Sense & Sensibility Chapter 26

Marianne's in London, desperate to hear from Willoughby. Elinor's there too.

We wish Mrs Jennings were a witch so she could curse people and use modern dating terms to refer to Willoughby's behaviour: toxic, ghosting, love bombing

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Transcript

Rachel:  jane austen.

Frances:  Kia ora, welcome to the amateur austenite. i'm frances duncan, author, austinite, and life coach. my cohost is beatboxer rachel Pilois book buyer austinite, and all around nerd. hi. today, we're discussing chapter 26 of sense and sensibility. eleanor and mary anne go to london. whoo. mary anne writes to willoughby, and the only visitor they have is colonel brandon, who she snubs.

Rachel:  she's so mean to him. be good to my boy.

Frances:  eleanor's like, what the hell are we doing? going to london with this woman? we haven't known her very well. we're not the same kind of people. she's so much older than us. we've got completely different personalities. and mary anne is gonna be wrapped up in herself the entire time, only talking to me, which she does on the way there, completely ignoring missus jennings, leaving eleanor again to be the one that has to do all the civility.

Rachel:  eleanor has to do so much emotional labor on mary anne's part.

Frances:  it's not fair.

Rachel:  i think we would all get incredibly exhausted talking to missus jennings. mary anne is all in her head about going to london and maybe seeing willoughby girl, get a grip. like

Frances:  being trapped for three days in a carriage with somebody?

Rachel:  yeah. no. thank you.

Frances:  it does not sound like a good time. i feel for eleanor. it's unfair of mary anne to behave this way. is she unaware that what she's doing is rude? she may think that missus jennings is beneath her in some way, but that doesn't mean you should be rude to her.

Rachel:  i think that mary anne thinks she's better than missus jennings for sure. obviously not financially. they're not as financially off as miss Jennings mary anne is just very she's just snobby. and she's young. and she's doing that kind of teen thing of being like, ugh, you're so old and gross. i don't want anything to do with you. but i wanna take advantage of what you can give me, which is gross in itself. she's just being very immature compared to eleanor who is older and she is the more mature one. she's a full adult compared to mary anne, who is basically a teen. she hasn't finished cooking.

Frances:  differences in behavior. Elinor doesn't wanna be there, but she's the one that's acting like she does.

Rachel:  she goes partially to be a chaperone to her sister. because, i mean, yes, missus jennings is there for it, but can we trust missus jennings to be an appropriate chaperone?

Frances:  not at all. she also wants to see willoughby and mary anne together so she can ascertain what's going on in their relationship and try to not think so much about herself and how sad she is while mary anne is happy.

Rachel:  at this point in the story, you feel bad for eleanor for she's so unhappy, but her sister's in love, and it's all so sweet and nice even if willoughby's gone off for some reason. and it's just kinda like,

Frances:  knowing what's coming. it's like when people are divorced and their friends get engaged, and they kinda just have to swallow what they're going through and be supportive and happy for their friend. yep. they get to portman square, which is where missus jennings has a house, one of the super fashionable, rich as fuck parts of london. why is she not there all the time when she has this fancy house? how much money does she have that she doesn't need to be in that very expensive house and make the most use of it? god. and they get what was charlotte's room. because she's just married. remember, she's pregnant.

Rachel:  how many rooms are in this house? like, how big is this house?

Frances:  don't know. i imagine there are several. maybe it's just more comfortable to put them in charlotte's room than guest one.

Rachel:  yeah. that's fair. charlotte's room's probably nicer than a guest room anyway.

Frances:  yeah. i imagine missus jennings wouldn't see much point in decorating rooms unless there were people in them. but there are much more interesting things to be doing right now, like talking to people.

Rachel:  talking to people. getting that good gossip. that's what she's all about. that's what she's like. yes. now i need the tea. and almost immediately,

Frances:  mary anne writes a letter to willoughby.

Rachel:  mhmm.

Frances:  and eleanor's like, okay. they must be engaged. literal quote must be engaged because however mysteriously they might wish to conduct the affair because she's writing, conclusion is they're engaged. and it goes to the 2p post, which is a postal service that's just within london. yeah. so we assume that mary anne somehow knows willoughby is in london, then mary anne is on hold the entire time waiting for him to turn up.

Rachel:  which is just sad in so many ways of, like, girl, he'll show up when he shows up. don't just wait around at home for this one guy.

Frances:  she's getting anxious. she's listening to the sound of every carriage, and then later, she's listening for every knock on the door. missus Jennings thankfully, doesn't see much of this. and then finally, someone knocks on the door, and i love this line mary anne seemed almost ready to throw herself into his arms when colonel brandon appeared in one of the adaptations that is done so well. it really looks like she's about to launch herself, and then she stops and just walks around him and leaves the room. yeah. which hideous when he's been nothing but nice to her.

Rachel:  he's just been so lovely, and then all of a sudden, he's just like, oh, i'm not welcome here. but he is welcome, and he is like a standing invite to the house.

Frances:  it's so funny that he and eleanor both don't wanna be talking to each other really. they're both being polite. we're doing the thing that we're meant to do. it's not that we dis like each other. we're just thinking about other things. and Elinor's like, yeah. my sister's ill. that's what's going on. can i try and explain this away? then, eventually, he remembers that he's supposed to ask her the polite questions. how was your journey? how is your family? that he'd forgotten to do at the start because he was just so shocked to see mary anne. remember, it's been, well, a couple of months since he's seen them. and in that time, she's gone completely downhill. she's not been eating, not been sleeping.

Rachel:  yeah. she doesn't look well.

Frances:  then eleanor's like, have you been in london the whole time? and he suddenly is like, uh, yep. mhmm. she's like, oh, crap. i wasn't actually interested. uh, i'm not like missus jennings. i just trying to ask a polite question. trying to back away slowly. because, yes, missus jennings would be like, why did you leave? why? why? why? we need to know everything. we have no secrets. and eleanor's like, you can keep your secrets. i'm cool with that.

Rachel:  yeah. we're good. don't worry about it.

Frances:  colonel brandon has been dining with the palmers, and that's how he knew that they had arrived because this is literally the day that they've arrived. yeah. the whole thing's a little confusing, though, because he'd only met missus palmer once or twice before she married, but he knows them well enough to dine at their house.

Rachel:  does he know mister palmer at all?

Frances:  i don't know. i don't know how mister palmer factors into the social circle apart from being married to charlotte. missus palmer is very pregnant at this point.

Rachel:  missus palmer might not know colonel brandon as personally by acquaintance, but she probably knows all about his life through her mother's gossip.

Frances:  that's very true.

Rachel:  she probably knows this man better than he wants her to know him because her mother has told her everything, even things that no one knows how she knows these things, but she does. how the hell would she know about eliza?

Frances:  yeah. how would she get that information? i think she's a witch. oh. she's divining information. exactly.

Rachel:  or she's got incredibly good servants who do find out all this information and give her the gossip.

Frances:  that probably more true. i want her to be a witch, and i want her to curse willoughby. yeah. so his penis falls off so he cannot seduce young women anymore.

Rachel:  can i get her to also curse, uh, john and fanny dashwood? because, oh, they suck so bad. yes.

Frances:  anyone else while we're at it?

Rachel:  i was just thinking about that. i'm like, who else do we want cursed? unlike missus farris?

Frances:  yeah. lucy. mhmm. i mean, anne steele, not necessarily bad. lady middleton, not necessarily bad.

Rachel:  i think sir john middleton needs a little bit of a curse just look. guy's really nice, really lovely, does some really great stuff. he needs to be cursed with something that's gonna make him more socially aware of situations.

Frances:  so you want to actually gift him with more awareness?

Rachel:  i want to gift him with awareness, but i think he's gonna think of that as a curse. if you gave him awareness and then he was able to realize his previous actions, he would be mildly horrified, i would hope.

Frances:  yeah. it would be giving him a lot more intelligence than he is allowed in the novel.

Rachel:  but i just had the thought that if we give him that awareness, he might not have been doing nice things like letting the dashwood stay in the cottage. dang. are smart people dicks? it's possible.

Frances:  would you refer to fanny dashwood as smart? it was quite smart, the way she handled her husband.

Rachel:  yeah. she's a good manipulator. i think she's very cunning, which i think shows intelligence of a kind. not all intelligent people are dicks and not all dicks are intelligent, but there could be a bit of an overlap of that venn diagram. mhmm.

Frances:  back to the

Rachel:  chapter. either way, colonel brandon is very smart and not at all a dick.

Frances:  and has been dining with the palmers with a very pregnant missus palmer, which missus jennings asks about. and he politely answers in a roundabout way because you don't talk about pregnancy because it implies that person has had sex, and we don't have sex. no. think how well we would have done on the regency period right

Rachel:  now. god. it would have been fantastic. everyone should be ace. yeah. and, honestly, it would have really helped us. eventually, we probably would have been expected to get married and have kids. no. but as debutantes, we would have been fantastic. we hopefully would have been what society deemed as proper. but

Frances:  no. we still would have been around.

Rachel:  i think yeah. we would have been like, oh, wow. that girl over there. and then we'd be like, oh, yeah. her dress is quite interesting. i'll be like, no. under the dress. just herself and her body is so beautiful.

Frances:  so missus palmer herself arrives the next day in her barouche, which is the equivalent of a fancy sports car, basically. she's got the fancy carriage that doesn't have a hood so they can drive around and be seen, and i just kind of adore her. she was so surprised that they're coming to town, though it was what she had rather expected to all along, so angry they're accepting her mother's invitation after having declined her own, though at the same time, she would never have forgiven them if they had not come. uh,

Rachel:  that's so much.

Frances:  that was probably ten minutes of actual dialogue that has been reduced to one sentence, quite a long sentence. when she goes shopping, her eye is caught by everything pretty expensive or new. she's wild to buy but could determine on nothing and dawdled away her time in rapture and indecision. i think missus palmer is adhd, actually.

Rachel:  oh, 100%. yeah. it makes a lot of sense.

Frances:  yeah. based on that description.

Rachel:  she's just like, oh, look at this thing. oh, look at this. she could also be a magpie in disguise. i think she would be like, oh, shiny.

Frances:  so they're out at the shops, and mary anne is described as always on the watch. so she is switched on all the time looking out for willoughby. the weird thing we discover later is that willoughby might even be there at the moment, like, watching them that he's so careful to avoid them.

Rachel:  that's so true. i hadn't thought about that. he's so determined not to see them that he is watching. that's creepy as hell, but he kinda is. he sucks. that's all i can say.

Frances:  he does not leave a card yet. mary anne is sad still, and it's making eleanor really anxious in a different way to the way that mary anne's anxious. and she's like, well, obviously, he must not be in town if he hasn't turned up. therefore, mary anne's gonna write to him at his house in combe magna, but she never sees it. so she doesn't know whether that letter actually exists or not. and she's like, need to talk to my mom. this is not okay. they shouldn't be engaged when they haven't told anybody about it. when mary anne is so young and we barely know this guy, something feels off, and she decides that if things don't improve, if willoughby doesn't turn up, there isn't a clear lead of what's happening. she's actually going to write to her mother and be like, look. you need to actually ask mary anne what's going on. remember, she's done this before. it's getting worse. because, yes, at home, mary anne was moping, but now they're in london. yeah. she's both moping and constantly on watch looking for this guy waiting for him to turn up.

Rachel:  and i think eleanor is wise to be worried because at least in home at barton, she can mope, and everybody knows and assumes that there is an attachment with willoughby. and so her moping is understandable but her doing this in london, like, if they go to an evening, a dinner, a dance, and he's there, whatever interaction happens will be inappropriate regardless. whether it's mary anne, trying to get willoughby's attention and him not giving out. if they both give each other attention, it's like, well, other people here presumably also know willoughby. do they know that he's apparently engaged to this girl? could also hurt marianne's reputation depending on how she behaves in the situation. but either way, a lot of other people in society will judge her heavily for this behavior even without knowing about the letters that they send to each other. so it's because it's more public than the small community that they live in normally yeah. yeah.

Frances:  it's highlighting how bad her behavior is. yeah. she refuses to do things. she's not gonna play cards. i initially thought that there might not be a pianoforte at missus jennings because she doesn't even do that. but i think later we we find out that there is. so marion's just putting her entire life on pause for this fucking guy.

Rachel:  again, it's so juvenile, but also just so, like, what the hell? there's already so little to entertain without company, like, constant company, which is all exhausting in itself. but there's so little to entertain that you're waiting for this guy to send you a message, so you're not going to do anything except sit there in silence. is she just lying in bed? probably not because she's waiting for him to show up, and she wants to be ready when he gets there. is she just sitting there and staring at the window?

Frances:  her employment is walking backwards and forwards across the room, pausing for a moment whenever she comes close to the window in hopes of distinguishing the long expected rap so she's just anxiously pacing.

Rachel:  that just seems so miserable. willoughby does a lot of awful stuff to her in the next few chapters, but i think just this, where she sent him a letter, and we know that he is in london. we know he's got that letter, and he knows she's there. him leaving her in limbo, he doesn't break it off. he just doesn't respond.

Frances:  well, he can't technically because he's not supposed to have got a letter from her.

Rachel:  but the fact is they have been sending letters to each other. it's been inappropriate.

Frances:  it's inappropriate for her to send letters, but they have not been sending letters to each other.

Rachel:  i thought he had responded to her when she was at Barton at. oh so he hasn't responded to her at all.

Frances:  she only sent him letters when they arrived in london. as far as we know, as far as the novel tells us, she arrives in london, writes him a letter to say, hi. i'm here. come see me. yeah. doesn't do it when she's at Barton

Rachel:  okay. either way, he's ghosting her yes. which sucks,

Frances:  he's leaving her on read

Rachel:  he's leaving her on read he's given her enough of it. it's not like when you've just maybe gone on one date with someone and you're like, oh, i don't know. i didn't feel it. i'm not gonna contact this person again even if they contact me, which sucks, but it's still not as bad. but the fact that they, while not being fully engaged, made promises of some kind, they acted like they were in love. they acted like they were engaged. he acted like he would propose at some point.

Frances:  he was love bombing her.

Rachel:  he was love bombing her, and he was being super toxic. and now, all of a sudden, quick cold turkey. and i think for me, one of the worst things he's doing is just letting her sit and wait for him because he must know she's doing it. he knows what she's like. if they never ended up seeing each other again, he always stayed away, mary anne would not only be heartbroken, but how long would she wait before she let herself live life again?

Frances:  oh, maybe never.

Rachel:  exactly. she's the kind of person she's so obsessed with the idea of love and true romance that it would take her years, i think, multiple years, even with her family everyone else trying to get her out of it for her to if he never responded to her for like, it would take her ages to get her to stop waiting for him, and then she would spend another couple years crying about it. and i think it would take so much of her youth away. because by the time i think she'd get over it, she would be heading into spinsterhood.

Frances:  i think she might declare that she would never marry.

Rachel:  exactly. she would. she would. she's dramatic like that.

Frances:  and that's our discussion of chapter 26 of sense and sensibility by jane austen. i've been frances duncan. this has been rachel Pilois bye. thank you for listening, and we wish you happy reading. so let's be fair. most relationships aren't happy.

Rachel:  yeah. it's so true.

Frances:  probably gonna cut all of that.

Rachel:  that's so fair. what you mean you we don't want to tell our listeners that not all relationships are happy? how will they ever get rid of the rose tinted glasses of the world they live in?