Jane Austen is a writer of romance and drama with a sense of social satire. She has displayed her view of family rituals and social customs of the Victorian era in most of her works ("Sense and Sensibility"). Her views of relationships were developed through frequent travels and extended visits to London and an ill-fated love for a young Irishman (Tomalin). In the book Sense and Sensibility Austen explores the customs of courtship, marriage, and lineage. There were several families illustrated in the book Sense and Sensibility and the relationships within each family were quite different. Three of these families will be described throughout this paper: the Dashwood family, the Ferrars family, and the family of Colonel Brandon.
The first family depicted in the book Sense and Sensibility is the Dashwood family. The Dashwoods are basically the main family of the book. It is "a story about the Dashwood family, who loses everything when Mr. Dashwood falls suddenly ill and dies unexpectedly"(Cierras). .
The relation between Mrs. John Dashwood (Fanny) and Mrs. Henry Dashwood (Mrs. Dashwood) is that Fanny is the wife of Henry Dashwood's son with his first wife, John. Their relationship is not very close. John promised his father to take care of Ms. Dashwood and his three sisters. To do that he was going to give them three thousand pounds a year, until Fanny talks him out of it. She wants as much of the inheritance from Henry's death as she can get. She talks him down from three thousand a year to fifty pound gifts every now and then. She says, "I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea of your giving them any money at all"(Austen 10).
Marianne and Elinor Dashwood are the two main characters and the focus of the novel. Originally the title of the novel was going to be Elinor and Marianne. So, respectively, they represent the title, Elinor is Sense and Marianne is sensibility (Hill). "As sisters, the two girls are very close, and sometimes very much alike, but more often than not, as different as night and day" (Hill).
