The Enduring Sharpness of English Novel ‘Sense and Sensibility’

Consider the early English novel. So often, it is hemmed in by the constraints of its own drawing rooms — clinking teacups, strained glances, and the brittle conversational fencing that passed for flirtation. It is easy, in hindsight, to consign such novels to the polite past, their tensions quaint, their revolutions miniature. But to do so is to underestimate the kind of cunning that can reside beneath a muslin gown, or the quiet devastation of a clipped remark. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, first published in 1811, understood this from the start — and wielded it like a stiletto. There…