The New Compass: A Critical Review
Sense and Sensibility,
Sensibly Edited
Bruce Stovel
Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Beth Lau.
The New Riverside
Edition of Sense and Sensibility is a
very attractive compromise, for teachers and ultimately for students, between
the usual paperback edition, à la Penguin or
This New Riverside
Edition has itself an interesting cultural context. Houghton Mifflin’s
Riverside Editions of classic English and American authors, such as the
Riverside Chaucer and the Riverside Shakespeare, had set the standard for
scholarly editions by the year 1900; in the 1950s and 1960s, in accord with the
New Criticism that prevailed at the time, Riverside Editions of classic English
and American novels and poets offered the serious reader and the university
student the standard paperback “text”: the work itself, a judicious scholarly
and critical introduction, lucid footnotes. However, times have changed, and
Houghton Mifflin has changed with them: beginning in 2000, the company began
publishing New Riverside Editions which will “reflect both the changing canons
of literature in English and the greater emphasis on historical and cultural
context that have helped a new generation of critics to extend and reenliven
literary studies” (according to Series Editor Alan Richardson in a prefatory
note).
Beth Lau’s edition of Sense and Sensibility (1811) does not
reflect a changing canon, but it does exemplify the value of a novel-in-its
context edition. Lau’s remarkably deft, concise, and wide-ranging Introduction
sketches within 22 pages the main issues of interpretation of this novel, which
is, as she notes, often regarded as one of Austen’s least successful and
popular novels. (Austen’s first-composed and first-published novel, it has
been, in fact, the ugly sister in the family.) Lau’s Introduction has a
valuable section on the kinship between Austen and the major, and male,
Romantic poets who were her contemporaries, but whose work is rarely set beside
hers. It ends with an account of the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson film adaptation of
1995, which, she writes, “attests to the relevance and appeal of Austen’s
characters for present-day audiences” (21).
What makes this
Introduction especially deft is that each stage in Lau’s account of critical
issues also serves as a rationale for the inclusion of the items in the two
sections, “Background Materials” and “Criticism,” that follow the text of the
novel. For instance, her brief but helpful account of the cult of Sensibility
and the Novel of Sensibility draws on, and so defines the significance of, the
first two texts in “Background Materials,” selections from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774;
first translated into English 1779) and Austen’s own parody of the sentimental
novel, Love and Freindship [sic]
(1790), written when she was fourteen. “Background Materials” also includes
excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s pioneering feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), a work that stresses the dangers to women of embracing Sensibility, and
several letters from Maria Edgeworth’s novel Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795), a precursor of Sense and
Sensibility that is also a story of two contrasting sisters, one sensible and
reserved and the other emotional and outspoken. These four works from Austen’s
time are followed by seven pages from Kenneth L. Moler’s essay “Sense and Sensibility and Its Sources”
(1966) that summarize several other contrasting-sister novels that preceded Sense and Sensibility. All of these
stories vindicate the sensible sister, as Austen does, but, as Lau points out
in her Introduction, in Edgeworth’s Letters
of Julia and Caroline, for example, “there is never a question in the
reader’s mind as to which character is superior or what values and modes of
behavior are being endorsed. In Sense and
Sensibility, by contrast, our allegiances and assumptions are constantly
shifting and being challenged” (18).
The four critical essays
in the section entitled “Criticism” embody that difficulty and ambiguity of
response. Two of the four essays present Elinor as the novel’s heroine: Marilyn
Butler’s account of the novel in her Jane
Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) and Susan Morgan’s chapter, “Polite Lies
and the Veiled Heroine of Sense and
Sensibility” from her In the
Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (1980)—though
for Butler Elinor is a Christian moralist and for Morgan she is an open-minded,
even Romantic, empiricist. The remaining two essays, Angela Leighton’s “Sense
and Silences: Reading Jane Austen Again” (1983) and Barbara K. Seeber’s “‘I See
Everything as You Desire Me To Do’: The Scolding and Schooling of Marianne
Dashwood” (1999) present a much more radical Austen, one whose sympathies with
Marianne appear in Marianne’s silences in the final section of the novel
(Leighton) and in the narrator’s multiplicity of perspectives (Seeber).
Set against its main
competitor, the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, edited by Claudia L.
Johnson in the same year (2002), Lau’s New Riverside Edition has several
advantages. It costs several dollars less; it has the heft of a novel and not a
phone book or political-science text. More importantly, compared to the Norton,
it is modest and realistic in what it offers. The Norton suffers from overkill:
the student, for instance, is offered twelve selections by modern critics, as
opposed to Lau’s four, and eleven works by Austen’s precursors and
contemporaries (including Wollstonecraft and Edgeworth), as opposed to Lau’s
four-plus-Moler. Lau’s four essays are a fair-minded representation of the
critical debate over the novel; Johnson’s twelve critics predominantly favour
one view of the novel, the feminist one advanced by Johnson herself in an essay
of her own that she includes. Furthermore, Lau’s selections are often complete
and at least substantial (for instance, she has the whole of Love and Freindship), whereas the Norton
excerpts from Austen’s contexts and her critics are often fragmentary. For
instance, the one critic reprinted in both collections, Marilyn Butler, is
represented by two pages in Norton and by nine pages in New Riverside (all but
three pages of
All in all, this New
Riverside Edition proves the worth of Houghton Mifflin’s new series. As Lau
says, “Understanding the historical context of Sense and Sensibility makes us aware of how much we have in common
with the men and women who lived two hundred years ago and whom Austen
understood and depicted so well” (21).
Stovel, Bruce. “Sense and Sensibility, Sensibly Edited.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3 (June 2004)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/stovel.html>