SOURCE: "Improving on Sensibility," in New Casebooks: Sense and Sensibility and Pride Prejudice, edited by Robert Clark, St. Martin's Press, 1994, pp. 26–37.

In the following essay, Duckworth examines Sense and Sensibility's two heroines and argues that Austen did not intend for the novel's conclusion to be merely a "happy ending, " but one in which the marriages are grounded in a moral society.

As many scholars have shown, Jane Austen works within inherited terms of aesthetic and ethical debate. Mrs Inchbald's Art and Nature (1796) and Maria Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795) are only two of many novels, in the decade in which Sense and Sensibility had its genesis as Elinor and Marianne, to anticipate Jane Austen's treatment of familiar dualities of prudence and benevolence, reason and passion, discipline and freedom. While Mrs Inchbald is Godwinian in her dislike of institutions and Rousseauesque in her affirmation of the natural virtues...