Sense and Sensibility
It's been a long long loooooong time since I read this novel. Coming to it fresh, it feels like the most publicly emotional of the published novels - Marianne is absolutely convincing as a teenage drama queen who has charm, but also holds nothing back of her emotional life, and has nowhere to go when things go badly. We have several scenes in the novel where big emotional moments are handled in direct speech, where in later novels Austen will contain these intense feelings in letter, or, in a pinch, a conversation with a third party that is overheard or relayed to the other principal. Charlotte Brontë is known for disliking Austen's work, complaining that "[A]nything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant." I think she would have liked this one best for its Gothicness, especially the duel and the bit where Marianne is gravely ill following a series of walks in the rain and Almost Dies. Also, we have Willoughby (the villain) turning up unannounced late at night in the house where she is recovering because he desperately wants to redeem his character to Elinor, which again makes him more of a Brontë-esque villain. But Austen has her own way - at the end of the book, Marianne recants her behaviour and tells her more reserved older sister that she wished she had behaved more like Elinor. So the confined and outwardly calm container for the big emotional life wins.
I'm struck by the essential conservatism of the Austen novels. Her characters are often struggling under the set order where capital is concentrated in a few individuals who actively scheme to keep wealth in as immediate the family as possible, and there is a very well-defined pecking order; but I don't think she had revolutionary sentiments around breaking the pecking order up or fighting for a more egalitarian society. Her solutions to these woes are two-fold: that those who have wealth should use it justly (Mr Knightley in Emma, and Sir John Middleton and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility) instead of for foolish or selfish reasons (John and Fanny Dashwood and Fanny's mother in S&S, for instance), and to revise the ranking system for who is considered worthy - education and nice manners for example. This does get interrogated sometimes - the kindly yet vulgar Mrs Jennings is initially looked down on by her two more genteel houseguests for retaining her connections with friends of her businessman husband, but ultimately is considered a great friend; the two daughters of Mrs Jennings have had their past polished up by an expensive school, but the sillier one (Mrs Palmer) is more approved of by the novel than the insipid elegant one (Lady Middleton). There are other places where the deep unfairness of the laws around property aren't interrogated at all: Colonel Brandon's lost love Eliza was coerced into marriage with Brandon's brother for the sake of her large inheritance, divorces the brother, and ends up dying in a debtor's prison; Brandon is considered a good man for raising Eliza's daughter and taking the stigma of people assuming she's his bastard - but I'm struck by how the fortune he now enjoys really came from Eliza. Once Eliza was married, her property became her husband's, and it passed down the male line, and that's that. Marianne is seen as a reward to Colonel Brandon for his patience and his goodness, and while in the novel she grows to love him and they're happy, it does seem very arbitrary. Fortunately for gender relations, Edward in this book is very much (as my friend Idiot puts it) Treasure, with no real motivation except to be fought over by Elinor and Lucy Steele, so that's something. Speaking of which, the two villainesses, Lucy Steele and Fanny Dashwood are So Damn Mean. In later books, the disagreeable or selfish characters often lack self-awareness - these two are spiteful because they can be, and because everyone expects them to be nicer, so they double down on their meanness. And also, are repaid by getting everything they want. Such is life.
Reading in the aftermath of Emma, here the ecosystem presented is that of genteel life - we hear less about the servant class in the village, and more about the goings on of the gentry class around Allenham and Barton, promoted by the very sociable Middleton family; many of these intimate families decamp en masse to London to continue with their visits. Compared to Mansfield Park, it ends where Mansfield Park starts, with two sisters living in close proximity, one married to the patron of the other's husband. Fortunately for the Dashwood sisters, they cohabit rather more happily than Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris, the book ends with the assurance that "among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands."
Battle of the Adaptations:
Adaptation 1: Emma Thompson rules the roost in screen writing her 1995 adaptation which she co-starred in with Kate Winslet, which kickstarted a good ten years of Austen-mania. I've watched this a lot over the years, having just reread the novel, I am at awe at Thompson's lightness of touch in her work. There are a number of places in the novel where Austen tells instead of showing; Thompson added a lot of material in the first act of the movie, meandering through the moments of Elinor's and Edward's love story and the precise awfulness of life at Norland under the auspices of Fanny Dashwood, that Austen got through briskly in the first chapter. There are also some new elements, such as Margaret being a tomboy (I read a graphic novel adaptation once which recreated that character detail in its entirety. ;-) ) While she compresses and rearranges events, and elides some characters, every emotional beat is approached spot on, usually capturing the Austen dialogue exactly. Thompson's performance as actress so exquisitely captures the feeling of having to deal with everyone else's shitty stuff and having to keep it together for them, while having no one to turn to for her own problem, and how incredibly exhausting that is. And Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon is so tragic and so, so... you want to wrap him in a blanket and give him a hug. It's also a masterwork for the sheer sense of comedy found in the movie: moments like making tea for a pack of crying women, the dumbshow around pretending you weren't doing anything important when a visitor arrives, the running joke about the roads and the weather being an appropriate topic of conversation - sadly, there's a funny conversation in the novel between Mrs Jennings and Elinor about Elinor's (not actually) engagement to Colonel Brandon which didn't make the cut. One must always murder one's darlings, I expect.
The main downside for me is that Hugh Grant has done his shy stutterer act so many times that it's lost much of its appeal to me now. I also like it because they put in little details about the life and times, like the fragile slippers in which gently bred young women were expected to walk the hills and muddy pooey streets in, and the novelty of steam engines. However, because I'm a bit of a costume nerd, while the pantalettes that Marianne and Margaret were wearing that enabled them to climb trees and tumble down hills modestly were technically in period, they weren't in any way ubiquitous, and also (in period) would have been crotchless. I'm still having trouble dealing with the idea of underwear as we know it, only being about 150 years old.
Adaptation 2: When I was checking IMDB for something, it turns out there was a 2008 adaptation which has duels and Marianne almost tumbling off a cliff. Clearly this is the version that Marianne would rather we know.
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