Chapter Sense, Sensibility, and Snapdragons
I grew up in a literary household; my father wrote poetry and my mother short stories. Literature was a serious matter—which meant that the romance genre, like TV and white sugar, was banned. Thankfully, my mother’s polka-dotted Austen hardcovers were jammed in a bookshelf, left over from college.
I read and reread Austen’s novels with a critical eye; unbeknownst to myself, I was preparing for a lifetime of writing historical romance.
To my mind, Sense and Sensibility’s claim to romance was dubious.
Marianne was young and beautiful, albeit brokenhearted.
Why should she give up and marry a man twenty years older?
I fiercely disliked seeing her “sensibility” flattened into “sense.”
I was particularly indignant about Austen’s disdain for Marianne’s little sister.
Margaret is described as having “imbibed” Marianne’s sensibility “without having much of her sense.” Who would want the pragmatism that sent Marianne into the colonel’s arms?
Austen concludes with biting condescension that Margaret “did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.”
I wrote this novella for my thirteen-year-old self, indignant at not being allowed to read “real” romances and critical of the literary romances I was allowed.
My Margaret is a version of myself, a young woman with a lifetime of writing novels ahead of her.
Her sensibility—not her sense—leads a gentleman to fall in love with her.
Back then, I had no idea how much my rereading of Austen would teach me about the art of writing novels about love. I am endlessly grateful.