SOURCE: "Law and Propriety, Sense and Sensibility: Austen on the Cusp of Modernity," in ELH, Vol. 59, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 385–408.

In the following essay, Kaufmann discusses the language of law and the language of propriety as they apply to Sense and Sensibility.

The term "propriety," with its etymological links to property and the notion of the proper, smacks of oppression and ideological obfuscation, of outmoded ideals and outdated restraints. Accordingly, as a piece of collateral damage, Sense and Sensibility seems deeply, if not at times desperately, conservative. Hence perhaps the indifference and discomfort that critics have shown towards this text since Marvin Mudrick's dispeptic dismissal of its apparently unsatisfying end.¹ A few recent commentators, most notably Julia Prewitt Brown, Susan Morgan and Claudia Johnson, have tried to redeem Sense and Sensibility, but they have tended to emphasize knowledge, not ethics.² Propriety in their discussions has constituted a sideshow, a...