Sense and Sensibility

At the center are two sisters. Elinor, the eldest, guards deep feeling behind composure and carries other people's burdens without a word. Marianne is all fire and excess, "her sadness and her happiness had no limits," certain she will never find a man she can truly love, until a stranger with a gun and pointers carries her home after a fall. Colonel Brandon watches quietly at the edge of every room; Willoughby arrives all charm and certainty; and there is Edward Ferrars, whose reserve Marianne finds wanting in passion, though Elinor does not.

Removed to a small cottage in Devonshire, the Dashwoods enter a world of drawing rooms and calculated matches, where a letter can betray more than it says and a miniature portrait drawn from a pocket can undo everything. Austen writes it with wry restraint, withholding as much as she reveals, trusting a single pause or misplaced word to carry a chapter's weight.

So the two philosophies of feeling are set against each other and left to work—one sister masking pain with pride, the other insisting feeling should be worn in the open—and the question of what each learns from the other stays open until the last pages. All of it is observed by a narrator who misses nothing.