At our April session we finished watching the film Sense and Sensibility and discussed the similarities and differences in these two books drafted much earlier but revised together during Austen’s later creative period.

Austen explores the difficulties of choosing a life partner in these two novels. Women without dowries were almost unmarriageable and formed the larger part of governesses and companions in middle class households. Younger sons too, who did not inherit the larger part of a family estate had to search for a woman with a substantial dowry that could keep them both as a first priority for financial survival. Dowries of £30,000 enabled the pair to buy an estate and create an income for themselves.

While Austen celebrates the pairs in these novels who were able to marry for love, she doesn’t deride those who chose a marriage of convenience and suggests that some of her characters made a good showing of their choices.

Next month we will watch the film of Pride and Prejudice and conclude our look at this novel.

Meg Dillon

At our March session we discussed Austen’s timeline for writing the six novels. She had two periods of intense creativity and work: firstly writing drafts of what later became Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey  between 1795 – 98. Then again nine years later , between 1810 – 1817, when she wrote the final versions of her three drafts and the three new novels Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion.

We discussed the characters in Sense and Sensibility and how they mirrored some of the “Pseudo Gentry” she had lived with at Steventon when she was a girl. The book explores the social responsibilities of  finding a life partner and marriage for men and women of those times and that class. Some were cheated and abandoned, others matured and had more tolerable marriages. It was all about money, grand estates and dowries. Love was an afterthought.

We watched the first half of the 1995 film of the novel, sumptuously produced, including Hugh Grant as Colonel Branson, Emma Thompson as Elinor and Greg Wise as the perfidious Willoughby. A romantic comedy version that excluded the satire and sharp observations of the novel. Worth watching though.