summary of love and friendship by jane austen

Are we supposed to believe this? Elinor is happy to believe it, but it sounds like a whopper to me.

Then I can't remember if this woman was divorced or dead, but the girl became Colonel Brandon's ward. Then she had an affair with someone who was not Colonel Brandon and had an illegitimate daughter. When Colonel Brandon tells Elinor he once loved a woman who resembled Marianne, but she had to marry his brother, who she did not love, or him her. Though Marianne's disregard for social conventions and willingness to consider the world well-lost for love may appeal to modern readers, it is Elinor whom Austen herself most evidently admired a truly happy marriage, she shows us, exists only where sense and sensibility meet and mix in proper measure. How each of the sisters reacts to their romantic misfortunes, and the lessons they draw before coming finally to the requisite happy ending forms the heart of the novel. Then Willoughby abandons her meanwhile, Elinor's growing affection for Edward suffers a check when he admits he is secretly engaged to a childhood sweetheart. So swept away by passion is Marianne that her behavior begins to border on the scandalous. Soon however, Marianne meets a man who measures up to her ideal: Mr. Commenting on Edward Ferrars, a potential suitor for Elinor's hand, Marianne admits that while she 'loves him tenderly,' she finds him disappointing as a possible lover for her sister. Whereas the former is a sensible, rational creature, her younger sister is wildly romantic-a characteristic that offers Austen plenty of scope for both satire and compassion. The story revolves around the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Though she initially called it Elinor and Marianne, Austen jettisoned both the title and the epistolary mode in which it was originally written, but kept the essential theme: the necessity of finding a workable middle ground between passion and reason. Though not the first novel she wrote, Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen published.

Summary of love and friendship by jane austen