SOURCE: "Sense and Sensibility and the Problem of Feminine Authority," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 2, January, 1992, pp. 149–63.

In the following essay, Wallace posits that Sense and Sensibility is Austen's most antifeminist book because of its ambiguous position on feminine authority and power.

For almost two hundred years, readers of Sense and Sensibility have questioned Jane Austen's ambivalence towards the values of proper conduct as opposed to those of inner-directed behaviour; but this question has tended to obscure another ideological issue in the novel—the issue of feminine authority and power.¹ While readers debate whether the narrator is drawing rigid lines between sense and feeling, they may overlook the book's attitude towards female power, an attitude which is negative, cautionary, devaluing. In this essay I argue that Sense and Sensibility betrays Austen's anxieties about female authority; seen from this perspective the novel reveals struggles and tensions rather than ideological...