Sense and Sensibility* belongs to a very old type of story--the story
of brotherly (or sisterly) contrast. In Hebrew narrative it is as ancient
as Cain and Abel, and receives the countenance of Jesus himself in the
parable of the Prodigal Son and his brother. In classical and modern drama
it lengthens chainwise and spreads fanwise in a long descent from Menander
to Terence, from Terence to Moliére, from Moliére to Sheridan
(with his griding Surfaces) down to a success not two years old in the
commercialized drama of our American metropolis. On the sisterly side the
theme reaches at least as far back as Martha and Mary in the New Testament,
and comes down to yesterday in the Marta y Maria of Valdés and the
Constance and Sophia of Amold Bennett in the Old-Wives' Tale. The Austen
mark is pleasantly conspicuous in the fact that the two sisters contrasted
in this novel are both virtuous and affectionate women; they differ only
in the degree in which they permit judgment to control feeling.
The conduct of the novel is careful and successful, though far from
blameless. Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, expecting offers
of marriage from two young men, are forsaken by their lovers without declaration
or explanation in the first half of the book. The retirement of the two
cavaliers induces a languor or slackness in the middle of the narrative
comparable to the effect of the departure of the masculine element on a
social assembly. For this shrinkage of interest the redress offered by
the conclusion is imperfect.
But the stories claim amore complete analysis. Elinor Dashwood learns
that Edward Ferrars, who has made tacit love to her, is bound by an early
and secret engagement to a young woman of inferior breeding called Lucy
Steele. The secret is divulged; the young man is promptly disinherited
by his vindictive and grasping mother; and he prepares by marrying the
girl to try how far the fulfilment of duty can console its victim for a
blighted love and a vanished income. Extrication comes from a novel quarter;
the brother who has stripped him of his inheritance unexpectedly relieves
him of his bride. The supplanter is decoyed into a secret marriage, and
the release of Edward Ferrars is followed by his betrothal to Elinor and
the reluctant forgiveness of the thwarted mother. The average novelist
would call this material interesting, and the author of Vanity Fair would
have lingered and luxuriated in the story of the arts by which the young
girl substituted the rich brother for the poor one. Not so Miss Austen.
She dislikes, or merely tolerates, this material. She is as slow in getting
up to it and as quick in getting away from it as the decencies of the situation
will permit. Two-thirds of the book is over before the divulging of the
engagement which would start the interest for the average reader is accomplished,
and the decisive events are narrated at second-hand in the briefest summary
in the impatient conclusion of a somewhat leisurely and ambling tale. The
haste was probably due in part to Miss Austen's discontent with the makeshift
expedient by which she cleared the path of Elinor and Edward to their deferred
and improbable happiness. She was also not indisposed to evade the direct
treatment of crises, as her management of the Lydia--Wickham affair in
Pride and Prejudice clearly shows.
The conduct of the other story is subject to equal, if different, strictures.
John Willoughby Leaves Marianne Dashwood without making the offer to which
his whole behavior has served as prelude and promise. Marianne follows
him to London. Her disillusion is then effected by a series of incidents
which are not uninteresting, but are at once so obvious and so meagre as
to retard the speed and contract the volume of the narrative. Another suitor
has been provided for Marianne in the person of an amiable and melancholy
Colonel, twice her age and the object, at his first introduction, of her
untiring and unsparing raillery. The renovation of Colonel Brandon in the
esteem of Marianne might have seemed a seductive theme to a novelist who
in Pride and Prejudice was to lavish time and pains on the rehabilitation
of the rejected sind discredited Darcy. But in Sense and Sensibility Miss
Austen has stayed her hand. The embellishment of the Colonel is incidental
and perfunctory; it consists chiefly in his bestowal of a rectory upon
Edward Ferrars--a point of only indirect concern to Marianne--and his fetching
of Mrs. Dashwood to her daughter's sick-bed. The courtship is unhesitatingly
shirked; Miss Austen, for all her implacable worldly sense, may have been
woman enough to shrink from detailing a process by which ayoung girl was
induced to marry a middle-aged gentleman who is the domicile--I had almost
said the sepulchre--of all the virtues.
Sickness is a classic expedient for reviving our interest in heroines
who are slipping into insignificance, and Miss Austen likes sickness for
its own sake she delights in its respectability. Accordingly Marianne,
who seems likely to fall into abeyance in the last third of the story,
is saved from this calamity by taking to her bed. It is only fair to this
illness to note that it disappears with the most obliging celerity as soon
as it has accomplished the rather trifling errand for which its presence
was invoked. That Marianne should be sick in a house not her own whence
the whole family, with the exception of a grandmother who is half a guest,
have fled at the mere pronunciation of the name "typhus," appears forced
in an author so studious of the normal as Miss Austen. The change of domicile
is intended chiefly to provide an excuse for a penitential visit on the
part of the mercurial and dashing Willoughby. He makes an explanation to
the placable Elinor which he has the impudence, and Miss Austen the courage,
to present as a defense of his behavior.
The two stories, as the outline shows, are essentially distinct; they
are bound together after a fashion, however, by the intimacy of the two
sisters who scarcely leave each other's sides, and there are one or two
secondary ligatures. Colonel Brandon, for instance, who is Marianne's suitor,
is destined for Elinor by the prevalent opinion of the circle in which
they move. As we have seen, itis Colonel Brandon who provides the rectory
for Edward Ferrars. The interval between the two plots is lessened, or
at least blurred, by the likeness of the two situations and the identical
moral which is deduced from the contrasted behavior of the two sisters.
I may remark here that the difference between Elinor and Marianne, whether
in conduct or fortune, is probably not so wide as Miss Austen in the zeal
of tutorship intended that it should be. Marianne's palpable indiscretions,
the private excursions and the letters to Willoughby, are productive of
no palpable misfortune. Her real error consists in the surrender of her
heart without guarantees, and the guarded and provident Elinor has made
the same mistake. A few months of anguish is the sum total of Marianne's
penalty, and the endurance of a very little less is all the reward that
Elinor reaps for the persevering exercise of the whole troop of circumspect
and heedful virtues. It may be said in Miss Austen's defense that the support
her narrative gives to the virtues is no more uncertain or unequal than
the support they commonly receive from that lukewarm and hesitating moralist
that we call life.
To return to the handling of the story. The volume of the two plots
is small, and the reader who recails the plethora of minor incident, the
incessant meetings and partings, the fuss and bustle, which mark the London
section of the novel will be puzzled to relate this superAux of exertion
to this shortage of Accomplishment. The truth is that Miss Austen's main
end is the exhibition of life and character forl their own sake, and her
specialty is not the great scene--hardly even the deciding or impelling
scene--but the normal social occasion. The multiplying of these occasions
without too rigid a scrutiny of their actual contribution to the outcome
has resulted in a feebler story and a better novel. It is notable that
side by side with this slackness in the pursuit of relevance there is an
extreme, almost an extravagant, interest in the development of minor trains
of consequence. Here is a little catena. First, John Dashwood meets his
sister Elinor in a jeweler's shop. Second, he calls on her the next day.
Third, he asks Elinor to take him to the Middletons. Fourth, he recommends
his wife to call on the Middletons. Fifth, his wife complies. Sixth, friendliness
results. Seventh, the Dashwoods invite Lady Middleton to their home, where
Mrs. Ferrars is staying. Eighth, the Misses Steele, who have been invited
to stay with Lady Middleton, hasten their acceptance. Ninth, they are included
in the Dashwood invitation. Tenth, Lucy Steele meets Mrs. Ferrars. Miss
Austen revels in this sort of generalship; her own temper has points of
contact with that of the satirized Mrs. Jennings. On the other hand, Colonel
Brandon's supposed courtship of Elinor has almost no bearing on the outcome
of the story. Willoughby's seduction of Colonel Brandon's ward is material
only in the clearer revelation it affords of the infamies of that young
wastrel's character. The utility of the Palmers appears to be confined
to the provision of a house in which Marianne can be sick, the Colonel
assiduous, and Willoughby histrionic. If Miss Austen had been a man, she
would have enjoyed the vocation of a courier. To see people from place
to place, to provide for their entrances and exits, and to get as much
out of them as an adroit use of these opportunities permits would have
given point and vivacity to life.
Miss Austen is unable or unwilling to dispense with the friendly offices
of coincidence. Coincidence had not in her day fallen into that sere and
yellow leaf to which the frost of latter-day criticism has reduced the
green of its abundant foliage. In this novel Mr. Robert Ferrars is seen
by chance in a jeweler's shop. Mr. John Dashwood is seen, equally by chance,
in the same place. Edward and Lucy call on Elinor by chance at the same
time. The encounter of the man-servant with Lucy Ferrars at Exeter is one
of those alms of destiny to which the poverty of novelists is perennially
grateful. I may add that the servant's mistake as to the identity of the
bridegroom is one of those borrowings from farce which a novelist of Miss
Austen's calibre in our own time would find incompatible with selfrespect.
Far worse is the misunderstanding between Mrs. Jennings and Elinor in Chapter
XL, where Elinor is talking about the gift of a rectory and Mrs. Jennings
about an offer of marriage. Here the stale devices which realists contemptuously
allow to farce prolong through a conference of appreciable length a misconception
to which the bluntness of actuality would have put an end in sixty seconds.
I pass to an estimate of the characters. Elinor Dashwood is the personification
of good sense and right feeling, and the instructress by precept and example
of her impetuous and incautious mother and sister. The hardships of such
a position are manifest, and nothing less than Miss Austen's wit and vitality
could have extricated Elinor from the straits into which she is thrown
by Miss Austen's irrepressible didacticism. "He really is not disgusting,"
said Gwendolen Harleth of Grandcourt, and insisted that the praise was
generous for a man. The critic is half disposed to say of Elinor Dashwood:
"She really is not disagreeable," and to say that for a paragon of discretion
the praise is munificent. Our liking passes through crises at every turn,
and its final safety is a form of miracle. The reader is aided by the fact
that under Miss Austen's convoy he takes up his abode in the mind of Elinor,
and a well-bred person feels a difficulty in quarreling with his hostess.
Elinor, moreover, has strong affections and even keen sensibilities, though,
like captive princesses, the most they can do is to flutter a signal or
drop a rose through the gratings of the tower in which her judgment has
confined them. Possibly another help is her practical helplessness in many
cases. Her temper is less rigid than her ideal, or what we may venture
to call her own version of her temper. She seems, at first sight, a bureau,
an official headquarters, to which all questions are automatically referred
for instant and final adjudication. But, however rigid, her judgment, her
conduct abounds in compliances.
Elinor accompanies Marianne to London against her judgment. She is
diplomatic in her treatment of her brother, of Fanny Dashwood, of the gadfly
Lucy and of the buzz-fly Miss Steele. She does not openly protest against
Marianne's letters to Willoughby. She accepts the hospitality of the Palmers
in opposition to her initial prejudice. She hears Willoughby after her
indignant refusal to hear him, and, by one of the subtlest touches in the
book, allows herself to be swayed in his favor by the romantic charm of
his person and manners. Miss Austen is after all so much wiser than her
superflux of wisdom would suggest. The truth is that the novelist is as
intensely social as she is conscientious, and if the essence of conscience
is inflexibility, the essence of society is compromise. The rational woman
is provisionally rational and ultimately woman.
Elinor is much better than her ungrateful rôle; Marianne is not
quite so good as her vocation. She is imagined strongly, but thinly and
brokenly as it were. She suffers from that glaze of formality which in
Miss Austen's work overlays the really formal and the really informal characters
alike. The twentieth century hardly knows what to do with a young woman
to whom apostrophes of this type are feasible:
And you, ye well-known trees--but you will continue the same.--No leaf
will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although
we can observe you no longer.
In lines like these the satirized Mrs. Radcliffe is vindicated--or
avenged. Even where the heart is stirred, the creaking of the eighteenth-century
stays in which its throbbings are confined is distinctly audible.
"Nor I," answered Marianne with energy; "our situations then are alike.
We have neither of us anything to tell; you, because you communicate, and
I, because I conceal nothing."
The pitiless Taine remarked of Pope's Eloisa to Abelard that Abelard
would have cried out "Bravo" at certain passages, and on reaching the end
would have reversed the letter to see if "For press" were not added to
the superscription. If Marianne wrote as she talks, one could almost forgive
a similar levity in Willoughby.
Deep passion is not Miss Austen's strong point, and Marianne's suffering
has the vague though real impressiveness of a house of mourning which the
spectator views from the remoteness of the pavement. As her business is
largely to suffer, the resulting exclusion is considerable. The need of
keeping her imprudences within strictly respectable limits has shortened
the span of the character, and, as I have already intimated, her speedy
recovery does not conduce to the energy of the thesis.
The first effect of Willoughby, as he comes dashing into the story
with spurs jingling and bridle-bells tinkling, like a youthful chevalier,
is distinct and promising. But with this first sharpness of impression
Miss Austen's proficiency ceases. Her knowledge of a bad man was decorously
limited. George Eliot in Tito or Grandcourt would spell you out a bad man,
word for word and letter for letter; Miss Austen keeps warily aloof from
the lip of the crater. She knows Willoughby's manners and that part of
his temperament to which manners are the clew. She is not withheld by any
visible squeamishness. Her account of Willoughby's worst offense is handled
with a frankness and a discretion and an absence of any consciousness of
either frankness or discretion which, in relation to her sex and epoch,
is notable and laudable. The awe, the mystery, which encircle sex are entirely
absent; her disapproval is emphatic, but her coolness is immovable. Willoughby
is a trumpery character. The curvettings and bridlings with which he dashes
upon the stage in the outset of the story arouse a distrust which is rather
confirmed than lessened by the final caracole of his repentance. Miss Austen
leaves us at last with the impression that his desertion of Marianne and
his betrayal of Eliza are criminal at best, and that, in an unpolished
or unhandsome man, they would have been totally unforgivable.
Edward Ferrars is placed in direct contrast to Willoughby. Willoughby
is gloss without substance; Edward is substance without gloss. The difficulty
with Edward is that the absence of plumage is so much more demonstrable
than the presence of marrow. Edward has the ill luck to be compelled always
to carry a shyness which needs no nursing into situations which supply
it with the most liberal encouragement. He is inactive and largely invisible;
and when he is dragged upon the stage by the inexorable Miss Austen, his
chief aim is to conceal his mind from the friends to whom he has been obliged
to expose his person. His adhesion to the pestiferous Lucy seems a dismal
if not a truckling type of virtue, and the American reader is not propitiated
by his naïve view of the ministry as a steppingstone to a living in
the double sense of a rectory and a livelihood. It is quite true that in
this view of the church as a refectory he has the cordial support of his
patroness, Miss Austen.
Colonel Brandon is the last of the three men in the story to whom the
office of lover and suitor is committed. He is hampered in this function
by an accumulation of years which exposes him to the contempt of romantic
young women of eighteen. Colonel Brandon is thirty-five, and the touch
of rheumatism from which he suffers is confessed by the novelist with a
candor which may be classed with the heroisms--not to say the heroics--of
conscientious realistic treatment. That touch of rheumatism is felt in
Colonel Brandon's gait throughout the story. He is a very good, indeed
a very eacient, man, if the only sound test, the test of deeds, be a applied
to his character, but we feel always that he is bandaged. He is the most
recurrent, yet the most unobtrusive, of characters, and the reader starts
at the perception of his arrival as he might at the discovery of the nearness
of some quiet person who had entered the room on tiptoe. Even at the very
end of the tale he can hardly be said to have laid aside his muffler; we
know the facts, but we do not know the man. It is natural that he should
be drawn to Marianne rather than to Elinor, between whom and himself is
the obvious bond and the impalpable barrier of a precise conformity of
tastes and principles. It is not so easy to understand his final conquest
of Marianne even with the aid of a proviso that Marianne accepts him in
the first instance on the unromantic basis of grateful friendship and esteem.
Discretion that is to be made amiable to indiscretion might surely assume
a livelier and courtlier shape than it wears in the sedate--almost the
lugubrious--Colonel.
Miss Austen's tolerance of inconsistency is evident in the changes
undergone by two characters, Mrs. Jennings and Mr. Palmer, in the shifting
exigencies of a varied novel. Mrs. Jennings as we first see her, is a vulgar
gossip, wholly foolish and wholly contemptible. In the course of the story
she becomes a convenience to Miss Austen, and Miss Austen is too robustly
English to view any convenience with unqualified contempt. Mrs. Jennings
is revamped. Her cheap good-nature is changed to an endearing benevolence;
the folly which had pervaded and constituted her character is reduced to
a tincture that makes her virtues pardonable by making them diverting.
The change in Mr. Palmer, while much less conspicuous, is even more violent.
When we are first introduced to this extraordinary person, the only characteristic
he exhibits is a brutal and supercilious rudeness, and that characteristic
is pushed to an extreme from which anybody but a demure and discreet clergyman's
daughter engaged in the writing of realistic novels would have shrunk.
Later on, when Mr. Palmer has a chance to be useful, half his brutality
is obliterated at a stroke. These alterations are instructive. In Miss
Austen's comic delineations the character is spitted on a trait, and the
trait is abnormally sharpened for the due performance of this trenchant
office. This may pass, if the handling is brief and includes no diversity
of functions. A person may stand on his peculiarities, as he may stand
on the tips of his toes, for a little while, if he is content to do practically
nothing else. But there is nothing like prolonged contact for the taming
of superlatives, and nothing like variety of function for abatement of
the rankness of caricature. Miss Austen's changes are tacit acknowledgments
that the unrevised Mrs. Jennings and Mr. Palmer were libelous. This confession
really involves the whole prolific and interesting group of characters
in Miss Austen for which the formula is the raising of a single trait to
the highest power and the iteration of that trait with tireless insistence.
People are not like that, whatever Smollett and Dickens and Miss Austen
may think. The arbitrary modification of full-blown or full-grown characters
is one of the artistic sins that spot the record of Dickens. I will take
an illustration from that novel of Dickens which reperusal has lately freshened
in my memory, the Tale of Edwin Drood. The lawyer, Mr. Grewgious, in that
book is pure fool and butt in the extravagant and irrational scene in which
he is first introduced to the amused but protesting reader. Later on, Mr.
Grewgious's help is wanted by Dickens in some rather delicate transactions
in the conduct of which a character and brain are indispensable. The equipment
of Mr. Grewgious with these desiderata is carried out without hesitation
or delay. Unsightly tricks of this sort excite the liveliest indignation
in admirers of the authoress of Sense and Sensibility.
Mrs. Jennings has two daughters, Lady Middleton and Mrs. Palmer. They
are like each other only in their brainlessness, Lady Middleton's folly
taking the form of an inane silence, Mrs. Palmer's that of inane speech.
Mrs. Palmer is the smarter performance, Lady Middleton the truer success.
Mrs. Palmer's drivel is incessant and her good-nature is swashing, but
beside her husband--and she is tactful enough never to leave his side--her
very insipidities are lustrous. Lady Middleton has not the air of the woman
of fashion she is presumed to be, at least not of the woman of high fashion;
the middle tone in her, if I may venture the pun, is very noticeable. But
the suggestion of well-bred and tranquil ineptitude by a very few strokes
is expert; and as her specialty is silence she is not subject to that continuity
in self-betrayal which is the retribution of loquacity in Miss Austen.
Her husband, Sir John Middleton, is described by Goldwin Smith as "halfway
between Squire Western and the country gentleman of the present day." This
is gracious, almost obsequious, to Squire Western. Possibly as a, social
datum it might be approved by a committee of historians, but I find nothing
in my own impression of Sir John to indorse it. I cannot think, with Goldwin
Smith, that the character is hinged on its vulgarity. The hinge is brainless
good-nature, and in the deft though sparse drawing I seem to feel that
this good-nature is reciprocated by Miss Austen, who is less violent than
usual in her chastisement of the brainlessness.
Fanny Dashwood is inhumanly simplified, and the same process that robs
her of nature endows her with liveliness, if not with life. Her business
is to clutch at property and to maltreat her husband's relatives, and in
the pursuit of this vocation she is not allowed even those passing furloughs
which Thackeray: permits to Blanche Amory or Becky Sharp. John Dashwood,
her husband, is a curious study. In him the crudities and delicacies of
Miss Austen's handiwork are seen in operation side by side. He is a fool
who talks; that is tantamount to saying that he is his own target, and
his marksmanship is so expert that he is left at the end of the exhibition
completely riddled by his own bullets. The crudity lies in that uniformity
of method which never permits him to open his mouth without, so to speak,
swallowing his own character. The delicacy lies in the art with which his
own view of his character is suggested at the same time that the utter
falsity of that view is laid bare to the least wakeful reader. The ground,
the texture, of his character is selfishness and worldly greed, but there
is a lining of decency, humanity, and self-respect, and the lining is very
thick and very soft. That is the delicate and worthy task--to portray inside
of the fool and knave the man who is like ourselves in every point but
the excess of his knavery and folly. The combination of abilities and ineptitudes
in John Dashwood is mysterious. Here is a man of excellent business judgment,
of perfect social tranquillity, of faultless ease in the handling of unexceptionable
English; yet he is the dupe of the flimsiest pretenses and blind even to
those inconsistencies which his own circle must have trained itself to
perceive. He complains of poverty in the same breath in which he offers
proofs of riches. He thinks a woman who invites two girls to spend a few
weeks at her house in London is under a moral obligation to remember them
in her will. I have no first-hand knowledge of England; in America folly
is more symmetrical.
To Mrs. Dashwood, the mother, who is an unregenerate, or, if the reader
pleases, an undegenerate, Marianne, Miss Austen is, for tactical reasons,
rather inattentive; but the brand of truth which she exhibits seems to
me more delicate than that which I find in the fuller portraitures of the
younger women. The two daughters are encumbered by the necessity of serving
at the same time as the poles of an antithesis and the stays of a thesis;
Mrs. Dashwood has the leisure and freedom to be herself.
I am not sure but the best-drawn character in the book is Lucy Steele.
She finds the spot of vindictiveness in the gentlest reader, for her business
throughout the book is to provide distress for Edward Ferrars and Elinor
Dashwood, to the first of whom she serves as barnacle, to the second as
gadfly. An early and heedless engagement has bound the scrupulous and submissive
Edward to this incubus, and placed his honor between him and his later
and lasting love for Elinor Dashwood. Lucy Steele is single-minded, courageous,
and resolute. She is without manners, without affection, and without conscience.
She is capable of meanness, hypocrisy, and treachery. At the same time
it is impossible to detect in Lucy the smallest trace of harlotry, of Bohemianism,
or of disorder. She is privateer, but not buccaneer. Her , means and her
ends alike find harborage within the securities and the decorums--those
securities and decorums which so often serve as shelter to worse deeds
than the deeds to which they serve as barrier. A Frenchman could not have
so neatly separated the manceuverer from the adventuress.
We see Lucy only in her relations with Elinor Dashwood--relations in
which her confidences are unmeasured, her attitude dissembling, and her
jesuitry extraordinary. In the skill with which she is drawn there are
occasional lacunae. Lucy is supposed to talk bad English, but the stuff
or tissue of which her English is composed is not bad at all. On the contrary,
it is very good English upon which patches of vile English have been.purposely
and inexpertly sewed. A second mistake, already mentioned, is the final
stroke by which Lucy, having jilted Edward to marry Robert, allows Elinor
to imagine that the marriage has gone forward without change of bridegrooms.
This seems an overdraft on the badness of a character which has met all
its obligations to the evil principle with the most commendable punctuality
and exactness. The stroke, even if natural, seems artistically wrong. A
touch of malignity is as injurious to the artistic perfection of the pure
self-seeking embodied in Lucy Steele as a touch of benignity would have
been.
Lucy has a sister, Anne Steele, a scatterbrain, frankly vulgar, who
may be said to reek with goodnature. Her conversation is an unceasing current
in which she not merely swims but splashes. She is drawn with a precision
which by no means excludes gusto. Robert Ferrars, on whom Lucy is finally
bestowed, has every claim to that privilege which imbecility and vanity
can confer. He is hacked out with the broad-axe, but the vigor of the axeman's
stroke is unmistakable.
* The dating of Miss Austen's novels is not altogether precise, but it seems generally agreed that Sense and Sensibility represents an earlier formation, if not an earlier date, than Pride and Prejudice. A review of this novel is therefore the natural introduction to a survey of her work. At the outset, however, I shall gratefully avail myself of the succinct and useful summary in which Mr. R. Brimley Johnson has snooded up, if I may risk the word, the dishevelment of priorities in which the composition and publication of Miss Austen's fictions is involved. "Pride and Prejudice, written between October, 1796, and August, 1797, first published in 1813, and a second edition the same year, third edition, 1817; Sense and Sensibility, written in its present form between November, 1797 and 1798, though a portion was extracted from an earlier manuscript, in the form of letters, entitled Elinor and Marianne, first published in 1811, second edition, 1813; Northanger Abbey, written during 1798, and first published in 1818; Mansfield Park, written between 1811 and 1814, and first published in 1814; second edition in 1816; Emma, written between 1811 and 1816, and first published in 1816; Persuasion, written between 1811 and 1816, and first published in 1818."
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