SOURCE: "Sense and Sensibility," in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Clarendon Press, 1987, pp. 182–237.

In the following essay, originally published in 1975, Butler discusses Austen's use of didactic comparison in Sense and Sensibility, focusing primarily on the Dashwood sisters, Willoughby, and Edward Ferrars.

Of the novels Jane Austen completed, Sense and Sensibility appears to be the earliest in conception. An uncertain family tradition suggests that its original letter-version, 'Elinor and Marianne', may have been written in 1795:¹ before the publication of Mrs. West's similar Gossip's Story, and in the same year as Maria Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline. The didactic novel which compares the beliefs and conduct of two protagonists—with the object of finding one invariably right and the other invariably wrong—seems to have been particularly fashionable during the years 1795–6. Most novelists, even the most purposeful, afterwards abandon it for a format using a single protagonist...