Happiness In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility

“It is certainly hard to know how exactly to respond to the end,” Tony Tanner wrote of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and its ending in 1969. Tanner could not have been more diplomatic in his assessment: the conclusion to Austen’s first published novel has been subject to rigorous discussion and debate even 200 years after it was released to be read and perused by English readers. On the surface, it does seem as though it was a happy ending – Elinor marries the man she has always loved from the very beginning of the book, the quiet and awkward Edward Ferrars; whilst Marianne, having been abandoned by her romantic but selfish first love John Willoughby for a more economically-sound alternative, marries loyal and steadfast Colonel Branson, whom at their first meeting she was convinced had “nothing

In assuming that Austen narrowly defined the meaning of happiness by confining it merely to marital bliss, it is the critics themselves who have narrowed the definition of happiness. They have not taken into account what Marianne’s resolutions at the end of the novel mean for her and for the people around her; they have mistaken this novel as a pitting of sense against sensibility, and in sense triumphing over sensibility, they interpret the ending as Marianne’s defeat rather than Marianne’s maturing; and lastly they have made the flaw of relating the state of happiness to lofty ideas such as feminism and individuality instead of to the true core of happiness – and that is the individual’s contentment. Having considered the mentioned aspects of this question, the essay finds that Marianne does get a happy outcome: her resolutions will “no longer torture others and worry” herself, she shall be more considerate of the people around her, particularly her family, but without abandoning her sensibilities and naturally passionate self, and most importantly, she herself is