“Oh, Elinor, how incomprehensible are your feelings! You had rather take evil upon credit than good.”
Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 15
Spoken by Mrs. Dashwood
After Willoughby leaves and Marianne’s heart is broken, Mrs. Dashwood would rather hope the best for them, but Elinor is more realistic.
Mothers and daughters often fail to understand each other, no?
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. . . 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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"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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“She new that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next: that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister.
’I do not attempt to deny,’ said she, ‘that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.’”
Elinor confronting the expectations of Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne
Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 4
But really, isn’t that the state of women in general? We hope and expect so much, as Darcy reminds us.
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“Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it”
Sense & Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 16
Marianne was of course in no danger of sleeping at all that night, poor girl.
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“The business of self-command she settled very easily: with strong affections it was impossible; with calm ones it could have no merit. That her sister’s affections were calm, she dared not deny, though she blushed to acknowledge it; and of the strength of her own, she gave a very striking proof by still loving and respecting that sister in spite of this mortifying conviction.”
Sense & Sensibility, volume 1, chapter 19
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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