Sense and Sensibility

Don’t know Jack about Jane? Here’s where to start.
In our pop-culture, Jane Austen’s name is associated with epic romances, sweeping period pieces in which fragile women in long skirts swoon when handsome aristocrats glance their way. This is ironic because the acerbic Austen is unapologetically unromantic. Nowhere is that more evident than in Sense & Sensibility, arguably her darkest novel and in many ways her most profound.

Austen uses the parallel stories of sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood to demonstrate the moral and practical superiority of hardheaded sense to that often-romanticized quality known perhaps as sensibility, but more often today as passion. In this psychological parable, the intensely aflutter Marianne falls deeply in love with a handsome sophisticate, while her more cautious older sister, from prudence, refrains from too deeply indulging in her own romantic feelings for her beau — a man who, though less of a heartthrob than Marianne’s intended, has more real heart. Marianne and Elinor both suffer in the course of the novel, but Marianne’s suffering is both more acute and strikes the reader as more self-indulgent than that of sensible Elinor.

The dourness of this message — its elevation of rationality over feeling — cut against the grain in Austen’s time as much as it does in our own. So it’s to Austen’s immense credit that, even with an unpopular moral, she produced a masterpiece — a book that engages the reader on an emotional level.

Juliet Stevenson’s polished and unobstrusive reading conveys the wry wit that is always gurgling just beneath the surface of Austen’s writing, without competing with the text for attention. Be warned: This audiobook is likely to make even those most temperamentally inclined to side with sensibility think twice.