Light and Shade--Marriages Mirrored in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen deliberately confines her description to the small tranquil world of the English landed gentry of her time, and takes love and marriage as her constant subject matter. As a writer with sharp insight, she acts not as a romantic matchmaker, but as a realistic painter who presents a picture of her society and her class with light and her class with light and shade in right proportion. In her earlier major works Sense …

…the ordinary domestic affairs. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, she objectively reproduces the light and shade in marriage seeking. As a novelist of her time, of her society, of her class and of her sex, she adopts both conservative and progressive attitudes toward marriage. By and large, she is more realistic than romantic in story telling, more satirical than critical about social realities, and above all, more practical than fantastical toward marriage.