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From: reneegade69@hotmail.com
Date: 27 Aug 2002
Time: 13:26:16
Some critics think that, because Sense and Sensibility was a relatively early work of Austen's, its characters rather too schematically represent certain "types" or intellectual ideas, instead of standing on their own as complex, fully developed human beings. Do you think this criticism is accurate? Are Marianne and Elinor more than merely representatives of Sense and Sensibility? Which characters are more and less convincingly developed?
Austen herself never married, but she depicts marriage as the ultimate goal and "happy ending" for Elinor and Marianne. What do you think the novel reveals about her views of marriage generally? How do the marriages of Charlotte and Mr. Palmer, Fanny and John Dashwood, Lucy Steele and Robert Ferrars, reflect on the marriages of the sisters? Would Austen have considered it a happy ending for Marianne if, as is posited in the end, Willougby had married her and also had been restored his fortune? Or if she had ended up living with her mother indefinitely, "finding her only pleasures in retirement and study," as she planned before falling in love with Colonel Brandon?
Before his duplicity is revealed, is John Willoughby an appealing character? Why so? How does Austen reveal his charms and hint at his defects? What does Willoughby's opinion of Colonel Brandon – that he dislikes him for "threatening me with rain, when I wanted it to be fine"– reveal about him? At the end of the book, when his ultimate fate is revealed, does Willougby seem in any way a changed man from the one we first meet?