Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/70

 Only conceive how comfortable they will be! Five hundred a year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them money, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give you something.'"

Perhaps Mrs. John Dashwood's bitterness against her husband's family is sharpened by perceiving the very evident attachment of her eldest brother Edward Ferrars for Elinor Dashwood, an attachment which both she and her mother find insupportable, as they are bent on his making a brilliant marriage which shall raise him to eminence. The elder Mrs. Dashwood, on the other hand, is delighted at the prospect, for, while cordially disliking her daughter-in-law, she has a great esteem and affection for Edward Ferrars; and warm-hearted, romantic, and imprudent, she looks to nothing but the future happiness of the young people. Her second daughter, Marianne, is the exact copy of her mother in disposition; both regard all prudence or circumspection as worldly wisdom of the worst type, and while they respect Elinor for her calm judgment and steady good sense, they have no wish whatever to imitate her.

I think the title of the book is misleading to modern ears. Sensibility in Jane Austen's day meant warm, quick feeling, not exaggerated or over-keen, as it really does now; and the object of the book, in my belief, is not to contrast the sensibility of Marianne with the sense of Elinor, but to show how with equally warm tender feelings the one sister could control her sensibility by means of her sense when the other would not attempt it. These qualities come still more prominently forward when Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters have found a home at Barton Cottage, on the estate of a