I’m sorry about the delay in responding to your query. I’m afraid we don’t have the expertise to offer ideas of what your Sense and Sensibility edition might be worth. Routledge seem to have issued an S&S c. 1851, and reissued it or reprinted it in the early 1870s. Even if the copy belongs to the later reprints, it may be a fairly rare one: my work was given a fillip by a ground-breaking memoir of me written by my nephew James-Henry Austen, published in 1869, even if a verger in Winchester Cathedral was still asking mid-Victorian visitors just what it was that made my tomb so very interesting. And despite the strongly appreciative notice written by Lord Macauley in 1843 and the appreciative treatment meted to me by G.H.Lewes, the intellectual partner of George Eliot, Austen-mania and the Jane-ite-ism ironically celebrated by Kipling in a short story of 1924 hadn’t yet arrived. I had of course died young (aged 41) in 1817, and after my death her work had fallen into relative, although not absolute neglect.  

With best wishes,  

Jane Austen.

If you haven't seen it yet, you may wish to take a look at Question 18

Yes, interestingly the key words have mutual involvement in that I am merely realistic in showing people acting cynically, but of course as this is creative writing of mine, I bring this cynical behaviour into being, even if it also represents social facts or factors. People may be encouraging a ‘cynical’ response which is not in itself cynicism even when acting self-righteously, if despicably, according to social conventions, like John Dashwood, an enclosing landlord who reclaims common land and wild nature, cuts down trees, and thinks of nothing but money, yet is at the same time bullied by his deliberately hysterical wife, who also embodies mean-spiritedness and venality; pursues a course of sustained hypocrisy in wealth creation for himself. This is ‘realistic’. Also realistic is the portrait of a Lucy who toadies her way to the top through sustained hypocrisy; she may have loved Edward Ferrars but has already been noted as condemning brother Robert as a snob and a fop, so she can hardly be seen as feeling anything for him as she marries him and enters on the path to what Mrs Jennings calls ‘money and greatness’, and such is her craven deference to horrid old Mrs Ferrars that she can even express ‘gratitude for the unkindness with which she is treated.

Mrs J is a warm-hearted, encouraging character, and the two Dashwood girls, the heroines, although cast in differing moulds, are both admirable. Cynicism would be hard put to it to find such characters and actions. Equally realistic on the cynical side (but if one is not ‘cynical’ does one deny that people can act from interested or despicable motives?); my portrait of Willoughby, well analysed by Elinor (this reveals much about my thinking), is psychologically realistic, showing him displeased with a marriage which brings merely money, while he would have been equally unhappy with a marriage to the comparatively impoverished Marianne, although she is good, beautiful and idealistic. I show high-minded, un-lucre-led thinking in the case of the sisters, admirable portraits of how women should be, their faults arising from a sort of excessive idealism vulnerable in a cynical self-interested milieu. (though, ironically, Marianne seems more assume more money necessary to a tolerable existence than Elinor.

My novel is even romantic in the additional sense that if the sisters correspond to sense and sensibility they may also be seen as corresponding in a different way to myself and my sister, with high aims and standards, and we never ‘achieved’ husbands and separate households at all! But the ending is muted: Marianne gets her colonel money and land, in the form of someone she thought specifically unfit for a lover, and Elinor her excellent but perhaps slightly dull Edward?? Perhaps even a wishful-thinking conclusion to a degree, then, but muted by realism--did Marianne really love Col. Brandon ? Is wonderful Elinor perhaps falling short in some way? It’s hard to say this is cynicism, however. Please pursue your own thought about this.

Love,

Jane

Darcy and Bingley are drawn as deliberately contrasting characters. Bingley is enriched by trade, ingenuous, unwary, unsure of himself and thus the possible prey of designing people. There is a connection between his character and that of the unwary, affectionate Jane Bennet, and Elizabeth feels a solicitude about her as Darcy does with respect to the naive Charles Bingley (e.g. 'I had often seen him in love before' [Darcy to Elizabeth in the letter following Elizabeth's rejection of his proposal in Hunsford]). Darcy is a landowner of ancient lineage, wary, guarded, highly intelligent (like Elizabeth), and not so eager to please and easy to please, able to see through people and particularly with respect to interested motives. He is a more formidable character and does have a tendency to personal and family pride, a pride which Bingley is without. Ironically, this is seen to be not altogether a good thing. Darcy shows a good deal of stubbornness and determination, for example in seeking out the Mrs Younge he loathes in order to locate the errant young tearaways Lydia and Wickham, and one imagines Bingley would be more easily deflected. Darcy is an introvert, while Bingley can be almost gushing. Any discussion would accommodate the idea that both are in their ways good people and each has a concern about the other, and others. Darcy reins himself in, but also feels a need to rein Bingley in. Really, this is only a start, but it could precede your own investigations, (interesting confirming points in the text, etc. which can be a pleasure, not a chore.

With best wishes,

Jane Austen.