Sense and Sensibility

Introductory Class
 Session 1: Introduction and comments on bibliography/ Austen in English
literature and what she represents/What has become of Austen ? Why does she
persist?
Session 2: Austen in history: what was happening in her times? Strife, war, social
class. Dissertation: Struggle
Session 3: What Austen knew and read.. Dissertation: Strategy
Session 4: Sense, sensibility, sentiment, love, gender. Dissertation: Emotion
Session 5: Sensibility and sociability/civilisation and its discontents. Dissertation:
Rebellion
Session 6: Economics, politics, the global vs. the domestic and local Dissertation:
Money and its circulation
Session 7: The miniature and the microcosm (two inches of ivory) Dissertation:
Little women and small worlds
Session 8: Language and Austen. Speaking true and the importance of the good
use of language (propriety). Dissertation: Storytelling
Session 9 : Style, irony, play Dissertation: Humour and Ridicule
Sessions 10 (commentaries and corrections)
 Bibliography
Biography
Austen-Leigh, J.E. A Memoir of Jane Austen and other Family Recollections. 1871. Ed. KathrynSutherland. Oxford :
Oxford UP, 2002.
Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen : A Literary Life. London : Macmillan, 1991.
Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen among Women. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen : A Family Record. 1989. 2nd ed. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 2004.
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen : A Life. Harmondsworth : Viking, 1997.

Editions of Sense and Sensibility

Ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1923.
Ed. Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1969.
Ed. James Kinsley, intr. and notes Margaret Anne Doody and Claire Lamont. Oxford
Worlds Classics.Oxford : Oxford UP, 2008. (Edition au programme)
Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Norton Critical Edition

Context
Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell,1986.
Todd, Janet, ed. Jane Austen in Context. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 2005.
Jarvis, Robin. The Romantic Period : The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1789-1830. Harlow :
Pearson Longman, 2004.
Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830. London : Longman, 1989.
Auerbach, Nina. Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment in David Monaghan, ed. Jane Austen in a Social
Context. London: Macmillan, 1981. 9-27.
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
 Other Austen
The Juvenalia of Jane Austen (any edition print or online)
Pride and Prejudice (any edition)

On sensibility
Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility : Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain. Chicago : Chicago UP, 1992.
MULLAN, John. Sentiment and Sociability. The Language of Feeling in Eighteenth
Century Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
TODD, Janet. Sensibility, an Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.

General
Massi-Chamayou, Marie-Laure. La Reprsentation de largent dans les romans de
Jane Austen, Paris: LHarmattan, 2012.
Miller, D.A. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. 1986. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. [Contient
lintroduction son dition de S&S. ]
 William Shakespeare (15641616)
Sonnet 15
When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
 William Shakespeare (15641616)
Sonnet 15
When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
 London
By William Blake, 1794

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe, 1722
The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c.
Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years,
besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to
her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at
last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and dies a Penitent. Written from her own
Memorandums
THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a
private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of
the person are concealed, and on this account we must be content to leave the reader
to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheet, and take it just as he pleases.
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very beginning
of her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal her true name, after
which there is no occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the
famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own
tale in modester words that she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand
having been written in language more like one still in Newgate than one grown
penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.
 MOLL FLANDERS
My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate, and in the Old
Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating
to my particular conduct, that it is not be expected I should set my name or the
account of my family to this work; perhaps, after my death, it may be better known; at
present it would not be proper, no not though a general pardon should be issued,
even without exceptions and reserve of persons or crimes.
It is enough to tell you, that as some of my worst comrades, who are out of the way of
doing me harm (having gone out of the world by the steps and the string, as I often
expected to go ), knew me by the name of Moll Flanders, so you may give me leave to
speak of myself under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.
I have been told that in one of neighbour nations, whether it be in France or where
else I know not, they have an order from the king, that when any criminal is
condemned, either to die, or to the galleys, or to be transported, if they leave any
children, as such are generally unprovided for, by the poverty or forfeiture of their
parents, so they are immediately taken into the care of the Government, and put into
a hospital called the House of Orphans, where they are bred up, clothed, fed, taught,
and when fit to go out, are placed out to trades or to services, so as to be well able to
provide for themselves by an honest, industrious behaviour.
Had this been the custom in our country, I had not been left a poor
desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper
in the world, as was my fate; and by which I was not only exposed to
very great distresses, even before I was capable either of
understanding my case or how to amend it, but brought into a course
of life which was not only scandalous in itself, but which in its ordinary
course tended to the swift destruction both of soul and body.
But the case was otherwise here. My mother was convicted of felony
for a certain petty theft scarce worth naming, viz. having an
opportunity of borrowing three pieces of fine holland of a certain
draper in Cheapside. The circumstances are too long to repeat, and I
have heard them related so many ways, that I can scarce be certain
which is the right account.
However it was, this they all agree in, that my mother pleaded her
belly, and being found quick with child, she was respited for about
seven months; in which time having brought me into the world, and
being about again, she was called down, as they term it, to her former
judgment, but obtained the favour of being transported to the
plantations, and left me about half a year old; and in bad hands, you
may be sure.
 The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, 1794
CHAPTER I
On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of
Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St.
Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of
Guienne and Gascony stretching along the river, gay with
luxuriant woods and vine, and plantations of olives. To the south,
the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose
summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and
lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes
barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and
sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept
downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were
contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that
hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and
simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above,
delighted to repose. To the north, and to the east, the plains of
Guienne and Languedoc were lost in the mist of distance; on the
west, Gascony was bounded by the waters of Biscay.
M. St. Aubert loved to wander, with his wife and daughter, on the margin of
the Garonne, and to listen to the music that floated on its waves. He had
known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in
the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of
mankind, which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had
too sorrowfully corrected. Yet, amidst the changing visions of life, his
principles remained unshaken, his benevolence unchilled; and he retired from
the multitude 'more in PITY than in anger,' to scenes of simple nature, to the
pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues.
He was a descendant from the younger branch of an illustrious family, and it
was designed, that the deficiency of his patrimonial wealth should be
supplied either by a splendid alliance in marriage, or by success in the
intrigues of public affairs. But St. Aubert had too nice a sense of honour to
fulfil the latter hope, and too small a portion of ambition to sacrifice what he
called happiness, to the attainment of wealth. After the death of his father he
married a very amiable woman, his equal in birth, and not his superior in
fortune. The late Monsieur St. Aubert's liberality, or extravagance, had so
much involved his affairs, that his son found it necessary to dispose of a part
of the family domain, and, some years after his marriage, he sold it to
Monsieur Quesnel, the brother of his wife, and retired to a small estate in
Gascony, where conjugal felicity, and parental duties, divided his attention
with the treasures of knowledge and the illuminations of genius.
 Jacques Rancire, Le partage du sensible: esthtique et politique, Paris: La
Fabrique-ditions, 2000.

There is a dissolution of a certain form of high literature, of the notion

of Letters, at the moment of Romanticism. Jacques Rancire uses the
word literature to mean a new writing which is no longer that of the
formal belles-lettres. In his book La parole muette. Essai sur les
contradictions en littrature he describes the printed word as a mute
or dead painting of speech [peinture muette, une peinture morte de la
parole] and gives the following description of its action:
() this muteness makes the written word too talkative. No longer
guided by a father who, according to a legitimate protocol, guides it to
the place where it will bear fruit, the written word goes off on its own
willy-nilly, as it pleases. It goes off to speak in its own mute way to
whomsoever it encounters without knowing who is a suitable
recipient/interlocutor and who is not.
Jacques Rancire, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions en
littrature, Paris: Hachette, 1998, 82.
Jacques Rancire, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions
en littrature, Paris: Hachette, 1998, 82.

() ce mutisme mme rend la lettre crite

trop bavarde. Ntant pas guide par un pre
qui la porte, selon un protocole lgitime, vers
le lieu o elle peut fructifier, la parole crite
sen va rouler au hasard, de droite et de
gauche. Elle sen va parler sa manire
muette nimporte qui sans pouvoir
distinguer ceux auxquels il convient de parler
et ceux qui cela ne convient pas.
 Jacques Rancire
It is this quality of writing which triumphs within the framework of what Rancire calls the emergence
of literature in opposition to the classical and normative definition of the belles-lettres. He sees this
moment as coinciding with romanticism, which does away with the hierarchy of genres to replace it
with the equal status of all subjects: the model of speech is replaced with the model of writing whose
only realm, Rancire tells us, is:

the infinite flow of ink onto the flat surface of the page, the un-bodied body
of the errant letter which goes off to speak to the faceless multitude of
readers of books.
Romanticism is thus not a new poetics but the entry of poetry and art into
the age of their dissolution. Both quotations: Rancire, La parole, 71.
This dissolution is a redistribution of cultural capital and a redefinition of what it means to have access
to a common experience. Be it narrative or advertising or both, writing is released from the confines of
a particular paper support and is able to move from one to another, to become media. To reach this
stage there is a work of burial of an old world and a construction of a new one which is the work of
Balzacs Lost Illusions, its first two parts published in 1837 and 1839 in volume form, the last in 1843 as a
daily serial before becoming a volume in 1844.
 Rancire, La parole, 71 : que la coule infinie
de lencre sur laplat des pages, que le corps
incorporel de la lettre errante qui sen va
parler la multitude sans visage des lecteurs
de livres.
Waverley by Walter Scott
First published 1829
 Chapter 2
It is, then, sixty years since Edward Waverley, the hero of the following pages,
took leave of his family, to join the regiment of dragoons in which he had
lately obtained a commission. It was a melancholy day at Waverley-Honour
when the young officer parted with Sir Everard, the affectionate old uncle to
whose title and estate he was presumptive heir.
A difference in political opinions had early separated the Baronet from his
younger brother Richard Waverley, the father of our hero. Sir Everard had
inherited from his sires the whole train of Tory or High-Church predilections
and prejudices which had distinguished the house of Waverley since the
Great Civil War. Richard, on the contrary, who was ten years younger, beheld
himself born to the fortune of a second brother, and anticipated neither
dignity nor entertainment in sustaining the character of Will Wimble. He saw
early that, to succeed in the race of life, it was necessary he should carry as
little weight as possible. Painters talk of the difficulty of expressing the
existence of compound passions in the same features at the same moment; it
would be no less difficult for the moralist to analyse the mixed motives which
unite to form the impulse of our actions.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813
Chapter 1
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be
in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a
neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is
considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at
last?"
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
"But it is," returned she; "for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it."
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
"Do you not want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently.
"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."
This was invitation enough.
"Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young
man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a
chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed
with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and
some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week."
"What is his name?"
"Bingley."
"Is he married or single?"
"Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a
year. What a fine thing for our girls!"
"How so? How can it affect them?"
"My dear Mr. Bennet," replied his wife, "how can you be so tiresome! You must know
that I am thinking of his marrying one of them."
"Is that his design in settling here?"
"Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love
with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes."
 Sense and Sensibility, 1811
CHAPTER 1
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large,
and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for
many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the
general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this
estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many
years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her
death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in
his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family
of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and
the person to whom he intended to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and
niece, and their children, the old Gentleman's days were comfortably spent. His
attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. and Mrs. Henry
Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from interest, but from
goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid comfort which his age could
receive; and the cheerfulness of the children added a relish to his existence.

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