Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/86

 home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village."

There can be little doubt that in Sense and Sensibility we have the first of Jane Austen's revised and finished works, and in several respects it reveals an inexperienced author. The action is too rapid, and there is a want of dexterity in getting the characters out of their difficulties. Mrs. Jennings is too vulgar, and in her, as in several of the minor characters, we see that Jane Austen had not quite shaken off the turn for caricature, which in early youth she had possessed strongly. The disagreeable story of Willoughby's earlier life is unnecessary to the plot, Colonel Brandon is too shadowy to be interesting, and Margaret Dashwood, the third sister, is an absolute nonentity. Nevertheless, there is much in it that is good. The John Dashwoods; Elinor and Marianne, and their mother; the Middletons, and Mrs. Palmer are all excellent, and, remembering it as the work of a girl of twenty-one, its promise for her future success was very great. It can never be put aside by anyone as wholly unworthy of her powers; all that the most severe critic could say is that it is not quite up to the mark of her later, more matured writing, and this is, indeed, a faint condemnation which would be praise for almost any other author.