The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 April 2007
by Jane Austen
It isn't easy to describe or critique work that is so intensely beloved as the writing of Jane Austen. Many of us were forced to read her in high school, and she is much adored by women who grew up with her novels. This reader skipped Austen back in the day and is just getting around to picking her up again. This book, from 1811, is the first of Austen's novels to be published, though, arguably, not the first written. We meet Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, two young women who embody the two elements of the title. They, their sister Margaret and their mother, are left in poor circumstances after the death of their father, and reduced to living in a mere country cottage in Devonshire. Half-brother John Dashwood is swayed from helping his poor sisters by the greedy manipulations of his wife, Fanny Farrars. Elinor is reserved and full of good sense. She is concerned with conforming to her society. Marianne is all sensibility, emotional and unconcerned with what society thinks of her passions. Making a lucrative marriage is, unfortunately, the only sure way for a woman of late 18th century upper class England to secure a safe future. Elinor and Marianne are at the mercy of their friends' matchmaking, but both meet eligible men, our attractive heroes, Colonel Brandon, Edward Farrars, and rakish John Willoughby. Marianne falls passionately in love with Willoughby and is as blind to his faults as she is to how her passion looks to the people around her. Elinor forms an attachment to reserved and confused Edward in the days after her father's death. Fate, of course will play a hand in how these romances play themselves out. Austen writes a number of meddling characters, her most evil given to selfishness, self-absorption, greed and insolence. They make the Dashwoods' lives difficult in a constricted social world. Her heroes and heroines, though, are reserved, considerate, and value love and honor above all. Much of what she writes, even of her protagonists, is steeped in satire and critique. The economy of her writing is surprisingly modern in tone. The language of the late 18th (early 19th) century can read like a four-hundred-page exercise in beating around the bush, but it is also tremendously elegant and humorous. Austen was a story teller, but was also evidently very forward-looking. Much of this must be lost on high school kids forced to read it. Too bad. It is a great book.
(The editors of this recent Penguin edition saw fit to include two introductions totaling some sixty pages. The first, by Ros Ballaster, is a modern look at Austen's book, with contemporary sensibilities and a somewhat interesting read. The second, by Tony Tanner, is the original 1969 introduction, with a more staid feel to it, and which repeats some early criticism of Austen's novel. It seems to this reader excessive that Penguin would reprint the earlier introduction. Surely, if any introduction is needed, one would have been sufficient. In the end, the main benefit of either introduction, if one can avoid spoilers of the novel one is about to read, is to place Austen in some context, historical and/or cultural. That could surely be done in fewer pages. Then again, if one must gripe, one could just find another of the many editions of the novel.)
Also by Jane Austen: [Pride and Prejudice] [Mansfield Park]