living a very kind of quiet domestic life at home. So, she published this first novel as “by a lady,” a pretty common more or less anonymous way to publish a novel. That's going to be the first and only novel that has that attribution. This one's “by a lady,” but then the next one Pride and Prejudice, which many of us know really well, is published as “by the author of Sense and Sensibility,” which I see as trying to already carve out and oeuvre it, right? Like she's already trying to make those connections and to have readers find her earlier work. That will continue, so she never in her lifetime publishes a novel with her name attached. She dies quite young at age 41. A few years later, all of the novels will just say, you know, “by the author of Pride and Prejudice,” or “by the author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.” But by the time she's near death, her identity is starting to be known. If you were in the London literati, you would hear rumors that this country girl named Jane Austen had written these novels—you know, something of an open secret at that point. Her brothers are bragging to their friends that their sister wrote these books that are becoming famous, but it is only after her death that her siblings publish her remaining novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, posthumously with a biographical note. With that posthumous publication they reveal her name, and they provide this pretty sanitized biography of her, but they add a biography, which also tells us they're not ashamed that these were novels written by their sister, in fact. I think we can think of that as kind of the beginning of launching Austen fandom, right? Like they want people to know who she was. 

[Mark:] You mentioned that Austen had been writing from a very young age, so by the time Sense and Sensibility comes out she's almost a veteran writer. But in your consideration of her entire bibliography, looking back on her entire career, does Sense and Sensibility have that kind of first novel spark and maybe she would later go on and write her masterpiece? Or do you think she hit the ground running, and this is a major work right away?

[Stephanie:] It's a great question. And, you know, to some extent, this is something that that Austen readers and Austen critics disagree about. I mean, there's certainly Sense and Sensibility detractors, who think of it as kind of the first pancake, right? Like, she's trying to figure it out but it's still this kind of transition from the more juvenile work that is all kind of a little more like tonally uneven, or overly dramatic, or not as mature or sophisticated or stylistically adept to some of the later novels. But there are also some real Sense and Sensibility devotees, and I count myself among them. I think she's really—from the very beginning, from her first published novel—she's not only working with that kind of set of questions that she'll continue to work on for the rest of her career: questions about most centrally, you know, how to find the right partner, or how to find some kind of   financial stability, and those are very much intertwined questions. But for me I'm a real kind of form girly. I'm also just fascinated by the fact that she is already with this versed novel, testing out some of the narrative techniques that she's going to come back to again and again, so we see in Sense and Sensibility this really kind of beautiful and adept use of free and direct discourse, for example, where she has the narrator kind of dipping into the consciousness of her characters. This is something that Austen is known for and is thought to be the master of.  You know, she's already doing that stuff; you can even say that the fact that we have these sister protagonists, these twinned protagonists, both following the arc of the marriage plot. It’s almost like advanced difficulty level, right? Like, she starts with something that is in some ways quite difficult to master, I think, for some— you know, she doesn't quite do it, I think, for me, some of the— well, that you can read its unevenness is for me the kind of complexity of how she's treating those two relationships and the relationships that they form with their communities, their circle.

[Mark:] The title Sense and Sensibility. How are we meant to take that? Is that helping guide us through the plot of the novel and its themes? 

[Stephanie:] This is a great question, and it's more complicated than it might seem on the surface. We know that when Austen was first writing this book, she just called it Elinor and Marianne, which are the names of the two sisters, the protagonists of the novel, and this is something she'll come back to with Emma, right? But she changes it, and so what is she doing by calling this “Sense and Sensibility”? On one level, we can see her trying to—it's almost like marketing for her book, like she's identifying for her readers the fact that this is going to be a novel that fits into the sentimental tradition—and we can talk about that a little bit more—but these novels that were very popular in the second half of the 18th century that are really trying to wrestle with questions about feeling emotion, how we respond to the tragedies of others, how we build bonds with others through a kind of shared feeling, so she's in some way giving us just a kind of genre tag, like loop this novel into all of your assumptions about these other novels. But I also read this title as there's a little bit of a bait and switch here, too, like, she's kind of um—I think she's tricking us a little bit, especially in the way that many readers—when it first was published, and many readers still today—will kind of take Sense and Sensibility and map it onto that original title “Elinor and Marianne,” right? Like, Elinor is sense, and Marianne is sensitive, you know, sensibility, feeling, emotion, passion. There were other novels that did this, where there were two sisters who had kind of opposite characters or opposite personalities, so she's very much kind of hooking this novel onto that subgenre. But if you really read the book, if you really linger with it, if you really think about it, I think she's also complicating that over the course of the novel and telling us actually it's kind of too easy to just map those two words onto her heroines.

[Mark:] So, one character isn't sense, one character isn't sensibility. There's a kind of a Venn diagram or an overlap? is that how she's conceiving of these characters? 

[Stephanie:] yeah, I like to think of it as a kind of spectrum. So, just to translate a little bit, because one of the difficulties with Austen is that the language can seem so familiar to us. She's not writing like Chaucer. She's writing in modern English. But there are still these words that like, you know, like, what does sensibility even mean, right? They can also seem quite alien. So, quickly just to give you a kind of a sense: most readers at the time that Austen's publishing this would have associated sense with what we might call now like common sense or good sense, like a kind of a rationality or intelligence. And sensibility—slightly more tricky—was associated both with passions, with emotion, but importantly also with the bodily experience of those things—the idea that you show your feeling through blushes, maybe through fainting or swooning, so are real like extremity of emotion to our modern perspective. But this was also something that was prized, like it wasn't just something that was ridiculed. It was something that was thought to be that that you could cultivate it, that you could get better at feeling, that you could get better at responding to art or responding even to politics in this way that you would feel for the plight of some underprivileged or dispossessed group of people, keenly feel for what it was that they were experiencing, and then that could then inform your politics. So, this was a very, very complex and hotly debated set of ideas, not just a kind of personality test; It wasn't just like INFP, like a Myers Briggs or something like that. It’s really a kind of mainstream subject of debate.

[Mark:] Is Austen ultimately telling us that there should be a balance between these two things or that one wins and one loses? What's her argument?

[Stephanie:] Ultimately, yeah, I think so. Early readers often would take the side of one or the other of these huge philosophical concepts, so in earlier reviews of Sense and Sensibility we actually get a lot of readers who say, “Good job, Jane, for showing that sense went out in the end and that Marianne was too sensible and had to be reigned in.” Later Victorian readers would say the opposite: “Good job, Jane”—like she comes out on top no matter what, but—“good job, Jane, for showing how passionate and sensitive Marianne is and rewarding her in the end. This is a novel with a happy ending.” I think most contemporary readers—I certainly read this as a novel that is ultimately suggesting that there not only is it maybe wisest to find to balance, but that it's just impossible. None of us can possibly embody one or the other of these things and that to be a truly ethical person to foster meaningful relationships; we're always kind of always navigating that collision between what is rational, what is maybe more um proper or expected, and the kind of deep current of feeling that we might be wrestling with at the same time. 

[Mark:] When Austen approaches a marriage plot and is also invested in the sentimental tradition, what role does sense play in trying to find a spouse? and what role does sensibility play? Do we go for what is practical? Do we go for love at first sight and happily ever after and passion? Is there a balance of those two of those two notions? 

[Stephanie:] In some ways this is a moment, you know— Austen’s, as I said, writing this at the end of the 18th century. She's publishing it in the Regency Era, kind of early 19th century. She's writing at a time when the whole idea of what marriage is undergoing change. And sometimes that change is read very starkly as marriage goes from being a matter of connection making between families and financial arrangements to being something that is about love, mutual affection, and compatibility. Of course, you know, I'm going to tell you it's more complicated than that, and I think something that Austen is just really good at is trying to show how complex these decisions are and showing that this is why it's worth centering a novel on teenage women in this moment. Marianne is 16 in this novel, Elinor is 19! And one thing that we haven't touched on: that readers of the novel will know well is this is a novel that begins with the tragedy. Their father dies suddenly, and when their father dies, they realize quite quickly that his estate had through complicated legal means been left to their adult half-brother. They're kicked out on the street; they don't have anything like the kind of material comforts or kind of status that they had before, and it's unclear several chapters into the novel where they'll even go. This is actually something that Austen had herself. In a way this is a little bit autofiction; Austen had experienced this herself. Her father had died without making plans for his family, especially for the women of his family, and so for four years Austen, her sister, and her mother are basically couch surfing. They're incredibly vulnerable to these material changes that come with you know the death of men, the absence of men, the leaving of men. This is why marriage is not just central in order for us to get a love story—though, I think we do get that—but it's also central because these are incredibly difficult and important decisions. These women have absolutely no financial independence, and to choose a husband would mean not only your own financial stability but the stability of your whole family, right? Like, what happens to your mother if you get married? Hopefully she's taken care of; if not, where are you gonna go? So yeah, I think Sense and Sensibility in some ways map on to that idea, too. Do you approach the question of matrimony rationally? Do you approach the question of matrimony passionately? We see, because this is a very complicated love story with these two young women, a number of different approaches are playing out in a lot of different way, the kind of pinball effect of all of those different possible combinations.  

[Mark:] Stephanie, I wanted you to just talk for one more minute about the sentimental novel tradition that Austen would either be reacting to or entering into depending on what you're arguing, so is the sentimental novel is it more moral in nature? Or is it trying to do something different than Austen's work is? 

[Stephaine:] In some ways we can think of the sentimental tradition from, let's call it the second half of the 18th century, kind of responding back to what we often call The Age of Reason. The Age of Reason is that kind of high Enlightenment, certainly a kind of prizing of rationality with the early Enlightenment thinkers, and there's a little bit of a pendulum swing. Again we could overread that, but there is this kind of collective response to that privileging of Enlightenment philosophy and thinking, like “oh, but what about… what about feeling?” Many critics will point to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which is a novel I know and love as a kind of a hallmark of this tradition, where we get the story of, again, a young woman who at first is pressured into a marriage that she doesn't want to enter into. She ends up either running away or being abducted by a handsome, rake figure, and she ultimately is raped and dies. This is, you know—the sentimental tradition is a dramatic one, right? Like, big feelings come from big dramatic action. Clarissa dies over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages. This novel is about 2,000 pages long in a in a modern edition, and readers are just completely captivated.

[Mark:] So it's playing on the emotions of the readers. 

[Stephanie:] Absolutely, and also suggesting that if you have an inadequate response to this story, meaning you're sobbing through the night trying to finish it, that says something about your character. That says something about your morality and about your kind of like ethical connection to others, even though what you're responding to is a fictional character. Now, from almost the very beginning you also have detractors, who think that this is all overblown who wanted Clorissa to come along and die ready, like looking at their watch, and also who suggested—and we get this now, too, I think—that, okay, so you have this strong reaction to fictional characters, but that doesn't tell me anything about your politics. Maybe you're spending all of your time watching tearjerkers and not doing anything to actually materially help anybody in the real world. So, from the beginning these are parodied, these are pillared, these are critiqued, and this is part of what I mentioned before about. 

[Mark:] By Austen, too? 

[Stephanie:] Yeah, so that's a more complicated question. I tend to think of Austen as someone who can really toe the line of affectionate parody. She has to know this tradition well to enter into it the way that she does. I do think that on some level Sense and Sensibility is a sincere addition to this line of thinking. At the same time, she knows part of it is just the kind of advantage of coming last in a way. But just as with her novel Northanger Abbey, which is, I think, again, affectionately parodying the gothic tradition. I think she has to know it well. She's kind of lovingly critiquing it. She still thinks there's a lot there that is worth thinking about. I call this is provocative, I think, but I call Sense and Sensibility in my introduction “the last 18th century novel” because I really do think that she is genuinely responding to and kind of putting a period to the end of this this ongoing conversation about the role of passionate feeling in one's moral life. I don't think it's just there to give her a kind of foil for the work that she wants to do.

[Mark:] Well, it might be helpful, with Sense and Sensibility in mind, to talk at least about the sisters without spoiling too much. What can you tell us as we enter this novel about these two sisters? What is Austen setting up? 

[Stephanie:] Elinor is 19. She's the eldest daughter. She's the eldest of three, actually. There's a younger sister Margaret, who gets almost no time in the novel, but we know there's like one more mouth to feed. Marianne is again we're told not 17, so she's 16 and a half, 16 and 3/4. And, again, they're rocked at the beginning of this novel by the sudden death of their father. Elinor is trying to keep the family together. Her mother is, we're led to believe, a little more on the Marianne’s side of the way she's responding to these events. I mean, she's a widow. She's feeling quite deeply but also is responding maybe in not the most practical ways to the fact that her daughter-in-law has now moved into her house and is now the mistress of that house and is now decorating it the way she wants. All of these different changes that come with this kind of changing of the guard financially and legally. Elinor is really trying to kind of manage all of this, and Marianne is quite devastated that she has to leave her home, that she has so many kinds of romantic associations with. And we have these sisters who are dealing with quite a lot at the same time that they find themselves in the period of eligibility—this is the word that we use for this, you know, rather brief period when women are expected to put themselves out there and go try to find, again, a husband who will bring both personal affection and material comfort, so there's a lot for them to juggle. One of the things that I find just so moving about this novel is that Austen doesn't just give us this kind of rosy picture of sisterly love. Their relationship to each other is really central to this novel, but it's something that is complex. They disagree all the time, they're bickering with each other all of the time, and they're responding quite differently to these material circumstances and to this this kind of task that's in front of them, which, to me, this is the beauty of the marriage plot in Austen's hands, right? Like, she shows us from the very beginning in Sense and Sensibility that this isn't just a kind of—it's not just obvious how this is going to play out right because she's giving us these two women for whom the challenge of finding a suitable partner looks very, very different.

[Mark:] So, who are these potential partners? Who comes into play as possibilities here? 

[Stephanie:] Not long after the Dashwood family does find a safe home their cousin reaches out and says, “hey you can come live in my little cottage,” and they do. Not too long after Marianne’s—probably the most romance novelly moment in an Austen novel; this is kind of meat cute—where she sprains her ankle and is rescued by this dashing man on horseback, Willoughby, and Willoughby is, for quite some time in the novel, kind of like perfect, you know, the tall, dark, handsome, reading her poetry, lavishing attention on her. Exactly every 16-year-old Regency girls on dreamboat. But Willoughby also has a past, we find out about that. One of the interesting things about the way this novel takes up the sentimental tradition, I think, is that we get all of these hints of the dark stuff in the corners, these hints of the dark stuff in the margins. A lot of times we're getting the stuff that's a little closer to Clarissa we only get in backstory. We only get gossip around these characters, and Willoughby is certainly one of those. For Elinor, it's a little bit more of the kind of boy-next-door story. She becomes quite fond of Edward, who happens to be her horrible sister-in-law's brother. In some ways he's like a perfect potential match because he's almost family, he's around, she knows his character, she knows his family, and he's not as mysterious as Willoughby. So, in some ways you know we're led to believe he's much more suitable for Elinor. At the same time, because they've lost everything, he's now kind of above her station. He's too good for her in some ways, so her sister-in-law is quite suspicious. And then it turns out—I won't get too far into it, but—Edward has a past, too. So, that complicates things. The last love interest I'll mention is Colonel Brandon, poor Colonel Brandon. I'm quite affectionate about Colonel Brandon, maybe in part because Alan Rickman played him in the movie [laughter]. But Brandon—his past is that he's a military man, but he's retired. Marianne thinks he's ancient because he's on the wrong side of 35. He has a little bit more kind of gravitas, worldly wisdom, and from the outset Marianne decides he is—there's a little bit of gossip around the fact that he seems to be fond of her, but no way, no way would she ever go for someone like him. Maybe he's more suitable for Elinor; they're both kind of quiet and thoughtful and broody. So, yeah one of the things that I think is so fun about this novel and fun to teach this novel is that I think it's a little harder to know how it's going to play out in the end than with some of her others. So, we really do not only in just having three potential romantic partners, but just with some of the revelations that we get as early as the end of volume one. You don't quite know where she's going with this one.

[Mark:] Stephanie Insley Hershinow, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility!

[Stephanie:] Thanks, Mark, anytime! The Norton Library Edition of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, edited by Stephanie Insley Hershinow is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.