Sense or Sensibility… What if Jane Austen Had to Choose? / Devoney Looser. In: Lit Hub February 11, 2019

How do you know if you will love Sense and Sensibility? What if it doesn’t happen to you? First-time readers of Austen’s fiction, knowing its reputation for literary greatness, may approach this novel with Marianne-like expectations. You want to be bowled over, to find charms in every sentence, or to discover that all the novel’s beauties are entirely shared on a first reading. It could happen to you. There are certainly those who love the book in ways that might seem imprudent or excessive.
Readers who love Sense and Sensibility in its original form are rarely describing their first encounters with the book. Instead, they’re describing what it means to read and reread it or to revisit it through film, television, and stage. These devoted readers have developed, rather than discovered, a Marianne-like inability to love the novel by halves while internalizing Elinor’s more measured approach to its prose. To love Sense and Sensibility—if you seek to—it’s crucial to enter its pages with gusto, as well as with deliberative care.
You may come to this novel already knowing the rough outline of the plot, having seen a recent popular film or stage version. Whether or not you’re reading the novel knowing how it all turns out, you may find the language challenging. If you read this book more slowly, you’ll be more likely to notice the way its language and its themes come together, as well as to appreciate its understated, wry comedy. It’s both a profoundly serious and an amusingly comic novel.
Look, for instance, at how the novel introduces Elinor and Marianne’s elder half-brother, John Dashwood, in the first chapter: “He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed.” Reading just the first phrase, you’d expect that what follows the comma would be a compliment. To be “ill-disposed” is to be someone disposed to do ill—to be a bad person. But what follows the clause telling us that John is not a bad young man is another double negative. He’s not bad, unless we think being coldhearted and selfish make a person bad—as, of course, we should! ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/sense-or-sensibility-what-if-jane-austen-had-to-choose/

From Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Used with the permission of Penguin Classics. Introduction copyright © 2018 by Devoney Looser.