Why did Jane Austen write Sense and Sensibility?

Answer 1

Jane Austen did not leave behind extensive writings on her reasons, views, methods and so on. We can only surmise why she did most of the things she did.

I think Jane Austen began an examination of romanticism and realism in Northanger Abbey, and continued that examination in Sense and Sensibility. In the former, she took the emotional content of books by authors such as Ann Radcllyffe, and showed they could be applied convincingly to the lives of ordinary girls much like those she knew and lived among. Catherine Moreland's life is purposely, though only implicitly, compared and contrasted with that of the romantic heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Northanger Abbey, however, depended to some extent on the reader's knowledge of the writings of the authors popular at the time, and so it was not entirely self contained. Without the background readers of that time had, its humor is not entirely accessible. In Sense and Sensibility, the comparison of the good sense of Elinor Dashwood with the romantic sensibilities of her sister, Marianne, is clear and complete within the novel, with no need to reference some other literature.

She is pointing out to her reader that the emotional contrivances of romanticism are unnecessary for emotional fulfillment. An ordinary English girl has in her life all the longing, anguish, and disappointment she needs, without artificial magnification of the feelings, and seeing a happy ending to her story is all the more satisfactory for the sense it could be real.