Sense and Sensibility

" Sense and Sensibility" written by Jane Austen in her novel Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was particularly concerned with the answer to these questions, especially within the confines of her eighteenth century British society. Never more does she examine the possible answers to these questions than in her first published novel. Sense and Sensibility. Most critics understand that Austen’s original title for this novel was not Sense and Sensibility but was rather Elinor and Marianne. Knowing this makes it more understandable as to why she used the word “sense” and the word “sensibility”; to see them in congruence with one another allows us to appreciate the opposites of her intentional juxtaposition, which is in essence that Elinor’s second name is “Sense,” and Marianne’s is “Sensibility.”

This becomes interesting because the definition of “sense” is that of having a“practical soundness of judgment,” and the eighteenth century definition of the word“sensibility” means an “emotional consciousness: quickness and acuteness of feeling” (“Sensibility”). To name the novel after both protagonists by using their propensities for either sense or sensibility is clever and draws her readers to begin the novel by examining Elinor and Marianne as keepers o f either pathway to knowing what they think they know.It is a fair assumption that Austen, through her two protagonists, means to deliberately paint the portrait o f separation and difference between them, hence establishing the juxtaposition.

 

The novel has so many elements which makes this novel readable because in this novel there are so many ingredients such as Love, greed deception etc. So Jane Austen here has very well knitted all these elements in her novel.