Sense and Sensible Pacing

Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
Sourced: Ravenswood Used Books, Chicago, IL

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I have started reading a new Jane Austen novel. New to me, anyway. I didn’t read Austen in school despite Pride and Prejudice being assigned. This was not a slight to Austen. I didn’t read most of the books assigned in school. I’ve always loved reading but was completely turned off by the classroom environment. My natural inclination is to get lost in books. I want to fall into the story completely, leaving myself behind. An English teacher’s insistence on not reading ahead meant that I had no opportunity to do so. One cannot take leave of their physical world in two-chapter increments.

So it was that in early March of 2020 I purchased a very nice publication of Emma to finally dive into the A-list author’s works. In that first year of lockdown, I read Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey in quick succession. I couldn’t get enough. What a world to be lost into. My problem, of course, was that Jane Austen is dead. Not the worst thing for a beloved author to be. She cannot ruin her legacy (or my admiration) by ignorantly commenting on social politics of the day. It does mean, however, that her works are finite, and that I had blasted through half of Austen’s major works in the span of one year. So, I pulled back. I continued to purchase her books whenever I happened upon one in a used bookstore and borrowed the audiobooks of the three I had read from the library.

Now, it is time to treat myself.

Sense and Sensibility (1811) was Austen’s first novel to be published. I have linked to the Canterbury Classics version, although my own is an Oxford World’s Classics I purchased from Ravenswood Used Books in Chicago, IL. Three chapters deep and our main cast of characters have revealed the complexities of their relationships. All of Austen’s works highlight the complete and total dependence of women in her own class, the landed gentry, and Sense and Sensibility is no different. As women are unable to hold property (anything they have belongs to her father and then, ideally, her husband), Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters are at the mercy of men with no legal obligation to them after the death of her husband. The four women will be left to survive on an income that only belongs to their mother until her death. Beyond that, they must rely on the goodwill of their half-brother (or, ideally, their future husbands). Unfortunately, it is only the second chapter when his goodwill is revealed to be fictional.

I’m so pumped to read this book. All those years ago my teenage self could never have predicted this. Her determined apathy would have seen my anticipation as performative. She might have rolled her eyes at my excitement and said something devastating about the reasons why I’m single. Luckily, that bitch is no longer in charge.

Let’s read.

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