What About Margaret? Reading Sense and Sensibility with Fresh Eyes, by Finola Austin
Over the years, whenever I’ve read or re-read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (published 1811), or watched various stage and movie adaptations, I’ve wondered what my own verdict should be—sense or sensibility? Or, in other words, Elinor or Marianne?
As an older sister myself, I have a natural bias towards Elinor, and Austen certainly wants us to see her as the true heroine of her novel. After all, our first introduction to Marianne, written with typical Austenian litotes, is, “Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s” (Volume 1, Chapter 1), which leverages understatement to draw our attention to the younger sister’s relative failings. However, there is much I found, and still find, appealing about Marianne’s romantic, artistic, and, yes, at times overly dramatic disposition.
(From Sarah: This is the second guest post in “A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility,” which began yesterday and will continue through to the end of the summer. You can find all the contributions to the blog series here. I hope you’ll join the conversations about S&S in the comments here and on social media: #senseandsensibilitysummer. Thanks for celebrating Jane Austen’s first published novel with us!)
Elinor and Marianne was Austen’s original title for the novel. So central is this contrasting pair to the book and its themes that many fans forget about the existence of the other Dashwood sister—Margaret. But recently I found myself flicking through the book with a new eye, doing a “Margaret read” to understand if there were any details about the third sister I might have overlooked.
It wasn’t a promising start. There are over 120K words in Sense and Sensibility, yet Margaret’s name is mentioned a mere 36 times.
Austen gives us this pretty damning introduction to her character, which comes just after Marianne’s: “Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humored, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). In the real world, someone saying you probably won’t live up to your older siblings can probably be shrugged off. But when an omniscient Austenian narrator says this, you’re in for trouble.
Poor Margaret! She’s proven wrong pretty much whenever she expresses an opinion throughout the novel. She dismisses Colonel Brandon for being “on the wrong side of five and thirty” (Volume 1, Chapter 7). She’s convinced Marianne and Willoughby will marry. And she sets off optimistically with Marianne on their ill-fated walk, which leads to Marianne’s fall in the rain.
Margaret may only be thirteen, but that doesn’t mean she’s spared harsh critiques for her silliness. Austen tells us Margaret refers to Willoughby as “Marianne’s preserver . . . with more elegance than precision” (Volume 1, Chapter 10). And—here comes that litotes again!—when Margaret puts her foot in her mouth speaking about Elinor and Edward, we get this particularly withering line: “Margaret’s sagacity was not always displayed in a way so satisfactory to her sister” (Volume 1, Chapter 12).
But, slight as the character work on Margaret is, Austen doesn’t veer into caricature when writing about her. The good humor and disposition Austen mentions upfront comes through at certain moments, like in this interaction, which underlines Margaret’s lack of material worldliness and contrasts her with Marianne to Margaret’s advantage:
“I wish,” said Margaret, striking out a novel thought, “that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!”
“Oh that they would!” cried Marianne, her eyes sparkling with animation, and her cheeks glowing with the delight of such imaginary happiness.
“We are all unanimous in that wish, I suppose,” said Elinor, “in spite of the insufficiency of wealth.”
“Oh dear!” cried Margaret, “how happy I should be! I wonder what I should do with it!”
Marianne looked as if she had no doubt on that point.
(Volume 1, Chapter 17)
Near the end of the novel too Margaret demonstrates loyalty and sensitivity toward Elinor, after her previous carelessness about her feelings: “Margaret, understanding some part, but not the whole of the case, thought it incumbent on her to be dignified, and therefore took a seat as far from [Edward] as she could, and maintained a strict silence” (Volume 3, Chapter 12).
The references to Margaret’s limitations are still there (she still doesn’t fully understand what is going on), but this change from her earlier indiscretion when talking about Elinor’s emotions gives us a glimmer of hope that she may yet learn from her older sisters’ (and particularly Elinor’s) example.
The last reference we have to Margaret in the novel teases us further about who she might be when she’s grown: “fortunately for Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them, Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing, and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover” (Volume 3, Chapter 14). For now, Margaret’s prospects are merely a diversion for her neighbors. But in a few short years, could she too be in for her own romantic adventure?
Overall, on this read, I was struck most by the believability of Margaret. She might not be crucial to the premise of Sense and Sensibility, like Elinor or Marianne, and at times she is used as a device to move the story forward (as in the hair cutting scene with Willoughby). Yet, of all three sisters, Margaret seems most like a girl we’ve probably all met—flawed and socially inexperienced, but, above all, relatable.
Quotations are from the Project Gutenberg edition of Sense and Sensibility. The wild rose photos were taken earlier this week in Greenwich, Prince Edward Island (by Sarah).
Finola Austin is an England-born, Northern-Ireland-raised, Brooklyn-based author of historical fiction. Her debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress , was published by Atria Books in 2020. She is the writer behind the Secret Victorianist , a blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture. By day, she works in digital advertising. Find her online at www.finolaaustin.com .
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Sisters and Sisterhood, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
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