Sense and Sensibility

I did finish Sense and Sensibility before leaving on break. My two broad comments:

1. Jane Austen can be very funny. She is one of the few people who can do what we would now call "snark" in such a way that I find it funny and am not put off by it.

2. I'm really, really glad I didn't live 200 years ago. Not just because of the whole "Pretty much only 'respectable' and secure path open to a woman is to find some dude with a sufficient income to marry you" but also because of the possibility of colds turning into "putrefying fevers" and suchlike - things we wouldn't think twice about today while on the way to the pharmacy to get antibiotics could have killed a person 200 years ago.

I will say I found the ending satisfying. Without giving too much away for those few who haven't read it, the "good" people wound up happy and getting what they should have gotten, the "not-so-good" people wound up, if not miserable, at least less-happy than the "good" people did.

I will note - what a bunch of self-serving characters exist in that novel. I already remarked on how Fanny Dashwood was "a piece of work" and I mostly stick by that assertion. But there's also a man who, though he turns out less dishonorable than he was at first blush, still, he's no prize. And there's a woman who dropped an engagement and hastily picked up another, probably mainly over money, though she claimed it was because her original intended seemed to love another....

And that's one of the things that baffles me as a 21st century person - as someone so raised in a culture where the idea was that you married for love - how could you hastily end one engagement and then marry another - in fact, a close relative of the man to whom you had been engaged? I get that for a lot of women, financial security, perhaps even having a place to live, hinged on getting a good husband, but, wow.

I wonder if having a network of female friends (and perhaps even the odd male friend) was far more important in those days, because you might be married to someone who was largely a stranger to you. (Or perhaps, as I've seen some argue, we've gone too far to the other extreme: that married couples are often seen or often see themselves as a closed unit, as the "only" person the other needs, and so friendships and other associations suffer by consequence).

I'm also not sure that I could bear to be idle to the degree that upper-middle or upper-class women are idle - having servants to do most of the work, mainly spending their time calling on friends or doing fancywork or reading....I mean, I enjoy knitting and reading but I don't think I could happily spend entire days at it.