Austen and Brontës: Complete Novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë & Anne Brontë E-Book
Charlotte Bronte
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Austen and Brontës: Complete Novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë & Anne Brontë is a masterful collection that captures the quintessence of early 19th-century English literature. This anthology presents a tapestry of narratives that explore profound social and emotional depths while encapsulating the diverse stylistic innovations of their time. From the nuanced social commentary of Jane Austen's novels to the hauntingly gothic and impassioned tales by the Brontë sisters, this collection is an invaluable testament to the literary prowess and thematic exploration of love, class, and individuality. Highlighted are riveting pieces that delve into the complexities of human experience with exquisite narrative techniques and distinct narrative voices. The authors leading this collection are figures of monumental importance in the literary arena. Austen's keen observational lens and the Brontës' vivid romanticism collectively challenge and redefine the constraints of their social milieu. Their works reflect the tenets of the Romantic and early Victorian periods, embracing themes of social mobility and existential introspection. The combined oeuvre of these authors offers insights into the broader social and cultural movements, revealing how their groundbreaking approaches continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This anthology invites scholars and enthusiasts alike to engage with an unparalleled literary dialogue that traverses various thematic explorations. Through a seamless interplay of stylistic diversity, Austen and the Brontës offer readers a panoramic view of distinctive narrative landscapes. It serves as both an educational voyage into the literary depths of the 19th century and a compelling touchstone for understanding the evolution of the novel. Dive into this volume to experience the confluence of voices that have profoundly influenced literature and continue to inspire a multitude of interpretations and discussions. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Austen and Brontës: Complete Novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë & Anne Brontë
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection gathers the complete novels of Jane Austen alongside those of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë to illuminate a shared preoccupation with conscience, community, and the claims of the heart. Across Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abby, Persuasion, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, social negotiation sharpens wit and ethical discernment. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, and Emma, inward intensity meets institutional constraint. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall deepen the spectrum. Together, these works present a continuous meditation on choice, attachment, and self-knowledge.
The curatorial emphasis falls on how private sensibility contends with public expectation, a dynamic that animates every novel here. Houses and workplaces anchor characters within networks of kinship, labor, and law; letters, conversations, and overheard remarks become instruments of judgment and change. By placing social comedy beside psychological turbulence, the collection highlights a single question across varied settings: how to live well among others. The aim is to foreground recurring structures—courtship and vocation, inheritance and refuge, friendship and solitude—while allowing each author’s methods to refract the rest. The result is a panoramic yet intimate map of moral testing and imaginative resourcefulness.
Rather than approaching these novels in isolation, the gathering enables sustained cross-reading. Northanger Abby’s playful treatment of fear and fantasy converses with the darker weather of Wuthering Heights and the inward storms of Jane Eyre. Agnes Grey’s attention to work and dignity enriches encounters with Mansfield Park and The Watsons, where decorum and dependence are negotiated with care. Lady Susan’s sharp social intelligence stands beside The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s principled resolve, producing a wider spectrum of moral agency. Seen together, the books complicate simple oppositions and reveal a lattice of shared concerns unfolding across distinct temperaments and narrative designs.
Genre becomes a lens through which affinities and divergences sharpen. Austen’s comedy of manners meets Charlotte Brontë’s intense portraits of interior resolve, Emily Brontë’s elemental drama, and Anne Brontë’s ethical clarity. The double presence of Emma—one by Austen, one by Charlotte Brontë—invites reflection on naming, expectation, and the shaping of character under social pressure. Lady Susan’s incisive poise converses with the broader social canvases of Shirley and Villette. The Professor, Sanditon, and The Watsons underscore experimentation across professional, seaside, and familial spheres. The collection aims to stage these correspondences so that each work’s singularity becomes newly legible amid chorus.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Read together, the novels develop a conversation about perception and judgment. Characters routinely read one another through gestures, letters, and rumor, making interpretation itself a central drama. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, wit and restraint sculpt social exchange; in Jane Eyre and Villette, guarded feeling acquires tensile strength. Wuthering Heights tests the limits of passion and memory, while Agnes Grey locates integrity in everyday endurance. Across this range, proposals, inheritances, and journeys function less as destinations than as occasions for ethical choice, linking drawing rooms and remote dwellings within a single web of responsibility.
A motif of education runs through the volume: not only schooling, but the schooling of feeling, taste, and will. The Professor, Shirley, and Agnes Grey engage the discipline of work; Mansfield Park and Persuasion explore the costs and benefits of belonging. Northanger Abby’s playful teasing of gothic expectations offers a foil to the grave atmospherics that pervade Wuthering Heights and the heightened solitude of Jane Eyre. Lady Susan’s tactical correspondence resonates with the strategic silences that ripple across Villette. These convergences encourage readers to hear refrains, as irony and fervor alternately amplify, correct, and illuminate one another.
Contrasts of tone create a vital dialogue. Austen’s calibrated social observation, perfected across Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, often finds comedy at the cusp of correction. Charlotte Brontë presses closer to the pulse of private resolve in Jane Eyre, Villette, and The Professor, while Shirley widens the field of civic belonging. Emily Brontë concentrates emotion into stark, resonant designs in Wuthering Heights. Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall bring ethical argument into ordinary life. Together, these textures pose an abiding balance between social script and interior truth without foreclosing complexity.
The juxtaposition also discloses quiet correspondences of image and cadence. The shared title Emma invites consideration of how a name can anchor contrasting narrative intentions, from Austen’s poised orchestration to Charlotte Brontë’s differently charged design. Sanditon’s littoral vantage point throws coastal flux against the inland severity associated with Wuthering Heights, producing a dialogue between edge and interior. Lady Susan’s elegant maneuvering refracts, at another register, the principled resistance shaping The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Northanger Abby’s light-handed treatment of dread anticipates later reworkings of fear as serious moral weather. Such echoes enrich each book’s individuality by situating it in conversation.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels endure because they think rigorously about freedom, responsibility, and care within the ordinary structures of living. Courtship, kinship, property, employment, and belief become testing grounds for autonomy and reciprocity. Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion chart varieties of feeling that remain recognizably modern; Jane Eyre and Villette probe the cost of integrity; Wuthering Heights stages the intensity of attachment; Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall insist on the ethics of everyday conduct. Together, the books explore how character takes form amid constraint and possibility, offering frameworks that continue to guide discussion across artistic, scholarly, and civic spheres.
Across generations, these works have attracted sustained engagement from readers and thinkers who debate their portrayals of love, judgment, authority, and reform. Some find in Austen a moral art of clarity and proportion; others see restless critique within the poise. Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë elicit reflection on solitude, rage, faith, and the ethics of care, often prompting revisitations of what counts as strength or virtue. Disagreements have proved fruitful, renewing attention to form, voice, and setting. The vibrancy of reception attests to an uncommon capacity to generate insight without exhausting interpretive possibilities.
Their cultural afterlives are extensive, with adaptations for stage and screen, retellings across genres, and allusive citations in conversations about romance, autonomy, and social mobility. Scenes of assembly rooms, classrooms, parlors, and rugged landscapes have become shared reference points. The figures named Jane Eyre, Emma, and others circulate as shorthand for complexity of will, wit, and feeling. Wuthering Heights supplies a lexicon of fierce attachment, while The Tenant of Wildfell Hall anchors discussions of conscience and harm. Such afterlives do not replace the texts; they testify to a durable capacity to inspire fresh interpretations and creative experiments.
Considered together, Austen and the Brontës demonstrate how the novel can accommodate civility and tumult, persuasion and protest, surface poise and subterranean fire. Gathering Sense and Sensibility through Sanditon with Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall clarifies continuities and departures without collapsing difference. It matters because the alignment makes visible structures otherwise easy to overlook: the moral grammar of conversation, the pressure of place, the dignity of work, and the tenacity of hope. The collection invites renewed attention to how art enlarges understanding while honoring complexity.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
These novels emerge from late Georgian, Regency, and early Victorian Britain, a constitutional monarchy convulsed by war and reform. Jane Austen wrote amid the Napoleonic conflicts and post-1790s anxieties, as Parliament, patronage, and parish networks organized power. The Brontë sisters published under Queen Victoria, when railways, urban growth, and contested franchise sharpened social divides. National identity hardened through imperial ventures, while local governance and the Church structured everyday obligations. Within this order, family strategies of property, marriage, and profession governed life chances, making courtship, inheritance, and education not private diversions but negotiations with public law, custom, and fluctuating economies.
Class stratification shaped horizons. Austen’s communities revolve around landed gentry, merchants, officers, and clergy, framed by entail, primogeniture, and patronage of church livings. The Brontës depict professionals, teachers, tenant farmers, and industrialists, exposing fragile respectability and precarity. Women’s legal identity was constrained by coverture; property often passed through male lines, and respectable employment options narrowed to teaching, companioning, or precarious authorship. Marriage settlements, dowries, and kin alliances mediated security. For men, advancement hinged on commissions, trade, or clerical preferment. Such structures render domestic decision-making politically saturated, with intimacy entwined with law, credit, parish relief, and a moralized public gaze.
War provided both peril and propulsion. During Austen’s era, naval blockades, privateering, and prize money reshaped fortunes, while militias and barracks altered provincial rhythms. Naval officers offered new avenues for mobility and honor, yet exposure to wartime mortality haunted peacetime courtships. Veterans and widows navigated pensions and patronage. In the Brontës’ Britain, imperial policing and distant campaigns persisted, though domestic politics shifted toward reform and industry. The aura of service, discipline, and rank remained a social currency, influencing status at assemblies, schools, and parsonages. Military and maritime infrastructures threaded through economies, correspondence, and the symbolic grammar of loyalty and duty.
Industrialization reordered northern England, crucial for the Brontës’ settings. Textile mills, machine-breaking unrest, and contested wage systems destabilized paternalist ideals. The earlier Luddite disturbances, later Chartist mobilizations, and repeal controversies over grain and trade filtered into public debate, shaping how communities interpreted justice and charity. Public health crises, workhouse regimes, and emigration transformed family strategies. In Austen’s southern locales, enclosure, market agriculture, and turnpike improvements likewise altered rural hierarchies. Across regions, credit markets and speculative bubbles intersected with moral discourse about thrift and benevolence. Parish oversight and informal surveillance rendered reputation a civic resource, convertible into employment and marriage.
Empire permeates these texts’ background. Caribbean plantations, colonial offices, and mercantile circuits linked provincial parlors to distant exploitation. Fortunes derived from West Indian estates or maritime trade underwrote marriages and educations, while missionary and humanitarian rhetoric complicated conscience. Racialized categories—Creole identities, colonial servitude, and imagined others—shadowed discussions of gentility and legitimacy. Continental contact, significant in The Professor and Villette, staged Britishness against European schooling, language, and surveillance states. Even when plots remain local, imperial tariffs, naval logistics, and colonial jurisprudence haunt choices. Such conditions exposed the gap between proclaimed national virtue and the unequal, extractive systems sustaining respectability.
Authorship navigated moral policing and market discipline. Austen published anonymously as “By a Lady,” reflecting anxieties around women in print and the propriety of fiction. The Brontës initially adopted gender-neutral pseudonyms, negotiating hostile reviewing climates and circulating-library gatekeeping. Triple-decker economics privileged length and decorum palatable to subscription readers, while libel laws, blasphemy statutes, and defamation risks encouraged circumlocution. Patronage persisted through dedicatory rituals, yet professional authorship loomed as precarious labor, entailing negotiation with printers, advances, and copyright. Educated readers, evangelical censors, and fashionable arbiters formed overlapping publics whose tastes, scruples, and gossip decisively filtered what could be imagined or sold.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
These writers inhabit a hinge between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic inwardness. Austen’s style values balance, irony, and ethical deliberation, registering reasoned choice amid social performance. The Brontës intensify subjectivity, dramatizing imagination, solitude, and spiritual hunger within institutional constraints of school, parish, and factory. Moral philosophy remains central, but sentiment becomes a testing ground for authenticity rather than mere politeness. The domestic interior serves as laboratory for competing notions of selfhood—autonomy, duty, vocation—filtered through reading practices, sermons, and conversational wit. Such tensions generate prose where observation and passion contend, shaping distinctive cadences, pacing, and the moral temperature of narration.
Across the collection, genres intermingle. The novel of manners refines social perception and conversational choreography; the Gothic intensifies anxiety, parody, and self-scrutiny; the Bildungsroman traces education through trial. Governess narratives bring wage labor, pedagogy, and surveillance into focus, while industrial fiction observes capital’s machinery of time. Free indirect discourse matures in Austen, decanting irony into thought; the Brontës deploy confessional urgency, frame-tales, and strategically limited viewpoints to test reliability and desire. Landscape—downland, city streets, or moors—acts as a cognitive map and moral weather. Music, drawing, and multilingual exchange stage taste, discipline, and the friction of aspiration.
Parallel arts expand the novels’ sensorium. Domestic pianoforte pieces, parish concerts, and touring virtuosi calibrate classed listening and accomplishment. Amateur watercolors and gallery-going supply visual grammars for proportion, character, and mood, while the Gothic revival recodes space through picturesque ruins and vigilance. Scientific ferment—geology’s deep time, statistical inquiry, and steam networks—reorients travel, speed, and plausibility, with railways and telegraphy tightening plots’ horizons of communication. Pedagogy emphasizes modern languages and composition, inflecting The Professor and Villette with cosmopolitan discipline. In such milieus, electricity, phrenology, and nascent evolutionary speculation tease boundaries between the measurable mind and moral mystery.
Print culture organized aesthetics. Subscription libraries rewarded respectability and length, shaping pacing and moral emphasis; reviewers policed tone, propriety, and politics. Prefaces, dedications, and chapter epigraphs instructed readers how to weigh experience, irony, and sentiment. The three-volume format, priced for lending, controlled reception cycles, while reprints and cheap editions later reframed intended audiences. Debates over fiction’s truth claims pitted improving narratives against alleged frivolity, casting novel-reading as both hazard and humane education. For women writers, paratext signaled seriousness, negotiating misreading as confession. Market and medium thus became formal pressures, bending plots, voice, and calibration of scandal.
Later labels assign these works to Realism, Romanticism, and the Gothic, yet the collection resists enclosure by schools. It stages contest between moral didacticism and aesthetic autonomy, often within the same chapter. The governess novel challenges the notion that domesticity is apolitical art; industrial set pieces interrogate providential comfort. Without manifestos, authors nevertheless theorize fiction in prefaces and narrative asides, defending frankness about cruelty and hypocrisy. Anne Brontë’s principled seriousness, Jane Austen’s disciplined irony, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s intensity collectively craft a poetics where conscience and craft spar, rendering everyday life worthy of philosophical scrutiny.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception histories diverged yet converged on fascination with moral tone. Austen’s early readers prized delicacy and wit, though some dismissed her narrowness of scene. The Brontës provoked shock and admiration, their anonymity fueling speculation and misattribution before identities emerged. Charges of coarseness, irreligion, or excessive passion met defenses of sincerity and social truth. Sales patterns were uneven, complicated by illness and bereavement. Early provincial and metropolitan audiences read through lenses of conduct literature, evangelical piety, and gendered decorum. Reviews, gossip, and cautious reprints progressively stabilized reputations, even as the novels’ representations of work, marriage, and conscience unsettled consensus.
Later nineteenth-century culture softened edges and curated images. Family guardianship of letters and memories idealized Austen as unthreatening geniality, while Brontë legend crystallized around intensity and suffering. Bowdlerizing tendencies muted impropriety and irony, encouraging readings that minimized economic critique or unruly desire. Stage dramatizations and recitations emphasized moral uplift and picturesque nostalgia. Memorialization through portraits, homes, and souvenirs created intimate national icons. At the same time, expanding literacy brought these works to clerks, artisans, and teachers, seeding interpretive communities beyond drawing rooms. Such diffusion standardized quotable wisdom yet partially domesticated the novels’ more disturbing ethical inquiries.
Twentieth-century upheavals reframed meaning. World wars, rationing, and evacuation fostered identification with resilience, thrift, and principled endurance; inexpensive editions circulated to mass audiences. Professional criticism consolidated textual histories, stabilized titles and variants, and elevated technique—especially free indirect discourse and narrative framing—into syllabi. Modernist experiments sharpened appreciation for structural economy and psychological nuance, while sociologists mined marriage markets, bureaucracy, and work discipline. Translation expanded global readerships, producing new idioms of irony and ardor. University courses canonized both Austen and the Brontës as pillars of the English novel, even as radical readers questioned the class politics of comfort.
Late twentieth-century scholarship transformed priorities. Feminist critics repositioned Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as searing interventions in marital law, addiction, and economic coercion, while rereading Jane Eyre’s education as labor history and spiritual contest. Austen’s ethics of attention—sociable judgment, embarrassment, and consent—gained prominence as political theory of everyday life. Studies of masculinity probed clerical ambition, naval hierarchy, and industrial patriarchy. Queer readings traced desire’s misdirection and friendship’s cover. Disability perspectives examined embodiment, convalescence, and care economies. Such approaches restored risk and courage to heroines and witnesses, emphasizing craft as a vehicle for legal and social critique.
Post-colonial inquiry interrogated the novels’ entanglement with empire. Critics mapped Caribbean capital underwriting dowries, schooling, or travel, analyzing how racialized language polices belonging and legitimacy. Continental classrooms in The Professor and Villette became laboratories for surveillance, nationalism, and translation politics. Environmental humanities reframed moors, gardens, and sea voyages as ecological actors, linking enclosure, extraction, and weather to character and plot energy. Animal studies reconsidered cruelty and care. Such perspectives neither dismiss nor absolve; they expand accountability, connecting domestic ethics to plantation capitalism, missionary projects, and resource frontiers. The works’ moral grammars stretch to accommodate ecological and imperial histories.
Adaptations multiplied across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Film, radio, and television reimagined dialogue, interiors, and weather as spectacle, while theatre, dance, and web serials discovered new rhythms in courtship, pedagogy, and industry. Illustration, audiobooks, and digital editions broadened access and invited annotation, remix, and classroom debate. Global copyright expirations enabled libre circulation, fostering translations and community readings. Heritage tourism and commemorations entwined memory with commerce, sometimes reinforcing nostalgia, sometimes staging critique. Ongoing arguments about fidelity, modernization, and casting reveal the works’ plasticity. The novels endure by provoking fresh ethical conversations in changing media ecologies.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sense and Sensibility (Austen)
Two sisters, pragmatic Elinor and impulsive Marianne Dashwood, navigate love, loss, and limited finances, revealing the tension between reason and feeling in Regency society.
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy confront class expectations and personal misjudgments as families maneuver for advantageous matches.
Mansfield Park (Austen)
Fanny Price, raised by wealthy relatives, quietly resists moral compromises as flirtations and ambitions unsettle life at Mansfield Park.
Emma (Austen)
Confident heiress Emma Woodhouse turns to matchmaking in her village, misreading hearts—including her own—and learning the limits of her influence.
Northanger Abbey (Austen)
Imaginative Catherine Morland enters Bath society and a gothic-sounding estate, discovering the gap between novel-fed fantasies and the realities of courtship and class.
Persuasion (Austen)
Years after being persuaded to refuse a suitor, Anne Elliot meets him again as fortunes shift with the rising Navy, testing constancy and second chances.
Lady Susan (Austen)
An epistolary tale of a charming, calculating widow who manipulates friends, family, and suitors to secure advantageous positions.
The Watsons (Austen, unfinished)
An incomplete narrative in which Emma Watson returns to a family of reduced means and faces the social and economic pressures of courtship without fortune.
Sanditon (Austen, unfinished)
Left incomplete, this seaside-set story follows Charlotte Heywood among speculators and invalids in a burgeoning resort, sketching a modernizing England.
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
An orphaned governess seeks independence, dignity, and love, confronting secrets and moral trials at Thornfield Hall and beyond.
Shirley (Charlotte Brontë)
Set amid industrial unrest in Yorkshire, the novel entwines business conflicts and social change with the intertwined lives of Caroline Helstone and the forthright heiress Shirley Keeldar.
Villette (Charlotte Brontë)
Lucy Snowe takes a teaching post abroad, contending with solitude, cultural difference, and an elusive love.
The Professor (Charlotte Brontë)
Narrated by William Crimsworth, this early novel follows a young man's career in Brussels as he pursues self-reliance, teaching, and a measured romance.
Emma (Charlotte Brontë, fragment)
An unfinished fragment set in a girls’ school begins with the arrival of a mysterious new pupil whose identity is in question, hinting at themes of deception, class, and education.
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
A stormy tale of obsession and vengeance on the Yorkshire moors, where the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine shapes two generations in neighboring houses.
Agnes Grey (Anne Brontë)
A clergyman’s daughter becomes a governess and records the quiet struggles and moral tests of life in wealthy households.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë)
A reclusive young mother arrives in a rural community amid rumor and curiosity; her journal reveals a stark critique of destructive marriage and a quest for autonomy.
Austen and Brontës: Complete Novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë & Anne Brontë
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
CHAPTER ONE
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece, and their children, the old Gentleman’s days were comfortably spent. His attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from interest, but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid comfort which his age could receive; and the cheerfulness of the children added a relish to his existence.
By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son: by his present lady, three daughters. The son, a steady respectable young man, was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother, which had been large, and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age. By his own marriage, likewise, which happened soon afterwards, he added to his wealth. To him therefore the succession to the Norland estate was not so really important as to his sisters; for their fortune, independent of what might arise to them from their father’s inheriting that property, could be but small. Their mother had nothing, and their father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal; for the remaining moiety of his first wife’s fortune was also secured to her child, and he had only a life-interest in it.
The old gentleman died: his will was read, and like almost every other will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure. He was neither so unjust, nor so ungrateful, as to leave his estate from his nephew;–but he left it to him on such terms as destroyed half the value of the bequest. Mr. Dashwood had wished for it more for the sake of his wife and daughters than for himself or his son;–but to his son, and his son’s son, a child of four years old, it was secured, in such a way, as to leave to himself no power of providing for those who were most dear to him, and who most needed a provision by any charge on the estate, or by any sale of its valuable woods. The whole was tied up for the benefit of this child, who, in occasional visits with his father and mother at Norland, had so far gained on the affections of his uncle, by such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise, as to outweigh all the value of all the attention which, for years, he had received from his niece and her daughters. He meant not to be unkind, however, and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds a-piece.
Mr. Dashwood’s disappointment was, at first, severe; but his temper was cheerful and sanguine; and he might reasonably hope to live many years, and by living economically, lay by a considerable sum from the produce of an estate already large, and capable of almost immediate improvement. But the fortune, which had been so tardy in coming, was his only one twelvemonth. He survived his uncle no longer; and ten thousand pounds, including the late legacies, was all that remained for his widow and daughters.
His son was sent for as soon as his danger was known, and to him Mr. Dashwood recommended, with all the strength and urgency which illness could command, the interest of his mother-in-law and sisters.
Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do every thing in his power to make them comfortable. His father was rendered easy by such an assurance, and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much there might prudently be in his power to do for them.
He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was:–he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;–more narrow-minded and selfish.
When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. He then really thought himself equal to it. The prospect of four thousand a-year, in addition to his present income, besides the remaining half of his own mother’s fortune, warmed his heart, and made him feel capable of generosity.– “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds: it would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.”– He thought of it all day long, and for many days successively, and he did not repent.
No sooner was his father’s funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood, without sending any notice of her intention to her mother-in-law, arrived with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her right to come; the house was her husband’s from the moment of his father’s decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood’s situation, with only common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing;–but in HER mind there was a sense of honor so keen, a generosity so romantic, that any offence of the kind, by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source of immovable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.
So acutely did Mrs. Dashwood feel this ungracious behaviour, and so earnestly did she despise her daughter-in-law for it, that, on the arrival of the latter, she would have quitted the house for ever, had not the entreaty of her eldest girl induced her first to reflect on the propriety of going, and her own tender love for all her three children determined her afterwards to stay, and for their sakes avoid a breach with their brother.
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;–her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.
Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great.
Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility;[1q] but by Mrs. Dashwood it was valued and cherished. They encouraged each other now in the violence of their affliction. The agony of grief which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again. They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she could exert herself. She could consult with her brother, could receive her sister-in-law on her arrival, and treat her with proper attention; and could strive to rouse her mother to similar exertion, and encourage her to similar forbearance.
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.
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs. John Dashwood now installed herself mistress of Norland; and her mother and sisters-in-law were degraded to the condition of visitors. As such, however, they were treated by her with quiet civility; and by her husband with as much kindness as he could feel towards anybody beyond himself, his wife, and their child. He really pressed them, with some earnestness, to consider Norland as their home; and, as no plan appeared so eligible to Mrs. Dashwood as remaining there till she could accommodate herself with a house in the neighbourhood, his invitation was accepted.
A continuance in a place where everything reminded her of former delight, was exactly what suited her mind. In seasons of cheerfulness, no temper could be more cheerful than hers, or possess, in a greater degree, that sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself. But in sorrow she must be equally carried away by her fancy, and as far beyond consolation as in pleasure she was beyond alloy.
Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum? And what possible claim could the Miss Dashwoods, who were related to him only by half blood, which she considered as no relationship at all, have on his generosity to so large an amount. It was very well known that no affection was ever supposed to exist between the children of any man by different marriages; and why was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry, by giving away all his money to his half sisters?
“It was my father’s last request to me,” replied her husband, “that I should assist his widow and daughters.”
“He did not know what he was talking of, I dare say; ten to one but he was light-headed at the time. Had he been in his right senses, he could not have thought of such a thing as begging you to give away half your fortune from your own child.”
“He did not stipulate for any particular sum, my dear Fanny; he only requested me, in general terms, to assist them, and make their situation more comfortable than it was in his power to do. Perhaps it would have been as well if he had left it wholly to myself. He could hardly suppose I should neglect them. But as he required the promise, I could not do less than give it; at least I thought so at the time. The promise, therefore, was given, and must be performed. Something must be done for them whenever they leave Norland and settle in a new home.”
“Well, then, LET something be done for them; but THAT something need not be three thousand pounds. Consider,” she added, “that when the money is once parted with, it never can return. Your sisters will marry, and it will be gone for ever. If, indeed, it could be restored to our poor little boy–”
“Why, to be sure,” said her husband, very gravely, “that would make great difference. The time may come when Harry will regret that so large a sum was parted with. If he should have a numerous family, for instance, it would be a very convenient addition.”
“To be sure it would.”
“Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties, if the sum were diminished one half.–Five hundred pounds would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes!”
“Oh! beyond anything great! What brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters, even if REALLY his sisters! And as it is–only half blood!–But you have such a generous spirit!”
“I would not wish to do any thing mean,” he replied. “One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than too little. No one, at least, can think I have not done enough for them: even themselves, they can hardly expect more.”
“There is no knowing what THEY may expect,” said the lady, “but we are not to think of their expectations: the question is, what you can afford to do.”
“Certainly–and I think I may afford to give them five hundred pounds a-piece. As it is, without any addition of mine, they will each have about three thousand pounds on their mother’s death–a very comfortable fortune for any young woman.”
“To be sure it is; and, indeed, it strikes me that they can want no addition at all. They will have ten thousand pounds divided amongst them. If they marry, they will be sure of doing well, and if they do not, they may all live very comfortably together on the interest of ten thousand pounds.”
“That is very true, and, therefore, I do not know whether, upon the whole, it would not be more advisable to do something for their mother while she lives, rather than for them–something of the annuity kind I mean.–My sisters would feel the good effects of it as well as herself. A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable.”
His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving her consent to this plan.
“To be sure,” said she, “it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in.”
“Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot be worth half that purchase.”
“Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. Twice every year these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my mother’s disposal, without any restriction whatever. It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the world.”
“It is certainly an unpleasant thing,” replied Mr. Dashwood, “to have those kind of yearly drains on one’s income. One’s fortune, as your mother justly says, is NOT one’s own. To be tied down to the regular payment of such a sum, on every rent day, is by no means desirable: it takes away one’s independence.”
“Undoubtedly; and after all you have no thanks for it. They think themselves secure, you do no more than what is expected, and it raises no gratitude at all. If I were you, whatever I did should be done at my own discretion entirely. I would not bind myself to allow them any thing yearly. It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a hundred, or even fifty pounds from our own expenses.”
“I believe you are right, my love; it will be better that there should be no annuity in the case; whatever I may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and would not be sixpence the richer for it at the end of the year. It will certainly be much the best way. A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father.”
“To be sure it will. Indeed, to say the truth, I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea of your giving them any money at all. The assistance he thought of, I dare say, was only such as might be reasonably expected of you; for instance, such as looking out for a comfortable small house for them, helping them to move their things, and sending them presents of fish and game, and so forth, whenever they are in season. I’ll lay my life that he meant nothing farther; indeed, it would be very strange and unreasonable if he did. Do but consider, my dear Mr. Dashwood, how excessively comfortable your mother-in-law and her daughters may live on the interest of seven thousand pounds, besides the thousand pounds belonging to each of the girls, which brings them in fifty pounds a year a-piece, and, of course, they will pay their mother for their board out of it. Altogether, they will have five hundred a-year amongst them, and what on earth can four women want for more than that?–They will live so cheap! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants; they will keep no company, and can have no expenses of any kind! Only conceive how comfortable they will be! Five hundred a year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give YOU something.”
“Upon my word,” said Mr. Dashwood, “I believe you are perfectly right. My father certainly could mean nothing more by his request to me than what you say. I clearly understand it now, and I will strictly fulfil my engagement by such acts of assistance and kindness to them as you have described. When my mother removes into another house my services shall be readily given to accommodate her as far as I can. Some little present of furniture too may be acceptable then.”
“Certainly,” returned Mrs. John Dashwood. “But, however, ONE thing must be considered. When your father and mother moved to Norland, though the furniture of Stanhill was sold, all the china, plate, and linen was saved, and is now left to your mother. Her house will therefore be almost completely fitted up as soon as she takes it.”
“That is a material consideration undoubtedly. A valuable legacy indeed! And yet some of the plate would have been a very pleasant addition to our own stock here.”
“Yes; and the set of breakfast china is twice as handsome as what belongs to this house. A great deal too handsome, in my opinion, for any place THEY can ever afford to live in. But, however, so it is. Your father thought only of THEM. And I must say this: that you owe no particular gratitude to him, nor attention to his wishes; for we very well know that if he could, he would have left almost everything in the world to THEM.”
This argument was irresistible. It gave to his intentions whatever of decision was wanting before; and he finally resolved, that it would be absolutely unnecessary, if not highly indecorous, to do more for the widow and children of his father, than such kind of neighbourly acts as his own wife pointed out.
CHAPTER THREE
Mrs. Dashwood remained at Norland several months; not from any disinclination to move when the sight of every well known spot ceased to raise the violent emotion which it produced for a while; for when her spirits began to revive, and her mind became capable of some other exertion than that of heightening its affliction by melancholy remembrances, she was impatient to be gone, and indefatigable in her inquiries for a suitable dwelling in the neighbourhood of Norland; for to remove far from that beloved spot was impossible. But she could hear of no situation that at once answered her notions of comfort and ease, and suited the prudence of her eldest daughter, whose steadier judgment rejected several houses as too large for their income, which her mother would have approved.
Mrs. Dashwood had been informed by her husband of the solemn promise on the part of his son in their favour, which gave comfort to his last earthly reflections. She doubted the sincerity of this assurance no more than he had doubted it himself, and she thought of it for her daughters’ sake with satisfaction, though as for herself she was persuaded that a much smaller provision than 7000L would support her in affluence. For their brother’s sake, too, for the sake of his own heart, she rejoiced; and she reproached herself for being unjust to his merit before, in believing him incapable of generosity. His attentive behaviour to herself and his sisters convinced her that their welfare was dear to him, and, for a long time, she firmly relied on the liberality of his intentions.
The contempt which she had, very early in their acquaintance, felt for her daughter-in-law, was very much increased by the farther knowledge of her character, which half a year’s residence in her family afforded; and perhaps in spite of every consideration of politeness or maternal affection on the side of the former, the two ladies might have found it impossible to have lived together so long, had not a particular circumstance occurred to give still greater eligibility, according to the opinions of Mrs. Dashwood, to her daughters’ continuance at Norland.
This circumstance was a growing attachment between her eldest girl and the brother of Mrs. John Dashwood, a gentlemanlike and pleasing young man, who was introduced to their acquaintance soon after his sister’s establishment at Norland, and who had since spent the greatest part of his time there.
Some mothers might have encouraged the intimacy from motives of interest, for Edward Ferrars was the eldest son of a man who had died very rich; and some might have repressed it from motives of prudence, for, except a trifling sum, the whole of his fortune depended on the will of his mother. But Mrs. Dashwood was alike uninfluenced by either consideration. It was enough for her that he appeared to be amiable, that he loved her daughter, and that Elinor returned the partiality. It was contrary to every doctrine of hers that difference of fortune should keep any couple asunder who were attracted by resemblance of disposition; and that Elinor’s merit should not be acknowledged by every one who knew her, was to her comprehension impossible.
Edward Ferrars was not recommended to their good opinion by any peculiar graces of person or address. He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every indication of an open, affectionate heart. His understanding was good, and his education had given it solid improvement. But he was neither fitted by abilities nor disposition to answer the wishes of his mother and sister, who longed to see him distinguished–as–they hardly knew what. They wanted him to make a fine figure in the world in some manner or other. His mother wished to interest him in political concerns, to get him into parliament, or to see him connected with some of the great men of the day. Mrs. John Dashwood wished it likewise; but in the mean while, till one of these superior blessings could be attained, it would have quieted her ambition to see him driving a barouche. But Edward had no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes centered in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life. Fortunately he had a younger brother who was more promising.
Edward had been staying several weeks in the house before he engaged much of Mrs. Dashwood’s attention; for she was, at that time, in such affliction as rendered her careless of surrounding objects. She saw only that he was quiet and unobtrusive, and she liked him for it. He did not disturb the wretchedness of her mind by ill-timed conversation. She was first called to observe and approve him farther, by a reflection which Elinor chanced one day to make on the difference between him and his sister. It was a contrast which recommended him most forcibly to her mother.
“It is enough,” said she; “to say that he is unlike Fanny is enough. It implies everything amiable. I love him already.”
“I think you will like him,” said Elinor, “when you know more of him.”
“Like him!” replied her mother with a smile. “I feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.”
“You may esteem him.”
“I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem and love.”
Mrs. Dashwood now took pains to get acquainted with him. Her manners were attaching, and soon banished his reserve. She speedily comprehended all his merits; the persuasion of his regard for Elinor perhaps assisted her penetration; but she really felt assured of his worth: and even that quietness of manner, which militated against all her established ideas of what a young man’s address ought to be, was no longer uninteresting when she knew his heart to be warm and his temper affectionate.
No sooner did she perceive any symptom of love in his behaviour to Elinor, than she considered their serious attachment as certain, and looked forward to their marriage as rapidly approaching.
“In a few months, my dear Marianne.” said she, “Elinor will, in all probability be settled for life. We shall miss her; but SHE will be happy.”
“Oh! Mama, how shall we do without her?”
“My love, it will be scarcely a separation. We shall live within a few miles of each other, and shall meet every day of our lives. You will gain a brother, a real, affectionate brother. I have the highest opinion in the world of Edward’s heart. But you look grave, Marianne; do you disapprove your sister’s choice?”
“Perhaps,” said Marianne, “I may consider it with some surprise. Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet–he is not the kind of young man–there is something wanting–his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence. And besides all this, I am afraid, Mama, he has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor’s drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth. It is evident, in spite of his frequent attention to her while she draws, that in fact he knows nothing of the matter. He admires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!”– “He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you WOULD give him Cowper.”
“Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!–but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke MY heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward’s virtues, and his person and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm.”
“Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen. It is yet too early in life to despair of such a happiness. Why should you be less fortunate than your mother? In one circumstance only, my Marianne, may your destiny be different from hers!”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What a pity it is, Elinor,” said Marianne, “that Edward should have no taste for drawing.”
“No taste for drawing!” replied Elinor, “why should you think so? He does not draw himself, indeed, but he has great pleasure in seeing the performances of other people, and I assure you he is by no means deficient in natural taste, though he has not had opportunities of improving it. Had he ever been in the way of learning, I think he would have drawn very well. He distrusts his own judgment in such matters so much, that he is always unwilling to give his opinion on any picture; but he has an innate propriety and simplicity of taste, which in general direct him perfectly right.”
Marianne was afraid of offending, and said no more on the subject; but the kind of approbation which Elinor described as excited in him by the drawings of other people, was very far from that rapturous delight, which, in her opinion, could alone be called taste. Yet, though smiling within herself at the mistake, she honoured her sister for that blind partiality to Edward which produced it.
“I hope, Marianne,” continued Elinor, “you do not consider him as deficient in general taste. Indeed, I think I may say that you cannot, for your behaviour to him is perfectly cordial, and if THAT were your opinion, I am sure you could never be civil to him.”
Marianne hardly knew what to say. She would not wound the feelings of her sister on any account, and yet to say what she did not believe was impossible. At length she replied:
“Do not be offended, Elinor, if my praise of him is not in every thing equal to your sense of his merits. I have not had so many opportunities of estimating the minuter propensities of his mind, his inclinations and tastes, as you have; but I have the highest opinion in the world of his goodness and sense. I think him every thing that is worthy and amiable.”
“I am sure,” replied Elinor, with a smile, “that his dearest friends could not be dissatisfied with such commendation as that. I do not perceive how you could express yourself more warmly.”
Marianne was rejoiced to find her sister so easily pleased.
“Of his sense and his goodness,” continued Elinor, “no one can, I think, be in doubt, who has seen him often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation. The excellence of his understanding and his principles can be concealed only by that shyness which too often keeps him silent. You know enough of him to do justice to his solid worth. But of his minuter propensities, as you call them you have from peculiar circumstances been kept more ignorant than myself. He and I have been at times thrown a good deal together, while you have been wholly engrossed on the most affectionate principle by my mother. I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments and heard his opinion on subjects of literature and taste; and, upon the whole, I venture to pronounce that his mind is well-informed, enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure. His abilities in every respect improve as much upon acquaintance as his manners and person. At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived. At present, I know him so well, that I think him really handsome; or at least, almost so. What say you, Marianne?”
“I shall very soon think him handsome, Elinor, if I do not now. When you tell me to love him as a brother, I shall no more see imperfection in his face, than I now do in his heart.”
Elinor started at this declaration, and was sorry for the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him. She felt that Edward stood very high in her opinion. She believed the regard to be mutual; but she required greater certainty of it to make Marianne’s conviction of their attachment agreeable to her. She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next–that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister.
“I do not attempt to deny,” said she, “that I think very highly of him–that I greatly esteem, that I like him.”
Marianne here burst forth with indignation–
“Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.”
Elinor could not help laughing. “Excuse me,” said she; “and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings. Believe them to be stronger than I have declared; believe them, in short, to be such as his merit, and the suspicion–the hope of his affection for me may warrant, without imprudence or folly. But farther than this you must not believe. I am by no means assured of his regard for me. There are moments when the extent of it seems doubtful; and till his sentiments are fully known, you cannot wonder at my wishing to avoid any encouragement of my own partiality, by believing or calling it more than it is. In my heart I feel little–scarcely any doubt of his preference. But there are other points to be considered besides his inclination. He is very far from being independent. What his mother really is we cannot know; but, from Fanny’s occasional mention of her conduct and opinions, we have never been disposed to think her amiable; and I am very much mistaken if Edward is not himself aware that there would be many difficulties in his way, if he were to wish to marry a woman who had not either a great fortune or high rank.”
Marianne was astonished to find how much the imagination of her mother and herself had outstripped the truth.
“And you really are not engaged to him!” said she. “Yet it certainly soon will happen. But two advantages will proceed from this delay. I shall not lose you so soon, and Edward will have greater opportunity of improving that natural taste for your favourite pursuit which must be so indispensably necessary to your future felicity. Oh! if he should be so far stimulated by your genius as to learn to draw himself, how delightful it would be!”
Elinor had given her real opinion to her sister. She could not consider her partiality for Edward in so prosperous a state as Marianne had believed it. There was, at times, a want of spirits about him which, if it did not denote indifference, spoke of something almost as unpromising. A doubt of her regard, supposing him to feel it, need not give him more than inquietude. It would not be likely to produce that dejection of mind which frequently attended him. A more reasonable cause might be found in the dependent situation which forbade the indulgence of his affection. She knew that his mother neither behaved to him so as to make his home comfortable at present, nor to give him any assurance that he might form a home for himself, without strictly attending to her views for his aggrandizement. With such a knowledge as this, it was impossible for Elinor to feel easy on the subject. She was far from depending on that result of his preference of her, which her mother and sister still considered as certain. Nay, the longer they were together the more doubtful seemed the nature of his regard; and sometimes, for a few painful minutes, she believed it to be no more than friendship.
But, whatever might really be its limits, it was enough, when perceived by his sister, to make her uneasy, and at the same time, (which was still more common,) to make her uncivil. She took the first opportunity of affronting her mother-in-law on the occasion, talking to her so expressively of her brother’s great expectations, of Mrs. Ferrars’s resolution that both her sons should marry well, and of the danger attending any young woman who attempted to DRAW HIM IN; that Mrs. Dashwood could neither pretend to be unconscious, nor endeavor to be calm. She gave her an answer which marked her contempt, and instantly left the room, resolving that, whatever might be the inconvenience or expense of so sudden a removal, her beloved Elinor should not be exposed another week to such insinuations.
