Sense and Sensibility, much like Austen's other fiction, has attracted a large body of criticism from many different approaches. Early reviews of Sense and Sensibility focused on the novel as providing lessons in conduct (which would be debated by many later critics), as well as reviewing the characters. The Norton Critical Edition of Sense and Sensibility, edited by Claudia Johnson, contains a number of reprinted early reviews in its supplementary material. An "Unsigned Review" in the February 1812 Critical Review praises Sense and Sensibility as well-written with well-supported and -drawn characters, realistic, and with a "highly pleasing" plot in which "the whole is just long enough to interest the reader without fatiguing."[9] This review praises Mrs. Dashwood, the mother of the Dashwood sisters, as well as Elinor, and claims that Marianne's extreme sensibility makes her miserable.[9] It claims that Sense and Sensibility has a lesson and moral which is made clear through the plot and the characters.[9] Another "Unsigned Review" from the May 1812 British Critic further emphasises the novel's function as a type of conduct book. In this author's opinion, Austen's favouring of Elinor's temperament over Marianne's provides the lesson.[9] The review claims that "the object of the work is to represent the effects on the conduct of life, of discreet quiet good sense on the one hand, and an overrefined and excessive susceptibility on the other."[9] The review states that Sense and Sensibility contains "many sober and salutary maxims for the conduct of life" within a "very pleasing and entertaining narrative."[9] W. F. Pollock's 1861 review from Frasier's Magazine, titled "British Novelists", is what editor Claudia Johnson terms an "early example of what would become the customary view of Sense and Sensibility."[10] In addition to emphasising the novel's morality, Pollock reviews the characters in catalogue-like fashion, praising and criticising them in according to the notion that Austen favours Elinor's point of view and temperament.[10] Pollock even praises Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings, and comments on the humour of Mr. Palmer and his "silly wife."[10] Pollock criticises Sir John Dashwood's selfishness without mentioning Fanny's influence upon them. He also criticises the Steele sisters for their vulgarity.[10]
An anonymous piece titled "Miss Austen" published in 1866 in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine departs from other early criticism in its sympathising with Marianne over Elinor, claiming that Elinor is "too good" a character.[11] The article also differs from other reviews in that it claims that the "prevailing merit" of the book is not in its sketch of the two sisters; rather, the book is effective because of its "excellent treatment of the subordinate characters."[11] Alice Meynell's 1894 article "The Classic Novelist" in the Pall Mall Gazette also concurs with Austen's attention to small things. Meynell claims that Austen deals in lesser characters and small matters because "that which makes life, art, and work trivial is a triviality of relations."[12] In her attention to secondary characters, Meynell discusses the children's function to "illustrate the folly of their mothers," especially Lady Middleton.[12]
Austen biographer Claire Tomalin argues that Sense and Sensibility has a "wobble in its approach", which developed because Austen, in the course of writing the novel, gradually became less certain about whether sense or sensibility should triumph.[13] Austen characterises Marianne as a sweet person with attractive qualities: intelligence, musical talent, frankness, and the capacity to love deeply. She also acknowledges that Willoughby, with all his faults, continues to love and, in some measure, appreciate Marianne. For these reasons, some readers find Marianne's ultimate marriage to Colonel Brandon an unsatisfactory ending.[14]
The Dashwood sisters stand apart as being virtually the only characters capable of intelligent thought and any sort of deep thinking.[15] Brownstein wrote that the differences between the Dashwood sisters have been exaggerated, and in fact the sisters are more alike than they are different, with Elinor having an "excellent heart" and being capable of the same romantic passions as Marianne feels, while Marianne has much sense as well.[15] Elinor is more reserved, more polite, and less impulsive than Marianne who loves poetry, taking walks across picturesque landscapes and believes in intense romantic relationships, but it is this very closeness between the sisters that allows these differences to emerge during their exchanges.[15]
Many critics explore Sense and Sensibility in relation to authors and genres popular during Austen's time. One of the most popular forms of fiction in Austen's time was epistolary fiction. This is a style of writing in which all of the action, dialogue, and character interactions are reflected through letters sent from one or more of the characters. In her book Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters, Mary Favret explores Austen's fraught relationship with epistolary fiction, claiming that Austen "wrestled with epistolary form" in previous writings and, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility, "announced her victory over the constraints of the letter."[16] Favret contends that Austen's version of the letter separates her from her "admired predecessor, Samuel Richardson" in that Austen's letters are "a misleading guide to the human heart which, in the best instances, is always changing and adapting."[16] According to Favret, the character of Elinor Dashwood is an "anti-epistolary heroine" whose "inner world" of thoughts and feelings does not find "direct expression in the novel, although her point of view controls the story."[16] Sense and Sensibility establishes what Favret calls a "new privacy" in the novel, which was constrained by previous notions of the romance of letters.[16] This new privacy is a "less constraining mode of narration" in which Austen's narrator provides commentary on the action, rather than the characters themselves through the letters.[16] Favret claims that in Sense and Sensibility, Austen wants to "recontextualize" the letter and bring it into a "new realism."[16] Austen does so by imbuing the letter with dangerous power when Marianne writes to Willoughby; both their love and the letter "prove false."[16] Additionally, Favret claims that Austen uses both of the sisters' letter writing to emphasise the contrasts in their personalities.[16] When both of the sisters write letters upon arriving in London, Elinor's letter is the "dutiful letter of the 'sensible sister'" and Marianne writes a "vaguely illicit letter" reflecting her characterisation as the "sensitive" sister.[16] What is perhaps most striking about Favret's analysis is that she notes that the lovers who write to one another never unite with each other.[16]
A common theme of Austen criticism has been on the legal aspects of society and the family, particularly wills, the rights of first and second sons, and lines of inheritance. Gene Ruoff's book Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility explores these issues in a book-length discussion of the novel. Ruoff's first two chapters deal extensively with the subject of wills and the discourse of inheritance. These topics reveal what Ruoff calls "the cultural fixation on priority of male birth."[17] According to Ruoff, male birth is by far the dominant issue in these legal conversations. Ruoff observes that, within the linear family, the order of male birth decides issues of eligibility and merit.[17] When Robert Ferrars becomes his mother's heir, Edward is no longer appealing to his "opportunistic" fiancée Lucy, who quickly turns her attention to the foppish Robert and "entraps him" in order to secure the inheritance for herself.[17] According to Ruoff, Lucy is specifically aiming for the heir because of the monetary advantage.[17] William Galperin, in his book The History Austen, comments on the tendency of this system of patriarchal inheritance and earning as working to ensure the vulnerability of women.[18] Because of this vulnerability, Galperin contends that Sense and Sensibility shows marriage as the only practical solution "against the insecurity of remaining an unmarried woman."[18]
Feminist critics have long been engaged in conversations about Jane Austen, and Sense and Sensibility has figured in these discussions, especially about the patriarchal system of inheritance and earning. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal feminist work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination contains several discussions of Sense and Sensibility. Gilbert and Gubar read the beginning of Sense and Sensibility as a retelling of King Lear from a female perspective and contend that these "reversals imply that male traditions need to be evaluated and reinterpreted from a female perspective."[19] Gilbert and Gubar argue that Austen explores the effects of patriarchal control on women, particularly in the spheres of employment and inheritance. In Sense and Sensibility they educe the fact that Mr. John Dashwood sends his stepmother and half sisters from their home as well as promised income, as an instance of these effects. They also point to the "despised" Mrs. Ferrars's tampering with the patriarchal line of inheritance in her disowning of her elder son, Edward Ferrars, as proof that this construction is ultimately arbitrary.[19] Gilbert and Gubar contend that while Sense and Sensibility's ultimate message is that "young women like Marianne and Elinor must submit to powerful conventions of society by finding a male protector," women such as Mrs. Ferrars and Lucy Steele demonstrate how women can "themselves become agents of repression, manipulators of conventions, and survivors."[19] In order to protect themselves and their own interests, Mrs. Ferrars and Lucy Steele must participate in the same patriarchal system that oppresses them.
In the chapter "Sense and Sensibility: Opinions Too Common and Too Dangerous" from her book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Claudia Johnson also gives a feminist reading of Sense and Sensibility. She differs from previous critics, especially the earliest ones, in her contention that Sense and Sensibility is not, as it is often assumed to be, a "dramatized conduct book" that values "female prudence" (associated with Elinor's sense) over "female impetuosity" (associated with Marianne's sensibility).[20] Rather, Johnson sees Sense and Sensibility as a "dark and disenchanted novel" that views "institutions of order" such as property, marriage, and family in a negative light, an attitude that makes the novel the "most attuned to social criticism" of Austen's works.[20] According to Johnson, Sense and Sensibility critically examines the codes of propriety as well as their enforcement by the community.[20] Key to Austen's criticism of society, runs Johnson's argument, is the depiction of the unfair marginalisation of women resulting from the "death or simple absence of male protectors."[20] Additionally, the male characters in Sense and Sensibility are depicted unfavourably. Johnson calls the gentlemen in Sense and Sensibility "uncommitted sorts" who "move on, more or less unencumbered, by human wreckage from the past."[20] In other words, the men do not feel a responsibility to anyone else. Johnson compares Edward to Willoughby in this regard, claiming that all of the differences between them as individuals do not hide the fact that their failures are actually identical; Johnson calls them both "weak, duplicitous, and selfish," lacking the honesty and forthrightness with which Austen endows other "exemplary gentlemen" in her work.[20] Johnson's comparison of Edward and Willoughby reveals the depressing picture about gentlemen presented in the novel.
Mary Poovey's analysis in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen concurs with Johnson's on the dark tone of Sense and Sensibility. Poovey contends that Sense and Sensibility has a "somber tone" in which conflict breaks out between Austen's engagement with her "self-assertive characters" and the moral codes necessary to control their potentially "anarchic" desires.[21] Austen shows, according to Poovey, this conflict between individual desire and the restraint of moral principles through the character of Elinor herself.[21] Except for Elinor, all of the female characters in Sense and Sensibility experience some kind of female excess. Poovey argues that while Austen does recognise "the limitations of social institutions," she demonstrates the necessity of controlling the "dangerous excesses of female feeling" rather than liberating them.[21] She does so by demonstrating that Elinor's self-denial, especially in her keeping of Lucy Steele's secret and willingness to help Edward, even though both of these actions were hurtful to her, ultimately contribute to her own contentment and that of others.[21] In this way, Poovey contends that Austen suggests that the submission to society that Elinor demonstrates is the proper way to achieve happiness in life.
Sense and Sensibility criticism also includes ecocritical approaches. Susan Rowland's article "The 'Real Work': Ecocritical Alchemy and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility" studies the effects of alienation upon Edward Ferrars. Edward is alienated from society because he lacks what Rowland calls "useful employment."[22] According to Rowland, Edward's condition represents problems with the history of work in Western industrialised societies. Edward's alienation from work also represents "the culture evolution of work" as a "progressive estrangement from nonhuman nature."[22] Rowland argues that human culture estranges people from nature rather than returning them to it. Marianne also suffers from this estrangement of nature as she is ripped from her childhood home where she enjoyed walking the grounds and looking at trees.[22] Rowland thus connects both Edward's and Marianne's progressive discomfort throughout the novel to their alienation from nature.
