Love, Reputation, and Balance in Austen's Sense and Sensibility

Love and Reunion Across Two Novels

In Sense and Sensibility, the reader follows the lives of the elder Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, as they navigate love and loss after the death of their father. Both girls fall in love shortly after becoming acquainted with Mr. Edward Ferrars and Mr. Willoughby. The couples are eventually separated, and it was believed "that some kind of engagement had subsisted between Willoughby and Marianne" (Austen 124), and between Elinor and Mr. Ferrars. Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane falls in love quickly with Mr. Bingley, and the two are later separated. In all three cases, they are eventually reunited, though with varying degrees of emotional success.

The manner of reunion, however, differs significantly across the novels. Jane and Mr. Bingley are reunited with love intact; when these two reunite, they are able to converse as if they had never been separated, and become engaged within a few days. After Elinor meets with Mr. Ferrars again, she faces a painful discovery: he has been engaged to Lucy Steele the entire time. When Marianne is reunited with Mr. Willoughby, he is cold to her, and she realizes that he had never truly loved her. In the end of Sense and Sensibility, both girls marry, but only Elinor marries the man she loved at the beginning of the novel. Marianne marries a man approximately twenty years her senior—a man she never thought she would love.

Reputation and False Impressions

Through these divergent outcomes, Austen conveys an important message about love's reliability. In both novels, Austen seems to say that love is something to believe in, but in Sense and Sensibility she also conveys that love does not always prove to be true, through the failure Marianne finds in her short, romantic relationship with Mr. Willoughby. Through the personal challenges the characters face when they fall in love, Austen suggests that love consumes a person's life once it is found. This is evident because the mothers of the daughters in each book question why their daughters' lovers have not written to them and wonder when a formal engagement will occur.

Both novels are set during a time in which reputation was very important in creating relationships with new acquaintances. Austen uses characterization to develop her characters, allowing the reader to receive either direct information or indirect understanding of who they are. In Sense and Sensibility, the novel introduces Miss Lucy Steele, a girl who appears to be uneducated but entirely well-meaning. She is secretly engaged to Mr. Edward Ferrars, and "he had always believed her to be a well-disposed, good-hearted girl, and thoroughly attached to himself" (Austen 255). Before the couple's engagement is over, however, she marries Mr. Ferrars's brother, Mr. Robert Ferrars, because she believed she had lost Edward's affection to Elinor. Edward then "had no scruple in believing her capable of the utmost meanness of wanton ill-nature" (Austen 255). His perception of her character shifts entirely based on her actions, not on any true knowledge of her nature.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy is believed by all to be full of pride and unwilling to make friends with new people. However, by the end of the novel, he is completely the opposite—a fact discovered when he marries someone he had only met a few months previously. With these two characters being presented with reputations that are completely untrue of their actual character, Austen comments negatively on how people are influenced by false impressions. This commentary is achieved through her creating characters whose reputations mask their true nature. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane never allows herself to grow close to Mr. Darcy throughout the majority of the novel because she believes that she would be unable to become friends with him due to his reputation. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen achieves similar commentary by portraying Miss Steele as a sweet, simple girl from the moment she meets the Dashwood sisters until Mr. Edward Ferrars comes to Elinor to tell her the truth and proclaim his love for her. Both novels demonstrate Austen's skepticism about judging character based on social standing or initial appearance.

Sense Versus Sensibility: The Central Tension

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen presents Mr. Darcy as being a man full of pride, and this pride keeps him from becoming close to Elizabeth Bennet because she is prejudiced against proud people. Though these themes are prevalent throughout the novel, neither is as prominent as the themes of Sense and Sensibility. Sense and sensibility are presented through the contrasting characters of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Elinor is consistently full of sense, even when her emotions affect her deeply. When she learned of Miss Steele's and Mr. Edward Ferrars's engagement, she was astonished, but "though her complexion varied, she stood firm in incredulity, and felt in no danger of an hysterical fit, or a swoon" (Austen 91). Even when she allowed her emotions to dominate her mind, she did so only in private. "Elinor found every day afforded her leisure enough to think of Edward…her thoughts could not be chained elsewhere" (Austen 73). Her sense allows her to maintain composure in public while processing her pain privately.

This sensibility was nowhere near the excess amount of sensibility Marianne possessed. When becoming friends with Mr. Willoughby, she had "been too much at [her] ease, too happy, too frank…[she had] been open and sincere where [she] ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful" (Austen 32). Upon heartbreak, she "[shut] herself up from her family" and "[left] the house in determined solitude to avoid them" (Austen 73), abandoning even the basic care of her health. However, Marianne does gain sense through her suffering. She admitted: "My illness…had been entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be so wrong" (Austen 240). Through this moment of self-awareness, Marianne moves toward the balance that Elinor already possessed.

In both novels, the themes prevent the characters from acting rationally in a way that would help them achieve happiness more quickly than they did. Austen's use of the themes present in both novels allows readers to understand that they are themes that affect life every day. By using these themes in her novels to create disorder in her characters' lives, she conveys the idea that love, belief in reputation, and either pride and prejudice or sense and sensibility need to be balanced in order to live happily. Since both novels end with a sort of compromise between either pride and prejudice or sense and sensibility, it can be assumed that Austen believed that the two ideas are necessary in our lives, but we must find the balance between the two in order to function properly.