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.
