SOURCE: "The Task of Telling Lies: Candor and Deception in Sense and Sensibility," in Greene Centennial Studies, edited by Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen, University Press of Virginia, 1984, pp. 442–52.

In the following essay, Brissenden proposes that the characters of Willoughby and the Dashwood sisters stand in stark contrast to the novel's other characters who are rooted in artificial politeness and social games.

No one would wish to argue that Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's greatest novel. The title, however, is one of her most brilliant touches. Titles of this sort, in which two related, often antinomous, qualities or concepts are set together, were of course, popular at the time.¹ No other, I think, crystallizes so lightly and precisely such a large and significant subject. The debate concerning the relative merits of the head and the heart, the reason and the feelings, had been pursued widely...