SOURCE: "The Sacrifice of Privacy in Sense and Sensibility," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall, 1988, pp. 221–37.

In the following essay, Haggerty argues that in Sense and Sensibility Austen is able to use the narrative to express "authentic feeling" (private desire) without hysteria and to investigate social behavior (public voice) without cool detachment and an abandonment of all emotion.

Sense and Sensibility remains one of Austen's "problem" texts. On the one hand, critics find it too programmatic in its analysis of the traits suggested by the title; on the other, they find the resolution of the work at best a baleful compromise.¹ Recent critics have shifted the focus of discussion from "sense" and "sensibility" in themselves to modes of perception and the "fallibility of our knowledge."² Claudia Johnson, for instance, suggests that "the stock terms of sensibility surface here only occasionally and somewhat vestigially. But … terms...