Marianne to Elinor
Sense and Sensibility, Vol 1, Ch 17
Category Archives: Marianne
Money & happiness
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What indeed?
“’What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?’” [Marianne]
‘Grandeur has but little,’ said Elinor, ‘but wealth has much to do with it.’
‘Elinor, for shame!’ said Marianne; ‘money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction as far as mere self is concerned.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Elinor, smiling, ‘we may come to the same point. Your competence and my wealth are very much alike, I dare say; and without them, as the world goes now, we shall both agree that every kind of external comfort must be wanting. Your ideas are only more noble than mine. Come, what is your competence?’
‘About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year; not more than that.’
Elinor laughed. ‘Two thousand a year! One is my wealth! I guessed how it would end.’”
Elinor & Marianne discussing with Edward the need of money for happiness
Sense & Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 17 [emphasis mine]
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Dear Mrs. Jennings
“It would be an excellent match, for he was rich, and she was handsome. . . . she was always anxious to get a good husband for every pretty girl.”
busybody Mrs. Jennings on why she thinks Marianne and Colonel Brandon should get together
Sense & Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 8
Filed under Beauty, Col. Brandon, Marianne, Marriage, Money, Money and Marriage, Mrs. Jennings, Sense and Sensibility, Wealth
Self-knowledge (or not)
Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne, than her own had seemed faulty to her.
Sense and Sensibility, v. 1, ch. 19
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Polite lies
Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell.
Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 21
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Till that instant
. . . in the acuteness of the disappointment which followed such an ecstasy of more than hope, she felt as if, till that instant, she had never suffered.
Sense and Sensibility, volume 2, chapter 9
Of Marianne, on finally receiving a letter and discovering it is from her mother when she thought it would be from Willoughby
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The first smart of the heavy blow
Supported by the conviction of having done nothing to merit her present unhappiness, and consoled by the belief that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem, she thought she could even now, under the first smart of the heavy blow, command herself enough to guard every suspicion of the truth from her mother and sisters. And so well was she able to answer her own expectations, that when she joined them at dinner only two hours after she had first suffered the extinction of all her dearest hopes, no one would have supposed from the appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love, and that Marianne was internally dwelling on the perfections of a man, of whose whole heart she felt thoroughly possessed, and whom she expected to see in every carriage which drove near their house.
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Rapture of delightful expectation
Elinor, in spite of every occasional doubt of Willoughby's constancy, could not witness the rapture of delightful expectation which filled the whole soul and beamed in the eyes of Marianne, without feeling how blank was her own prospect, how cheerless her own state of mind in the comparison, and how gladly she would engage in the solicitude of Marianne's situation to have the same animating object in view, the same possibility of hope.
Sense and Sensibility, volume 2, chapter 4
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Violent sorrow
. . . she thought with the tenderest compassion of that violent sorrow which Marianne was in all probability not merely giving way to as a relief, but feeding and encouraging as a duty.
Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 15
Elinor considers Marianne’s broken heart
Marianne is devoted to feeling everything to the extreme.
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If it feels good…
"I am afraid," replied Elinor, "that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety."
"On the contrary, nothing can be a stronger proof of it, Elinor; for if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure."
Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 13
Austen, no doubt, came down on Elinor's side on this one. What do you think?
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The Jane Austen Guide to Life: Thoughtful Lessons for the Modern Woman (May, 2012)
A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith