Sense and Sensibility

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Kathleen James-Cavan’s new critical edition of Jane Austen’s
classic, Sense and Sensibility, will be a delight to both readers and
scholars. The text itself is based on the novel’s second edition
(1813), which Austen personally saw through publication; the substantive
changes between the first and second editions are noted in the footnotes
and often provide interesting insights into Austen’s creative process
and social milieu. The occasional footnotes in the text are informative,
unintrusive, and certainly far more convenient for the reader than the
usual endnotes.

James-Cavan’s excellent introduction to the novel is written with
admirable clarity and thoroughness. Beginning from a historical
perspective, she relates the story of the novel’s composition and
publication, and looks at the historical context in which Austen was
writing, giving particular attention to the popular and scholarly
discourse of the early 19th-century concerning sense, sensibility, and
sentiment. She draws attention to the diversity of critical responses to
the novel from Austen’s time to the present day, in relation to the
culture of sensibility, and then includes her own close reading of the
text, arguing that Austen’s extensive use of a parodic structure
reveals a masterful technique that undercuts the seemingly orthodox
narrative. As an introduction, this is must-read material that sheds an
invigorating light on a well-known text.

Her choice of material for the appendixes is equally informative. She
includes contemporary reviews of the novel, articles from the late-18th
century concerning the cult of sensibility and the picturesque, and
three examples of Marianne’s reading material (from Scott, Thomson,
and Cowper). The result is an edition that successfully places the novel
within a clear cultural context and illuminates many elements of a
deceptively complex text that might otherwise

be lost to the modern reader.