Change and Fixity in Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

In his introduction to Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner notes Marianne Dashwood's relish for the language of the early Romantic poets, "a language of solitude rather than society," and remarks that Jane Austen, too, had a special affinity with these writers. 1 In that small detail, perhaps, lies part of the novel's complexity--its mandate of having, if not to kill the thing it loves, then at least to mute it with compromise and social adjustment. A "language of solitude" is de facto a personal discourse to which the reader gains access as a privileged eavesdropper, and style indirect libre, that supposed invention of the nineteenth-century novel, was already implicit in the discursive verse of sensibility, as witness the way, in William Cowper's Retirement, it opens a window on a different consciousness from the speaker's: