I really enjoyed the book. But I felt like the eventual romances were a bit hollow at the end? (I’m going to avoid talking about the age differences, due to the time in which the book was written)
For Edward, most of his time spent getting close to Elinor was before the book started. Most of what we hear about Edward during the book is through Lucy and gossip from others, such as Mrs Jennings. The only times we encounter him directly after they move to Barton is when he visits and acts very stand-offish, and then at the end when he comes to ask Elinor to marry him. He put her through so much turmoil (Although, for understandable circumstances for the time) that it’s hard to be happy about their ending if we hadn’t seen much of them interacting in a positive way.
For Colonel Brandon and Marianne, I really feel for him, as she was very uninterested for practically the entire book. Then at the end of the book, they are suddenly married, with again not much positive interaction shown to the reader between them.
At one point, when Colonel Brandon was telling Elinor about his generous gift to Edward, and Mrs Jennings thought they were getting engaged, I thought that really, that did seem like a very happy ending to me. Elinor saw the good in Colonel Brandon from the start, and he was clearly very fond of her.
However, if I think about it from the point of view that this is not supposed to be a book about romance (what I thought going into the book), but instead about the sisters’ relationship with each other, and Marianne’s character development, I suppose it makes sense. Marianne starts the book as well meaning, but a bit bratty. She is cynical of Edward due to him and Elinor not having all the same interests, and she can be quickly dismissive of those around her.
For example, Mrs Jennings is an awful gossip, and pretty loud, but she adores the sisters, and was so generous towards them. Marianne seemed to not notice the good qualities at all, and admits this near the end of the book.
Marianne loving Willoughby, who seems to be all the things she admires in a person (fun, exciting, shares all her interests), and then finding that he was a terrible person and completely let her down, is a huge part of her character development. I suppose her ending up with Colonel Brandon, who she previously branded as boring, shows that she now sees what is really important in a person’s character. If she didn’t end up with him, it probably would have ruined the moral of the book.
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However, I’m still struggling to find the ending satisfying, and I was wondering how other people felt while reading it?
by hazelsnap
2 Comments
When I first read it, it was after P&P and Persuasion, and I was really dissatisfied by the ending. It’s almost antiromantic, especially the part with Colonel Brandon, and I was expecting something else, partly because I had gone into P&P knowing it was supposed to be “romantic” and had to gloss over some things that made me uncomfortable.
As an adult going back to it (I read it young because I was so primed by the Regency romances my best friend and I consumed), I thought that it was a continuation of some of the darker themes in P&P— that while Elizabeth in that book is brutal about Charlotte’s choice, Charlotte is shown as quite content and having made the best of her situation, and also the troubling fact that Elizabeth never tells Darcy she loves him. He loves her. He has 10,000 pounds a year. I had a long argument with a colleague who said that I was getting too hung up on the romance, and that part of Austen’s point was that women couldn’t disengage money from love, that even romantic love needed to have those considerations, and that I was importing a modern divide into a book that thought about love differently than we do now. I found that helpful going back to Sense & Sensibility.
But that doesn’t mean I love it. It’s one of the Jane Austen books I really don’t reread. It’s easier to appreciate than to love.
Hmmmmmmm I actually loved the ending when I first read it, but I can see myself feeling a little differently now. Have you ever watched the movie? I feel like the screenplay does a good job of landing the emotional beats of the story and really lands the ending for me.