A Passion for Dead Leaves (Sense and Sensibility, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow discusses her own history with Austen, common misconceptions about the novel, her favorite line in the novel, a Sense and Sensibility-inspired playlist, and more.

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.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Sense and Sensibility: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/57XGkr5wU6J7QN6LvET2OX?si=b45ea6554c9c4431.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/senseandsensibility/part2/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 second of our two episodes devoted to Jane Austen's classic novel Sense and Sensibility, as we interview its editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow. In part one, we discussed Austen's life and how it led to the publication of her first novel, the idea of the sentimental tradition, the meaning of the title, and much more. In this second episode, we learn about Stephanie's own history with Austen, her favorite line in the novel, A Sense and Sensibility playlist and, of course, her hot take. Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an associate professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and 18th-century culture. She is the author 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:] Thanks, Mark, I'm so happy to be back! I am looking forward to learning more about Jane Austen and hearing you talk about Sense and Sensibility and your relationship to it. But before we really get into it, I wanted to ask you to comment on the Norton Library cover, the design of Sense and Sensibility. Can you describe it and sort of explain the inspiration behind it?  

[Stephanie:] For everyone listening, maybe you can pull up in your browser. This lovely kind of coral color, and the accents are a kind of deeper—what do we call that?—a little like a maroon. On some level, I think, it draws on a little bit of the moodiness of this novel. I've talked about how it's a little darker than some of Austen's other novels, and we have a kind of key scene where Marianne is enthusing about autumn, the leaves turning colors. But more directly the color scheme is drawn from the movie poster for the 1995 Ang Lee adaptation; the screenplay was written by Emma Thompson. I know that poster very well. I also have some nostalgia that I get from this cover.

[Mark:] Oh, excellent. I'm sure we'll talk about the adaptation in just a little bit. But, yes, the cover does invite us to think about autumn and fall moods. Stephanie, do you remember when you first encountered Sense and Sensibility? 

[Stephanie:] I mentioned this, I think, in the Emma podcast that we recorded. But I am a child of the 90s, so the Ang Lee movie was my first encounter with Sense and Sensibility. This is a such a golden age!

[Mark:] The movie before the book?

[Stephanie:] Yeah! I mean, clueless. The BBC Pride and Prejudice came out, the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility came out, so yeah. Listen, I had that poster up in my room. They published Emma Thompson's screenplay along with the diaries that she kept while she was filming it. She stars in the film as Elinor and wrote the screenplay, so I definitely am one of those. I was a Jane knight first, then a Jane scholar—Jane Austen scholar second. I came to her work through adaptation, like a lot of readers do, I think. 

[Mark:] When you did first read the book, did it match or enhance the movie-going experience? 

[Stephanie:] For me, I think, the books were only more interesting and only better than the films. I've always come back to the films, but I was delighted to start reading the novels when I was a teenager—and rereading them, too—so I hope that my students have the same experience. Many of them have also—they're more familiar with the adaptations when they come to my classroom. But I think for many of them even if something happens that deviates from the screenplay, which happens pretty often, usually it's to make things more interesting and complex.

[Mark:] And when you do your scholarly work on Jane Austen, is it one novel above another or are you interested in her entire career and output? 

[Stephanie:] I think, like most Austen scholars, I'm pretty interested in the whole career. I mean, increasingly I'm interested in the juvenilia, as well. We mentioned this in the last episode, but she's just writing some really fun, ruckus, sometimes violent, like slapstick humor. Emma Thompson called the juvenilia a series of Monty Python sketches, which is often true, right? We got levels of goofiness that the mature novels can't quite match. I'm writing a book right now about Austen's narrative technique, her use of form, and I'm really trying to think about how her technique develops over the course of her whole career, so I've been thinking about a lot of those connections between the novels. With Sense and Sensibility one of the things that was very new to me in working on this edition was actually the more the nitty-gritty textual stuff with this novel. You know, this is her first published novel. It came out in 1811, but because it came out earlier in her career, a few years before her tragic death she actually was able to cooperate with the second edition that came out in 1813. There aren't huge changes, but we do see her taking out a sentence here, adding in a sentence there, and it is kind of fascinating to track how she is responding to the public reception of that novel. At the same time, there also probably—I don't know— hundreds of tiny little changes between the first and second editions, so one of my tasks as editor would have to be, you know—which one do I go with? Do I go with the second edition? And this Norton Library Edition is largely based on the second edition. Do I go with the way that she changed the spelling of this word? If the spelling is inconsistent, do I keep it inconsistent? You know, all of these tiny little changes. The Austen scholar Claudia Johnson, who also edited the Norton Critical Edition, writes about how she didn't know how to make one of these decisions about like a comma in a sentence of Sense and Sensibility, and she swears that she heard a Austen breathe in a corner. Austen's ghost came to her to tell her what to do. And, you know, I'm no Claudia Johnson, so Austen did not come to me and tell me what to do. When I was working on this edition, I had to kind of figure it out myself. But yeah, it's all to say, I think, for me Austin has been this kind of endless repository for things to think about and work on. 

[Mark:] Was there a substantive change from 1811 to 1813 that you can tell us about? Something that might reveal an aspect of Austen's artistic vision? 

[Stephanie:] There's a great moment when many of the characters are sitting around in a parlor, as they often do, and they're gossiping about one of the other characters who is suspected of having a child out of wedlock, having a love child. And there is this, you know, somewhat small but important change where Austen kind of takes out a little bit of the detail where one of the characters is kind of so flustered by this topic of conversation that she has to leave the room because she can't bear to think about it. Austen makes, I think, material changes to how much detail, like how much she's explaining, why the character is in a huff and leaving, and in the second edition she kind of lets us as readers figure it out a little bit more, and I think that is one of the places where we can kind of see her refining. She's known for this kind of sharp satire, and I think you can see her working on that and thinking about how much to spell out some of these things.

[Mark:] It's almost like she trusts herself more in that second moment. 

[Stephanie:] Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And we can point to later moments where she's doing something similar and she's trusting us, too, right? She's trusting us to figure it out and to be able to read it from the context. 

[Mark:] One more question about your role as an editor, I'm trying to picture. Are you actually able to look at the 1811 first edition and then an 1813 edition? 

[Stephanie:] This was really fun for me. I believe it or not there's no digitized copy of the second edition, even though that's the one that most scholars depend on, so I sat in the Morgan library in New York City, which everyone should visit. it's this beautiful museum with a wonderful research Library. They only let you look at one book at a time, so I had to beg them to let me hold two volumes, one from each edition, at a time in the little book cradles, and I just I sat and flipped pages from each I checked every single comma, every single change of spelling, so this was somewhat new to me. This is not something that I had to do with the Emma edition, which was only in one edition in her lifetime. And yeah, it built character; I'm a better, stronger person [laughter] after having sat in the Morgan for many, many, many hours.  

[Mark:] Well, it led to this Norton Library edition, so that's all worth it. Do you think that there is a common misreading of Sense and Sensibility that you encounter in either in your classrooms or in critical discourse?

[Stephanie:] Yeah, this is something we touched on in the last episode, but I think it is so easy to come into this novel thinking that you're reading about these two women who are polar opposites, you know, these two women who have different personality: one is an extrovert, one is an introvert, and to really kind of oversimplify their personalities. I think that's just tempting reading. I think many of us are attracted to those kinds of crystallizations, even our own personalities, and in some ways it's quite comforting to be able to kind of categorize people into types in that way. And, like I said, this is a very common early reading of the novel as well, but it persists. I wrote about this in the introduction actually but when my daughter was born, she got a board book of Sense and Sensibility, and it's an opposites book, it's a baby book. So it's like, you know, tall, short; fat, skinny. I I can only assume it's an opposites book because it is also an interpretation of this novel, and it assumes that sense and sensibility are opposites, so I think I really try when I teach this novel, and when I reread it myself to just watch for those moments—and they're everywhere—where Austen is reminding us that that is too easy a reading.

[Mark:] What about the challenges to reading the novel, either first-time readers or your students? Does this novel have challenging aspects? 

[Stephanie:] Yeah, one of the things that is always kind of tricky. I'll have classrooms where half my students are already obsessed with Jane Austen and half my students don't really know who she is, so everybody's coming at this from a slightly different perspective. Textually, I think, one of the challenges with any Austen novel—in part just because when they're written—is the kind of eerie familiarity of the language, so it can seem quite straight forward but then at the same time we have these like false cognates. Fanny Dashwood, the despicable sister-in-law, is referred to as mean. Mean has one meaning for us, right? She's evil. But it really means that she's stingy. Mean has a different meaning in 1811 than it has now, so there’re all those little moments that you have to kind of keep an eye out for. I really try to help out with the notes to this edition. For me, even an Austen obsessive, even somebody who knows the novels, knows the adaptations really well can pick up on some new nuances if you slow down and really think about the language here. It can be a little bit alienating once you realize that some of these words me different things, but then you also get this whole other kind of richer context at the same time.

[Mark:] Do you think the plot is convoluted or hard to follow? 

[Stephanie:] I'll say this: well, in some ways no. In some ways it's just that kind of rocky love story, and if you have any kind of experience with love stories, with soap operas, with telenovela, you know, if you have any kind of experience with kind of rocky romance or personal experience, maybe, you should be able to follow it. I think one thing that happens in this novel that is quite interesting and—I know I touched on this—is the way that some of the more exuberant excesses of the sentimental tradition, the real hefty drama happens on the margins, or it happens off stage. So we will get reports of a scandalous divorce or, like I said, a love child of someone dying in debtors’ prison, but we don't get that narrated for us; we get it reported to us from these characters, so I do think one thing that we have to be careful about is you can kind of be lulled into complacency, “oh, they're just talking in a sitting room, they're just playing cards, they're just doing their needle point.” But those conversations get quite deep and quite dramatic if we slow down and pay attention to them. The same thing happens on a less kind of sorted scale just with the way some of these characters divulge or withhold secrets from one another. One of the things this novel is about, I think, is when do you tell someone something that you know that has been confided in you? And when do you ensure that you keep that secret? That can be a really difficult question to track over the course of the novel too.

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in Sense and Sensibility?

[Stephanie:] I do. When I was talking about the cover, I talked about this autumnal spirit of this book and the way that Marianne enthuses about autumn, and I love autumn myself. But there's this passage where Marianne is just gushing about the leaves turning and the seasons changing, and Elinor just deadpans to her, “It is not everyone who has your passion for dead Leaves.” [laughter]. I swear I laughed out loud when I read. The thing I love about it is both that Elinor is just being so b*tchy. But Elinor is funny, right?! I think this is one of those moments where I'm just like you cannot read Elinor as just this kind of like uptight, dutiful, you know, perfect, rational woman because she's also snarky and funny, and I think that's the moment where I'm like, yes, it's right that Emma Thompson played her—some people think she's miscast. So that's my that's my moment. 

[Mark:] That's a great one. I wanted to propose a favorite line. I just wanted to see if you could react to this spontaneously—I know—so this is on in page 96 of your edition, toward the bottom. We're talking about Elinor , and I found this sentence so fascinating: “Her mind was inevitably at liberty; her thoughts could not be chained elsewhere; and the past and the future, on a subject so interesting, must be before her, must force her attention, and engross her memory, her reflection, and her fancy.” So, to say nothing of the dozen commas that are in there that sentence, what is being expressed there and what is that telling us about that character?

[Stephanie:] This is also a great line. I would have to go back and double check my notes, but I think you're right that this is one of those where I was like, “God damn it, is there another semicolon in this sentence?”—when I was editing it. So this is a moment when Elinor is alone, which is pretty rare in a novel where she not only has two sisters and a mother in a tiny little house, but also they're constantly being—you know, there's barges of social calls. So Elinor is alone, and she's thinking about Edward: whether or not it would be possible to pursue a relationship with him or not. this is that kind of fascinating topic of conversation with her. I love this moment. I actually write about this moment because it's one of these times where Austen kind of makes literal and physical this thing that she's doing with narrative perspective. So this is the end of a moment where the narrator has been inside of Elinor's mind where the narrator is using free and direct discourse to give us kind of access to the way that Elinor is thinking and the—even the kind of characteristic of her speech, so we're deeply inside of her mind. And just after that sentence that you read, we get another sentence from a reverie of this kind as she sat at her drawing table. She was roused one morning soon after Edward's leaving them by the arrival of company, so we get this almost a kind of literal intrusion, right? We've just been kind of intruding into her deepest, most secret thoughts, and then she has her privacy invaded by literally company, and most of them are pretty annoying, let's face it—Mrs. Jennings, Sir John… I love those moments where we get—I think she's being quite playful about what kind of access do we have to another person's consciousness, and how might those private interior moments differ from how Elinor has to be acting in company in semi-public, in this kind of domestic public with acquaintances and sometimes strangers. 

[Mark:] I'm glad I asked that. So, Stephanie, could you take us into your classroom for just a bit? How do you teach this novel? What tends to work on students with Sense and Sensibility? 

[Stephanie:] Like I said, I think we're always on the lookout for moments that complicate. You know, I set up the same way that I have in our discussion: what is this kind of opposition of the title? What are these early readers seeing, and how might we see something a little bit different when we're digging in deeper to the novel? So we're always in the lookout for those kinds of passages, always on the lookout for example the moments when the narrator tells us that Elinor is earnestly trying to repress her feeling, right? Like she's deeply feeling but she doesn't feel that she's allowed to display that, right? That's something different than just being a rational, unfeeling kind of actor. So that's one thing that we do. A little more fun maybe: my students increasingly are bringing in: do you know these, like Reddit, like, “am I the as*hole?” [laugher]. These posts where—I mean to me this is such a great example of how we're still so interested in judging complicated, like ethical scenarios, right? Like some of them are less complicated than others, let's face it. But you know, my students are often eager to kind of translate some of the kind of complex interactions of this novel into that kind of like almost advice-columny  relationship description, right? Like, is it what Willoughby does to Marianne —I won't get into details—is he the as*hole? Like, did he betray her or not? This is something that we can actually earnestly debate and think through. Are some of these consequences the result of kind of understandable human complexity, or is there someone we should be blaming here, right? Like is this about blame and responsibility or are these kinds of inevitable collisions of competing interests. That's happening all over the place in this novel, and I think sometimes that that kind of contemporary genre of assessing people's moral deliberation more or less is one way. 

[Mark:] It seems like both of the techniques that you're describing are celebrating Austen's ambiguity, the complexity in the novel, and maybe your classroom sort of thrives on finding those kinds of gray areas in texts that could slip into easy dichotomies, let’s say.

[Stephanie:] I think that's right. As much as I love adaptation, sometimes adaptation can flatten some of that ambiguity for understandable reasons. You have to fit it into 90 minutes, or you have to have heroes and villains. I think that's one of the ways that we can kind of recover something that's a little bit different than what we get from reimagining or from adaptations, as wonderful as they are.

[Mark:] So, Stephanie, I know that you are going to have a hot take about Sense and Sensibility. Am I right? 

[Stephanie:] I have the dorkiest hot take ever. So prepare yourselves, but it actually would make some people very angry. [laughter].Okay, so there is a, I think, a common misconception that Sense and Sensibility started as an epistolary novel. So Austen is reading a ton of novels that are written in the form of letters. it's a very popular form in the 18th century. When she's writing, the 1790s, probably more than half of the published novels are written in the form of letters between characters. Years later, one of the nieces—you know, she's from a big family—a niece remembers that Sense and Sensibility had first been written in the form of letters. We suspect Pride and Prejudice was written first in the form of letters. So this is the truism that just gets repeated over and over in the criticism, like Sense and Sensibility was first epistolary and then she turned it into a third person narrator novel. I think it's bogus. I don't think it was ever epistolary. It doesn't make any sense. Elinor and Marianne are together for the entire—physically together in one place for the whole novel, so who she's going to write letters to? It just makes no structural or narrative sense, and I think for me that matters because it really is about Austen trying to figure out some of those narrative perspective questions that I had mentioned earlier with the passage that you highlighted in a new way. I don't think that this has been a translation from some other form, and that may seem very low stakes to some of your listeners, but there may be some Austen scholars listening to this and throwing their phone against the wall because they're so angry at my Sense and Sensibility hot take.

[Mark:] No, that does un undo what you generally hear about Sense and Sensibility, so that definitely qualifies. Well you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I'm interested in how this novel's been adapted and repurposed. So obviously one of the ways is movies.

[Stephanie:]  Yeah, there's earlier adaptations than the Ang Lee, but I do think that 1995 film—it's starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet; Hugh Grant is Edward Ferras—that is for many Austen fans the kind of iconic adaptation of this novel. If you go back and look at those diaries, when Thompson was approached to adapt it she thought, “why this one?” In part for some of the reasons we've talked about: a lot of the most dramatic stuff isn't actually in the novel. it's just isn't actually like narrated in the novel; it happens off stage. How do you turn this into a plot? But I do think that film captures so much of the kind of atmosphere of the book in a really beautiful way. This is not one of the most adopted novels, like Pride and Prejudice might be, but there are some really wonderful ones. There's a great stage adaptation by Kate Hamill. That was performed—I saw it in New York a few years ago. It's a beautiful kinetic. The characters are on chairs with casters, like rollers, and they just careen around the stage in this kind of balletic way, which is very cool. I recently read a great kind of reimagining by the romance novelist Nikki Payne, who has also adapted Pride and Prejudice, and she takes them—it's almost the kind of in the clueless manner—she puts them in contemporary Black America. Her characters are from Washington DC, and so she's really thinking about some of the kind of class implications of the fall from status at the beginning of this novel. I really recommend it it's called Sex, Lies and Sensibility. That's a really great one. So yeah, this is still very much ripe for adaptation and reimagining, but I want to say maybe it's a little bit more of a kind of cult favorite in a way. It's a little less maybe at the fingertips of adapters than some of the other novels.

[Mark:] What about music? Do you have a Sense and Sensibility playlist for us?

[Steaphnie:] I was thinking about this. I think even though—slight spoiler—this is a novel that ends happily. Unlike many novels of the sentimental tradition, where heroines get killed off in the end, this one does end happily. But I do think the bulk of the novel really lends itself to breakup songs, so I've been thinking a lot about the breakup song in trying to think about a Sense and Sensibility playlist, so here are some, to me the greatest—also 1995, like the Ang Lee adaptation: Alanis Morissette, You Oughta Know, key breakup song…You know, it's hard, every Taylor Swift song ever [laughter]. But, let's say, um—

[Mark:] I was thinking: which one is she going to choose? [laughter] 

[Steaphnie:] yeah, I'm sure there are other Norton Library editors who could help me out with this one. I was thinking about a really recent one: I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, which I think is very much captures an Elinor vibe in that it's trying to describe what it feels like to not show that you have a broken heart. A favorite of mine, Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I think, really captures the kind of plaintiveness of Marianne ’s romantic despair. and because we can't just have like plaintiff breakup songs, I will throw in Dua Lipa’s Don't Start Now, which spoils a little bit that ending, or how I read the ending of this novel. But I will let your listeners go back and reread it to see how. 

[Mark:] We'll add those to the playlist. Those are great, Stephanie. And I wanted to end on one note because unlike most Norton Library editions, you included an afterword to your text. What was your thinking behind it? What does it add to the novel? And what are we to get from it?

[Stephanie:] I think I was really trying both with the Emma edition and the Sense and Sensibility edition to be pretty respectful of the spoiler question, and it's complex to me because I do tend to believe the idea that a spoiler can't ruin a good book. So it's not that I think that if you know the ending of this novel you will somehow have this impoverished experience of reading it. But at the same time I do think that there are some things that play out over the course of this novel that are best kind of mold over after you've gotten through, like exactly how they've been narrated. I wanted to save some of that stuff. I mentioned earlier that this novel is about secrets and knowing when to share them. And this is something Austen comes back to later in her career, too. But I wanted to really be able to talk about the stakes of some of those secrets in my writing of this edition, so it felt like withholding that until after would allow me to just really spell out some of the things I think about Elinor , for example. She's confided in by another character, and she then keeps that character secret from everyone that she loves. I think for many readers we just want to shake, like “What? You don't owe her anything. Tell anybody you want!” And I think that really trying to come to understand how it's a matter of personal Integrity for her to not share, to not turn it into a subject of gossip, is something that I wanted to linger with in the afterword. I also wanted to think a little bit about where those love interests end up whom we were talking about in the last episode. You know, what becomes of them. so yeah, if you want to think about some of those questions, go look at the afterword and then listen to the playlist, and you can decide which of the breakup songs goes with which.

[Mark:] Well, the Norton Library editions and the Norton Library Podcast is often sensitive to spoilers, so that necessitates the afterward, letting the novel speak for itself first.

[Stephanie:] Yeah, that's right. I really hope that this edition is one that welcomes new readers to this novel who haven't read it before and maybe haven't seen any of these adaptations, so it's not just about being respectful of that but being you know just really welcoming to like a very fresh set of eyes, someone who is just really encountering this for the first time, which I'm jealous. I wish I could read this novel for the first time.

[Mark:] Stephanie Insley Hershinow, what a pleasure to have you back, our first return guest in the history of the Norton Library Podcast! Thanks so much for joining us!

[Stephanie:] Thank you so much, Mark! This is really fun.

[Mark:] 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.