Self-consequence

Written over 200 years ago, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility performs the courtly ambition of Victorian daughters. Through long monologues and dialogue, we hear the desire for gentility, annuities, attachment, matrimony. The contrived double-marriage ending leaves a less lasting impression than the well-developed temperaments of the two sisters, the younger Marianne impetuous and whole-hearted, the older Elinor self-governing and moderate. Austen does not follow the sisters into middle and older age and we are left to wonder how they fared.