Sense and Sensibility follows a short period in the lives of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Their father has recently passed and willed the majority of his estate and fortune to his son from his first wife. His second wife, Elinor, Marianne, and their younger sister Margaret are left with a small amount that would cover their living expenses, but only under lesser financial circumstances. For Elinor and Marianne to reclaim the life of luxury, they must find suitable husbands. The book follows this search. Elinor pursues a former love interest that is currently engaged to a different woman. Marianne is pursued by a married man, but has no other prospects but a man 20 years her elder - and she is not overly thrilled about that. Will they find love? Will they once again live the good life?
Does that description sound like a boring romance novel? That's because it is. I have to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said of Austen's writing:
"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with?"
That pretty well sums up my opinion of this book. There's virtually no plot. It's all dialogue about who would be suitable for marriage, how they are going to survive with only one servant and one cook, who has more money, blah blah blah blah. If that's what I want to read about, then I'll pick up a supermarket tabloid. At least then I'll be done with reading it in an hour. There's 20-30 pages of material in here stretched out to 10 times that length. Austen's technical skills are clearly strong; her use of vocabulary and rich sentence structure ranks fairly high. However, the story itself is utterly pointless and dull. Classic? Not to me.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
38 books, 141 days...at this rate I'll read 98 books in 1 year
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