Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility is the story of the Dashwood sisters and their romantic misadventures. Of genteel birth but with little fortune and only middling connections, sisters Elinor and Marianne both fall in love with men who need to make better matches. Both endure heartache and humiliation before Austen provides her usual happy ending.

For some reason, I had never read Sense and Sensibility, and I have to say I found it rather tedious. I tried to blame it on reading the book on Kindle . . . but Elinor is too perfect, Marianne too much of a whiner, and the characters Austen uses as foils for the two heroines are so predictable and presented with so little humor that they don't enliven the story in the same way that characters in, say, Pride and Prejudice, do. When Emma Thompson won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, I thought she must have had a pretty easy task, but I now think she did, in fact, deserve the award.

Favorite passages:

There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanor, and a general want of understanding.

Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical; perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but THAT did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.