Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility - J.M. Dent

Reader's note

A vintage edition of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility in a lovely blue and pink dust - jacket! The title and plot, the leading characters and most dramatic scenes of Pride and Prejudice, the heroine's situation and her entire dependence on the hero in Northanger Abbey, all point so clearly to frank appropriations from Fanny Burney, that I cannot believe myself mistaken in extracting an origin for Sense and Sensibility from the same source. As the 'moral' of Cecila plainly foretells the obstacles to understanding between Darcy and Elizabeth, the 'moral' of Camilla - less clearly but no less surely - proclaims the contrasted temperaments of Elinor and Marianne: 'This ended the long conflicts, doubts, suspense, and sufferings of Edgar and Camilla: who, without one inevitable calamity, one unavoidable distress, so nearly fell the sacrifice to the two extremes of Imprudence and Suspicion, to the natural heedlessness of youth unguided, or to the acquired distrust of experience that had been wounded.