This document provides an overview of key themes in Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility, including women and femininity, society and class, love, the home, language and communication, family, marriage, wealth, dreams and plans, and competition. It discusses how Austen presents a realistic portrayal of women and explores different facets of love. The world of Sense and Sensibility is depicted as a complicated hierarchical class system that influences all relationships. Marriage and money are also important motivating factors for the characters.

1.  DHARABA GOHIL
 Roll no: 8
 Semester : 2
 Enrollment no.:
2609108420170011
 Batch : 2016- 18
 Paper no. 5 The
Romantic Literature
 Smt. S. B. Gardi. Dept.
of English

2.  Jane Austen was born on December
16, 1775, at Stevenson Rectory in
Hampshire, England.
 Austen’s novels mostly focus on
themes of courtship and marriage.
However, her work stands out
because of her sharp, satirical
depiction of late 18th century English
society.
 She is still one of the most studied
and influential novelists of her time,
largely because she was creating
strong, unusual female characters
during this period and also for her
mastery of form, satire, and irony.
 His famous works are Emma,
Mansfield park, Northanger Abbey,
Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice,
sense and sensibility.

4.  Women and Femininity
 Society and Class
 Love
 The Home
 Language and Communication
 Family
 Marriage
 Wealth
 Dreams, Hopes, Plans
 Competition

5.  Rumor has it that girls are made of sugar and
spice and everything nice, but we think that Jane
Austen might disagree.
 Her very real, at times rather harsh depiction of
the women of Sense and Sensibility exposes the
undeniable fact that there's more to her proper
young ladies than meets the eye – underneath
their dainty exteriors, we see dangerous passion,
frustration, and even a bit of malice in one case
in particular.
 Austen's portrayal of women is challenging and
incredibly real, and she sums up both the
delights and difficulties of femininity through the
array of characters revealed in this text.

6.  The world of Jane Austen's Sense
and Sensibility is a complicated
one, in which everyone fits neatly
into minute little pigeonholes in
the incredibly stratified,
hierarchical class system.
 Imagine this system as an
enormous card catalog, in which
every single person we encounter
fits somewhere – and moving them
to another place is quite a big
undertaking, that involves
shuffling everyone else around
slightly and getting them all used
to it.
 Her characters are all painfully,
obsessively aware of their
individual positions in society, and
all of their relationships are
marked distinctly by their varying
amounts of power within the social

7.  In Sense and Sensibility, she shows us
dramatically different facets of this crazy little
thing we call love, from the euphoric to the
life-threatening.
 While love is certainly the driving force of the
various plots we see in this novel, it's not
always a good thing – in fact, more often than
not, there's an edge of danger or tragic
potential in it.

8.  The loss of a cherished home is one
of the first major thematic elements
of Sense and Sensibility, and that
sense of transition and movement
persists throughout the novel.
 Home is identified as any number of
things – a beloved place, a specific
set of well-known, well-loved
landmarks, a treasure trove of
memories – but most of all, it's
where the heart is, as they say. And
that mostly means that it's where the
family is; the sense of connection
between the Dashwood sisters (our
protagonists) is what keeps them
grounded throughout this novel,
even when everything seems like it's
about to fly apart.

9.  In Sense and Sensibility basically everything in this book – plot,
the characters, their various motivations – all boil down to
marriage. As the most important social contract of the world that
Austen depicts, marriage is an all-important concern.
Wealth
 Money is nice, and we all want to have it. We know it now, and
Austen knew it back in the nineteenth century. For this simple
reason, money is a motivating factor in a lot of the decisions that
we see unfold in Sense and Sensibility. Wealth and inheritance
create systems of control and power here, that profoundly
influence the personal choices and options of our characters;
most of the young people Austen introduces to us are financially
dependent upon parents or other relations, and therefore
obliged to submit to them, according to the rules of the day.

10.  Most of the dreams, hopes, and plans that we see
unfold in Sense and Sensibility have to do with love,
romance, and marriage.
 Basically, these are the only possible futures that are
available to our two heroines, and they both have
their own visions of how these futures should play
out.
 The novel deals with the gaping chasm between
idealistic hopes and pragmatic plans – and what
happens when these two concepts clash.
 The results are by turns comic and tragic; through
the struggles of our characters, we see what happens
in the difficult process of making dreams into real
plans – and then into real life.

11.  http://www.shmoop.com/sense-and-
sensibility/society-class-theme.htm
 https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-
victorians/articles/status-rank-and-class-in-
jane-austens-novels