Texts and Pretexts: Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

Julia Kristeva has argued that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’.3 We know that Sense and Sensibility is a novel formed out of another novel, its lost ur-text Elinor and Marianne; likewise, Pride and Prejudice is the rewritten version of the vanished First Impressions. Both Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions most likely belonged to the period of Austen’s artistic development called, dismissively, the ‘betweenities’, and including the fragment Catharine, or the Bower and the epistolary Lady Susan.4 The first draft of Elinor and Marianne may have predated the publication of Sense and Sensibility by as much as 16 years, while Pride and Prejudice endured a similarly lengthy gestational period.5 The composition of the two novels is intertwined — both enact the transition from epistolarity to free indirect discourse that was an historic reality of the eighteenth-century novel; both treat the subject of the impact of money on class, gender and personal freedom; both share similar titles, plot structures and characters. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are, like the heroines they portray, sisters: light and dark texts with distinct personalities and destinies, paired for contrast, but ultimately bearing the same origin and ancestry.