May 2026 in Books: Rereading Sense and Sensibility

Life is tough, so instead of widening my horizons in contemporary literature I've metaphorically pulled up the blankets and returned to classics.

Rereading Sense and Sensibility — one of the first Jane Austen books that my mother put into my hand when I was perhaps ten or eleven years old — after a long gap was rewarding. It was never my favourite Austen, so the Emma Thompson film adaptation feels like a more recent and vivid overlay to the text than the way I'd pictured the scenes and characters as a fledgling reader.

Sense and Sensibility was conceived before Napoleon attained power, but finally published when the Wars were well underway. (To me, the gloomy aspects of Colonel Brandon's personality reflect the weightiness of war in a way in which Austen's later novel Persuasion's cheerfully profiteering Captain Wentworth no longer does.) Austen updated not just the tone or writing style, I'm guessing, but also the cultural references. There is a whiff of Regency fan fiction in the book — she wrote the story also for her own family, to whom she read it aloud; you can imagine that her family offered opinions about which love interest deserves to win the hand of the heroine, etc. — but, given the domesticity of its setting, that only adds to the atmosphere.

The novel is about a family of women who are forced to move to a new home in the English countryside. Why? The head of the Dashwood family has died, and the only son has married a woman who is eager to squirrel away any land and money she can from her family-in-law. Deprived of their home through this mixture of greed and the laws of inheritance, the mother and three sisters move to the smaller Barton Cottage, rented to them by an extended relative. There, the women are left to figure out on their own what their logistical and romantic futures should look like.

Eldest sister Elinor finds herself removed to a greater distance from the clergyman whom she has fallen in love with. She bears the distance philosophically, partly due to her logic-loving personality — partly also due to her sense that something has been off with the clergyman lately. But the younger sister Marianne meets a handsome and dashing young man who seems to share all her enthusiasm for literature and music. They navigate the new beauties of Romantic literature together, William Cowper and all. Things are going well enough, but then lurking secrets come to the surface and both of the sisters' romantic relationships implode...

As always, Austen paints beautiful portraits of high-minded morals and psychological self-analysis, side by side with the daily drip of benign silliness (e.g. the ever helpful Mrs. Jennings) and poisonous malice (e.g. Lucy Steele, Elinor's rival) that make life amongst other human beings so challenging.

Two hundred years later, I think we could find counterparts to most of Austen's characters. That said, many social Regency conventions that form the novel's plot (like giving a clergyman a job due to 'connections' rather than a meritocratic application process, or shunning unmarried women who become single parents) are happily out of date. Has Sense and Sensibility survived the passage of time worse than, as well as, or better than, Austen's other books? — Not having thought about it in depth before, I'll evade the question.

Now that I am decades older than when I first read Sense and Sensibility, it strikes me that Austen intended a gentler contrast between the sisters Elinor and Marianne than I'd realized when I was little. Marianne is often rude and self-absorbed to acquaintances, but Austen does justice to her good intentions, capacity for sympathy, and intellectual curiosity. These nuances and Austen's moments of ironic detachment are what makes her novel more of a well-rounded character study than merely a morality tale. Besides, sharp-tongued though she may often have been, as a youthful writer she is indulgent: it's all right for young people to make mistakes.

Classics of the 19th Century: Rereading Maria Edgeworth's "The Bracelets"

Maria Edgeworth wrote novels, short stories and essays from her home in Ireland into the first decade of the Victorian Age. Her father, who influenced her work and wrote prefaces for her publications, was a clergyman. She lived through the historical caesura of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; she and her family travelled to Belgium and France during an early pause in the Wars, but she also knew personally the wife of the Duke of Wellington. In her books, she also published observations on rural poverty — she died during the Irish Potato Famine era — and the differences between English and Irish life. I've left out a lot in this mini-biography, but a wealth of secondary literature does supply the juicier gossip; The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth also fills in much detail.

Edgeworth's novel Belinda (1801) was popular enough in her day that Jane Austen mentioned it in Northanger Abbey. Over 70 years later, the American writer Louisa May Alcott referred to Edgeworth's children's story, "The Purple Jar" (1796), in her own book Eight Cousins. Sir Walter Scott, too, admired her work.

But since the Victorian Age — and in their emphasis on domesticity, virtue and morality, Edgeworth's pre-Victorian stories also feel anachronistically Victorian — Edgeworth's writings have become more obscure. She was never mentioned in any English class that I took in Canadian school or college. That said, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics have reprinted Belinda, Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee since 2000; and I stumbled across a secondhand paperback edition of Patronage in a Canadian bookshop in 2018.

In my late teens and early twenties I read Maria Edgeworth's books and stories often, mostly because they were mentioned in the Victorian works that I'd read earlier. Some of her moral dilemmas and precepts I thought were worth thinking over. But now I am skimming through her works in the e-book collection at Project Gutenberg again, over a decade later, and feel ready to give my take with a fresh perspective.

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Her Children's Stories: "The Bracelets: or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded"

The Bracelets (ca. 1820?) is set in a private, rural English school, where a teacher named Mrs. Villars raises twenty girls. To reward the pupil who has done the best work, she offers a bracelet. The pupil Cecilia wins it, and then the problems begin: Cecilia begins to treat her schoolmates rudely, and — for example — laughs at a schoolmate who accidentally broke one of her toys after Cecilia barged into her. After soul-searching, the school decides to award another bracelet to the kindest schoolmate. Needless to say, the resulting competition amongst the girls to see who is kindest (Cecilia and her friend Leonora are the frontrunners) leads to even more friction.

*

As soon as Mrs. Villars had given her the bracelet, all Cecilia's little companions crowded round her, and they all left the hall in an instant. She was full of spirits and vanity—she ran on, running down the flight of steps which led to the garden. In her violent haste, Cecilia threw down the little Louisa. Louisa had a china mandarin in her hand, which her mother had sent her that very morning; it was all broke to pieces by the fall.

"Oh! my mandarin!" cried Louisa, bursting into tears. The crowd behind Cecilia suddenly stopped. Louisa sat on the lowest step, fixing her eyes upon the broken pieces; then turning round, she hid her face in her hands upon the step above her. In turning, Louisa threw down the remains of the mandarin; the head, which she had placed in the socket, fell from the shoulders, and rolled bounding along the gravel-walk. Cecilia pointed to the head and to the socket, and burst out laughing; the crowd behind laughed too. At any other time they would have been more inclined to cry with Louisa; but Cecilia had just been successful, and sympathy with the victorious often makes us forget justice. Leonora, however, preserved her usual consistency. "Poor Louisa!" said she, looking first at her, and then reproachfully at Cecilia. Cecilia turned sharply round, colouring, half with shame and half with vexation.

*

It strikes me that several parts of the tale have not survived the past two centuries all that well: its views on education and on feminine virtues, and its subordination of literary pleasure to narrative preaching and overelaborate sentences. 

I'd start by questioning the whole pedagogical premise of the story, and asking if the adult narrator and adult teacher are behaving properly themselves. Can classmates voting for a prize be reliable, absolute moral arbiters? Do prizes really encourage children to adopt kind behaviour and feel a sense of achievement? or do they encourage children to be ostentatious about kindness, and believe that the purpose of kindness is to look better than others? Are prizes just a popularity contest where kindness is a secondary criterion? That said, given my own school experience, I don't think that pedagogy has developed past these ambiguous incentives even nowadays.

The second premise I'd question is Maria Edgeworth's view on gender difference. [General note: anyone who strongly believes in 'show, don't tell' writing might want to avoid reading Edgeworth for the sake of their blood pressure.] For example, this passage about how Cecilia's widower father has raised her to be more masculine than properly feminine will likely be read very differently in 2026 compared to, say, 1826:

All small objects and small errors she [Cecilia] had been taught to disregard as trifles; and her impatient disposition was perpetually leading her into more material faults; yet her candour in confessing these, she had been suffered to believe, was sufficient reparation and atonement.

Leonora, on the contrary, who had been educated by her mother in a manner more suited to her sex, had a character and virtues more peculiar to a female; her judgment had been early cultivated, and her good sense employed in the regulation of her conduct; she had been habituated to that restraint, which, as a woman, she was to expect in life, and early accustomed to yield; compliance in her seemed natural and graceful.

In a specific sense, ignoring matters of gender for the moment, Edgeworth tells us that Cecilia prefers to act first and apologize later. For example, when Cecilia sells a present that Leonora had given her, she only confesses the truth and acknowledges her wrongdoing much later, hoping that this will cancel out her misdeed. But the harm is already done: Leonora finds out what happened to the present early, and assumes that Cecilia despises her.

But, beyond this particular plot point, where did Edgeworth's ideal of womanhood as "restraint" and "compliance" come from, did she genuinely think it through, which groups or individuals shared that ideal, and whom does this ideal serve?

Illustration from The Bracelets
1850 edition
(Project Gutenberg)

Thirdly, I'd nitpick that Edgeworth's plot, characterization, and scene-setting (although I could still picture the scenes in my mind's eye), begin to feel distractingly mechanical when they serve a moralizing schematic rigidly.

For example, this passage is easy to read

The moment it [the bracelet] was completed, every body begged to try it on. It fastened with little silver clasps, and as it was made large enough for the eldest girls, it was too large for the youngest; of this they bitterly complained, and unanimously entreated that it might be cut to fit them.

"How foolish!" exclaimed Cecilia. "Don't you perceive that, if you win it, you have nothing to do but to put the clasps a little further from the edge? but if we get it, we can't make it larger."

"Very true," said they, "but you need not to have called us foolish, Cecilia!"

However, this sentence feels like a sledgehammer:

Let those who are tempted to do wrong by the hopes of future gratification, or the prospect of certain concealment and impunity, remember that, unless they are totally depraved, they bear in their own hearts a monitor who will prevent their enjoying what they have ill obtained.

Edgeworth's psychology, though not mechanical, is undoubtedly Manichean (figuratively speaking). It's rare that we can separate the sheep from the goats in our world as clearly as she does in her fiction. And a child who reads The Bracelets and then looks around at the adults in their lives will probably question if any evidence supports the author's thesis: that growing up is at times a process of perfecting one's self into ethically consistent sainthood.

Lastly, The Bracelets' dialogue is admittedly also not very contemporary. — Perhaps even by Regency standards it was written more as one would write and not as one would speak? For example, if a child in 2026 ever thinks in an internal monologue like Leonora's, I'll eat my hat:

And how pleasing Cecilia can be when she wishes to please! how candid she is! how much she can improve herself!—let me be just, though she has offended me—she is wonderfully improved within this last month; for one fault, and that against myself, should I forget all her merits?

In short, re-exploring The Bracelets in 2026, I still enjoy the plot, characters, and scenery, as well as Edgeworth's observations on the details of everyday life, just as I enjoyed reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess as a girl. I tend to skip past the unsubtle morals and ignore dialogues' implausibility. But I suppose one of the tale's other lasting values, outside of its place in English literary history, is Edgeworth's insight into how part of the upper classes — those who would have read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile [Note: I haven't read this myself, so I'm relying on synopses] — envisioned childhood education in the British Isles, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

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Maria Edgeworth [Wikipedia]
The Bracelets; or, Amiability and Industry Rewarded [ebook in Project Gutenberg]