Sense and Sensibility: Most Downloaded
Autor Jane Austenen Limba Engleză Hardback – 24 sep 2026
Pășim într-un univers al restricțiilor sociale și al peisajelor rurale englezești, unde fiecare gest este cântărit și fiecare conversație ascunde nuanțe de o finețe rară. Sense and Sensibility nu este doar o cronică a căutării stabilității financiare prin căsătorie, ci o explorare profundă a modului în care echilibrăm rațiunea cu pasiunea. Simțim tensiunea dintre Elinor, ancora de prudență a familiei, și Marianne, a cărei sensibilitate romantică o împinge spre marginea suferinței într-o societate care taxează sever lipsa de discreție. La intersecția dintre Pride and Prejudice și abordările mai experimentale din Sanditon, această operă marchează tranziția de la romanul sentimental al secolului XVIII către realismul literar modern. Reținem că, deși a început sub formă de scrisori, structura narativă finală permite o introspecție mult mai bogată, accentuată în această ediție de apendicele valoroase care explică termenii culturali ai epocii Regency. Putem afirma că romanul rămâne relevant tocmai prin contrastul dintre cele două protagoniste, oferind o perspectivă critică asupra dependenței economice a femeilor. Comparativ cu interpretările mai senzuale precum Clandestine Classics de Cerise Deland, textul original al lui Jane Austen păstrează o ironie mușcătoare și o eleganță a dialogului care definesc „comedy of manners”. Ediția de față este organizată meticulos, oferind nu doar textul integral, ci și o cronologie a vieții autoarei și eseuri despre estetica pitorescului, elemente esențiale pentru a înțelege profunzimea filosofică adăugată de Austen primei sale lucrări publicate.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9798259518018
Pagini: 844
Dimensiuni: 183 x 260 x 49 mm
Greutate: 1.75 kg
Ediția:Text mare
Editura: Clearview Editions
Colecția Most Downloaded
Seria Most Downloaded
Pagini: 844
Dimensiuni: 183 x 260 x 49 mm
Greutate: 1.75 kg
Ediția:Text mare
Editura: Clearview Editions
Colecția Most Downloaded
Seria Most Downloaded
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De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această ediție cititorilor care doresc să exploreze originile realismului britanic printr-o proză de o precizie chirurgicală. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege cum echilibrul dintre logică și emoție dictează succesul social. Veți câștiga o perspectivă fascinantă asupra modului în care umorul și ironia pot fi folosite ca instrumente de critică socială, rămânând totodată captivați de destinul fragil al surorilor Dashwood.
Despre autor
Jane Austen (1775–1817) a fost o romancieră engleză a cărei operă a transformat literatura prin utilizarea ironiei și a comentariului social acut. Deși în timpul vieții a publicat anonim titluri precum Sense and Sensibility și Pride and Prejudice, obținând un succes modest, astăzi este considerată una dintre cele mai influente figuri ale literaturii universale. Romanele sale explorează cu precizie viața micii nobilimi de la sat, punând accent pe necesitatea căsătoriei ca instrument de securitate economică pentru femei. Opera sa, care include și capodopere precum Emma sau Persuasion, rămâne un reper al tranziției către realismul secolului al XIX-lea.
Notă biografică
Jane Austen (1775-1817) is among the small handful of authors whose canonical standing in English fiction is effectively unquestioned: she is credited with perfecting free indirect discourse, the technique that lets a narrator render a character's private thought without quotation marks, and her influence runs continuously from George Eliot through Henry James to the contemporary novel of manners. Sense and Sensibility (1811) was her first published novel - issued anonymously, "By A Lady," since Austen never put her own name on a book in her lifetime - and it already contains the close, ironic social observation that defines everything she wrote after it. Austen's inclusion case is less about her own biography, which is well documented and not obscure, than about what Sense and Sensibility is actually about: the real legal and economic precarity of unmarried women under English inheritance law. The novel opens with the Dashwood women losing their home because it passes by entail to a male relative, and the plot that follows is driven by exactly the kind of financial vulnerability Austen herself lived with as an unmarried woman dependent on her father and brothers. Read this way, Sense and Sensibility is social history as much as courtship comedy - a precise account of what property law did to women who had no independent income and no legal standing to inherit it. The novel's durable reader appeal needs little argument: it is funny, romantic, and psychologically exact, and it has sustained two centuries of readers, adaptations, and rereadings without slackening. This Clearview Editions large-print printing - 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, ragged-right, with no word-division - makes Austen's earliest published novel available to older readers and those with low vision who make up a large and loyal share of her continuing readership.
Descriere scurtă
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, originally published 1811. Austen's first published novel appeared anonymously in 1811, its title page identifying its author only as "By a Lady.". Through Elinor's discipline and Marianne's emotional candor, Austen reveals how inheritance, money, reputation, and self-command shape women's chances of marrying well without betraying themselves. Its precise union of social comedy and psychological insight established a durable model for examining the tension between feeling and judgment. This is a Jumbo Edition: it runs longer than our 442-page Liftable usability cap, printed in one volume up to our printer's mechanical maximum of 1,200 pages.
For collection development: this is a large-print edition intended for low-vision and aging patrons, and for any reader who finds standard trade print tiring over a long sitting. It suits large-print and accessibility collections, adult and young-adult general collections where the text is a standard, and reading-room copies where a durable case binding matters. This volume runs beyond the 442-page Liftable limit and is correspondingly heavier; a Liftable edition of the same text, divided into lighter volumes, is available under separate ISBNs. The text is unabridged and reproduced from a public-domain source without modernisation.
Algorithmic Quality Assurance: this edition was checked by 123 deterministic tests covering typography, pagination, colour, cover geometry and metadata, then read by frontier language models for semantic review and holistic evaluation. What was checked, and what those results do and do not mean, is explained in the back of the book.
This Clearview Editions hardcover is built on a production standard that significantly exceeds the industry norm for large-print publishing. The body text is set at 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next on 27-point leading, 1.5 line spacing --- the minimum WCAG 2.2 Level AAA Success Criterion 1.4.8 sets for a block of text, and the figure UKAAF's large-print guidance gives as well. The leading North American large-print hardcover imprints typically set their body text at 16 point, and most large-print trade paperbacks release at 14 to 16 point. At 18 point, Clearview Editions offers text that is measurably larger than every other major large-print publisher, specifically for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or any visual condition that makes standard trade print frustrating or impossible to read for long stretches. The trim size is equally generous. Clearview Editions is printed on a 7x10-inch page, substantially larger than the 6x9 hardcover that is standard in the large-print industry and roughly 50 percent larger by area than the 5x8 trade paperback trim most legacy large-print paperback imprints use.
The extra page area is deliberate: it allows the 18-point body to set at the 50-to-55 character line length that reading-fatigue research identifies as optimal, without the narrow text columns and cramped margins that plague smaller-trim large-print books. The body font, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, was developed by the Braille Institute of America specifically to maximize letter recognition for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, and visual processing differences. It distinguishes between commonly-confused letter pairs - lowercase l versus uppercase I, the digit 0 versus uppercase O, b versus d, p versus q - using distinctive shape features that preserve readability even under eye strain. Text is set ragged right with no word division: WCAG 2.2 1.4.8 and UKAAF both advise against justifying large-print text, since the uneven word spacing it creates is harder to track, and against breaking a word across a line ending, since the reader then has to reassemble it.
For collection development: this is a large-print edition intended for low-vision and aging patrons, and for any reader who finds standard trade print tiring over a long sitting. It suits large-print and accessibility collections, adult and young-adult general collections where the text is a standard, and reading-room copies where a durable case binding matters. This volume runs beyond the 442-page Liftable limit and is correspondingly heavier; a Liftable edition of the same text, divided into lighter volumes, is available under separate ISBNs. The text is unabridged and reproduced from a public-domain source without modernisation.
Algorithmic Quality Assurance: this edition was checked by 123 deterministic tests covering typography, pagination, colour, cover geometry and metadata, then read by frontier language models for semantic review and holistic evaluation. What was checked, and what those results do and do not mean, is explained in the back of the book.
This Clearview Editions hardcover is built on a production standard that significantly exceeds the industry norm for large-print publishing. The body text is set at 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next on 27-point leading, 1.5 line spacing --- the minimum WCAG 2.2 Level AAA Success Criterion 1.4.8 sets for a block of text, and the figure UKAAF's large-print guidance gives as well. The leading North American large-print hardcover imprints typically set their body text at 16 point, and most large-print trade paperbacks release at 14 to 16 point. At 18 point, Clearview Editions offers text that is measurably larger than every other major large-print publisher, specifically for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or any visual condition that makes standard trade print frustrating or impossible to read for long stretches. The trim size is equally generous. Clearview Editions is printed on a 7x10-inch page, substantially larger than the 6x9 hardcover that is standard in the large-print industry and roughly 50 percent larger by area than the 5x8 trade paperback trim most legacy large-print paperback imprints use.
The extra page area is deliberate: it allows the 18-point body to set at the 50-to-55 character line length that reading-fatigue research identifies as optimal, without the narrow text columns and cramped margins that plague smaller-trim large-print books. The body font, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, was developed by the Braille Institute of America specifically to maximize letter recognition for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, and visual processing differences. It distinguishes between commonly-confused letter pairs - lowercase l versus uppercase I, the digit 0 versus uppercase O, b versus d, p versus q - using distinctive shape features that preserve readability even under eye strain. Text is set ragged right with no word division: WCAG 2.2 1.4.8 and UKAAF both advise against justifying large-print text, since the uneven word spacing it creates is harder to track, and against breaking a word across a line ending, since the reader then has to reassemble it.
Textul de pe ultima copertă
Sense and Sensibility is one of the best loved of Jane Austen's novels, populated by great comic creations like Mrs. Jennings, the unscrupulous cad Willoughby, and guileless and artful women. As ever, Austen suffuses her work with great ironic observation and tremendous wit, producing a masterpiece of romantic entanglement that time and a very different set of mores cannot diminish.
Descriere
Descriere de la o altă ediție sau format:
Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's first published work, meticulously constructed and sparkling with her unique wit. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.
This edition also includes explanatory notes and textual variants between first and second edition.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was extremely modest about her own genius but has become one of English literature's most famous women writers. Austen began writing at a young age, embarking on what is possibly her best-known work, Pride and Prejudice, at the age of 22. She was the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.
Recenzii
Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is a witty satire of the sentimental novel, a popular genre in Britain throughout the 1790s and the Regency. When it first appeared in 1811, the words in its title carried significant cultural weight beyond the confines of the novel, and into both popular and learned discourse. Through her dual heroines, Austen addresses, and satirizes, notions of sense and sensibility, and engages with the issues of inheritance, marriage, and love.
The story concerns two sisters: the level-headed Elinor and the passionate and impulsive Marianne. When their father dies, his son by a previous marriage assumes possession of the family home. Marianne and Elinor, left to the care of their mercenary brother John and his wife Fanny, must remove to a cottage with their mother. Each sister meets a man in whom she is interested, and as with other Austen novels, requited love does not come easily.
This newly annotated edition offers a thorough and perceptive introduction and a wide range of carefully selected contextual materials that further explore the term “sensibility.”
“The complexity and courage of Sense and Sensibility get their due in this wonderful new edition, which features an illuminating and sometimes surprising selection of contextual materials. Kathleen James-Cavan’s introduction provides a readable, trenchant account of the characteristically bold ways in which Austen went public as a woman novelist and negotiated the power of literary precedent.” — Deidre Lynch, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
The story concerns two sisters: the level-headed Elinor and the passionate and impulsive Marianne. When their father dies, his son by a previous marriage assumes possession of the family home. Marianne and Elinor, left to the care of their mercenary brother John and his wife Fanny, must remove to a cottage with their mother. Each sister meets a man in whom she is interested, and as with other Austen novels, requited love does not come easily.
This newly annotated edition offers a thorough and perceptive introduction and a wide range of carefully selected contextual materials that further explore the term “sensibility.”
“The complexity and courage of Sense and Sensibility get their due in this wonderful new edition, which features an illuminating and sometimes surprising selection of contextual materials. Kathleen James-Cavan’s introduction provides a readable, trenchant account of the characteristically bold ways in which Austen went public as a woman novelist and negotiated the power of literary precedent.” — Deidre Lynch, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Cuprins
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Jane Austen: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Sense and Sensibility
Appendix A: Reviews of Sense and Sensibility
Appendix E: Modes of Travel
Introduction
Jane Austen: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Sense and Sensibility
Appendix A: Reviews of Sense and Sensibility
- Critical Review, February 1812
- British Critic, May 1812
- “Effects of Mistaken Synonymy.” The Lady’s Monthly Museum, 1799
- Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger, June 1785
- Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger, July 1786
- “Letter from Barbara Heartless.” The Lounger, October1786
- Vicesimus Knox, Winter Evenings, 1795
- William Gilpin, Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 1794
Appendix E: Modes of Travel
- Curricle
- Plain Post-Chaise
- Town Chariot
- Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel
- James Thomson, “Autumn”
- William Cowper, The Task
Extras
Sense and Sensibility, the first of those metaphorical bits of "ivory" on which Jane Austen said she worked with "so fine a brush," jackhammers away at the idea that to conjecture is a vain and hopeless reflex of the mind. But I'll venture this much: If she'd done nothing else, we'd still be in awe of her. Wuthering Heights alone put Emily Brontë in the pantheon, and her sister Charlotte and their older contemporary Mary Shelley might as well have saved themselves the trouble of writing anything but Jane Eyre and Frankenstein. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, is at least as mighty a work as any of these, and smarter than all three put together. And it would surely impress us even more without Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815) towering just up ahead. Austen wrote its ur-version, Elinor and Marianne, when she was nineteen, a year before First Impressions, which became Pride and Prejudice; she reconceived it as Sense and Sensibility when she was twenty-two, and she was thirty-six when it finally appeared. Like most first novels, it lays out what will be its author's lasting preoccupations: the "three or four families in a country village" (which Austen told her niece, in an often-quoted letter, was "the very thing to work on"). The interlocking anxieties over marriages, estates, and ecclesiastical "livings." The secrets, deceptions, and self-deceptions that take several hundred pages to straighten out-to the extent that they get straightened out. The radical skepticism about human knowledge, human communication, and human possibility that informs almost every scene right up to the sort-of-happy ending. And the distinctive characters-the negligent or overindulgent parents, the bifurcating siblings (smart sister, beautiful sister; serious brother, coxcomb brother), the charming, corrupted young libertines. Unlike most first novels, though, Sense and Sensibility doesn't need our indulgence. It's good to go.
In the novels to come, Elinor Dashwood will morph into Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet (who will morph into Emma Woodhouse); Edward Ferrars into Edmund Bertram, Mr. Knightley, Henry Tilney, and Captain Wentworth; Willoughby into George Wickham and Henry Crawford. But the characters in Sense and Sensibility stand convincingly on their own, every bit as memorable as their later avatars. If Austen doesn't have quite the Caliban-to-Ariel range of a Shakespeare, she can still conjure up and sympathize with both Mrs. Jennings-the "rather vulgar" busybody with a borderline-unwholesome interest in young people's love lives, fits of refreshing horse sense, and a ruggedly good heart-and Marianne Dashwood, a wittily observed case study in Romanticism, a compassionately observed case study in sublimated adolescent sexuality, and a humorously observed case study in humorlessness. "I should hardly call her a lively girl," Elinor observes to Edward, "-she is very earnest, very eager in all she does-sometimes talks a great deal and always with animation-but she is not often really merry." Humorlessness, in fact, may be the one thing Marianne and her eventual lifemate, Colonel Brandon, have in common. (Sorry to give that plot point away; it won't be the last one, either. So, fair warning.) The minor characters have the sort of eidetic specificity you associate with Dickens: from the gruesomely mismatched Mr. and Mrs. Palmer to Robert Ferrars, splendidly impenetrable in his microcephalic self-complacency. The major characters, on the other hand, refuse to stay narrowly "in character"; they're always recognizably themselves, yet they seem as many-sided and changeable as people out in the nonfictional world.
Elinor makes as ambivalent a heroine as Mansfield Park's notoriously hard-to-warm-up-to Fanny Price. She's affectionately protective of her sister Marianne yet overfond of zinging her: "It is not every one who has your passion for dead leaves." She's bemused at Marianne's self-dramatizing, yet she's as smug about suffering in silence as Marianne (who "would have thought herself very inexcusable" if she were able to sleep after Willoughby leaves Devonshire) is proud of suffering in Surround Sound. She can be treacherously clever, as when Lucy Steele speculates (correctly) that she may have offended Elinor by staking her claim to Edward: " 'Offended me! How could you suppose so? Believe me,' and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity, 'nothing could be farther from my intention, than to give you such an idea.' " Yet she can also be ponderously preachy: "One observation may, I think, be fairly drawn from the whole of the story-that all Willoughby's difficulties, have arisen from the first offense against virtue, in his behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents." (In the rest of Austen, only the intentionally preposterous Mary in Pride and Prejudice strikes just this note: "Unhappy as the event may be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson; that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable . . ."). Is Elinor simply an intelligent young woman overtaxed by having to be the grown-up of the family? Or is she an unconsciously rivalrous sibling, sick of hearing that her younger, more beautiful sister will marry more advantageously? Or both? Or what? It's not that Austen doesn't have a clear conception of her-it's that she doesn't have a simple conception. Elinor is the character you know the most about, since Austen tells most of the story from her point of view, and consequently she's the one you're least able to nail with a couple of adjectives or a single defining moment.
Edward bothers us, too. He's a dreamboat only for a woman of Elinor's limited expectations: independent-minded yet passive and depressive, forthright and honorable yet engaged in a book-long cover-up. (It's a tour de force on Austen's part to present a character so burdened with a secret that we see his natural behavior only long after we've gotten used to him.) At his strongest and most appealing-to Elinor, at least-he's a clear-your-mind-of-cant kind of guy: "I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. . . . A troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world." But he can also be a Hamlet-like whiner, complaining about his own idleness and vowing that his sons will be brought up "to be as unlike myself as possible. In feeling, in action, in condition, in every thing." For my money, Edward is the least likable of Austen's heroes, while his opposite number, Willoughby, is the most sympathetic of her libertines: smarter than Pride and Prejudice's Wickham (a loser who gets stuck with the "noisy" and virtually portionless Lydia Bennet) and more warmhearted than Mansfield Park's textbook narcissist Henry Crawford. Willoughby may strike trendy Wordsworthian poses with his effusions on cottages ("I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness is attainable"), but at least he has enough sense to abhor his own callowness, and enough sexy boldness to discompose even the rational Elinor. "She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess . . ." His opening line when he at last explains to her what he's been up to ("Tell me honestly, do you think me most a knave or a fool?") is one of those Byronic flourishes that make him the person in Sense and Sensibility you'd most want to dine with and least want to trust.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
In the novels to come, Elinor Dashwood will morph into Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet (who will morph into Emma Woodhouse); Edward Ferrars into Edmund Bertram, Mr. Knightley, Henry Tilney, and Captain Wentworth; Willoughby into George Wickham and Henry Crawford. But the characters in Sense and Sensibility stand convincingly on their own, every bit as memorable as their later avatars. If Austen doesn't have quite the Caliban-to-Ariel range of a Shakespeare, she can still conjure up and sympathize with both Mrs. Jennings-the "rather vulgar" busybody with a borderline-unwholesome interest in young people's love lives, fits of refreshing horse sense, and a ruggedly good heart-and Marianne Dashwood, a wittily observed case study in Romanticism, a compassionately observed case study in sublimated adolescent sexuality, and a humorously observed case study in humorlessness. "I should hardly call her a lively girl," Elinor observes to Edward, "-she is very earnest, very eager in all she does-sometimes talks a great deal and always with animation-but she is not often really merry." Humorlessness, in fact, may be the one thing Marianne and her eventual lifemate, Colonel Brandon, have in common. (Sorry to give that plot point away; it won't be the last one, either. So, fair warning.) The minor characters have the sort of eidetic specificity you associate with Dickens: from the gruesomely mismatched Mr. and Mrs. Palmer to Robert Ferrars, splendidly impenetrable in his microcephalic self-complacency. The major characters, on the other hand, refuse to stay narrowly "in character"; they're always recognizably themselves, yet they seem as many-sided and changeable as people out in the nonfictional world.
Elinor makes as ambivalent a heroine as Mansfield Park's notoriously hard-to-warm-up-to Fanny Price. She's affectionately protective of her sister Marianne yet overfond of zinging her: "It is not every one who has your passion for dead leaves." She's bemused at Marianne's self-dramatizing, yet she's as smug about suffering in silence as Marianne (who "would have thought herself very inexcusable" if she were able to sleep after Willoughby leaves Devonshire) is proud of suffering in Surround Sound. She can be treacherously clever, as when Lucy Steele speculates (correctly) that she may have offended Elinor by staking her claim to Edward: " 'Offended me! How could you suppose so? Believe me,' and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity, 'nothing could be farther from my intention, than to give you such an idea.' " Yet she can also be ponderously preachy: "One observation may, I think, be fairly drawn from the whole of the story-that all Willoughby's difficulties, have arisen from the first offense against virtue, in his behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents." (In the rest of Austen, only the intentionally preposterous Mary in Pride and Prejudice strikes just this note: "Unhappy as the event may be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson; that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable . . ."). Is Elinor simply an intelligent young woman overtaxed by having to be the grown-up of the family? Or is she an unconsciously rivalrous sibling, sick of hearing that her younger, more beautiful sister will marry more advantageously? Or both? Or what? It's not that Austen doesn't have a clear conception of her-it's that she doesn't have a simple conception. Elinor is the character you know the most about, since Austen tells most of the story from her point of view, and consequently she's the one you're least able to nail with a couple of adjectives or a single defining moment.
Edward bothers us, too. He's a dreamboat only for a woman of Elinor's limited expectations: independent-minded yet passive and depressive, forthright and honorable yet engaged in a book-long cover-up. (It's a tour de force on Austen's part to present a character so burdened with a secret that we see his natural behavior only long after we've gotten used to him.) At his strongest and most appealing-to Elinor, at least-he's a clear-your-mind-of-cant kind of guy: "I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. . . . A troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world." But he can also be a Hamlet-like whiner, complaining about his own idleness and vowing that his sons will be brought up "to be as unlike myself as possible. In feeling, in action, in condition, in every thing." For my money, Edward is the least likable of Austen's heroes, while his opposite number, Willoughby, is the most sympathetic of her libertines: smarter than Pride and Prejudice's Wickham (a loser who gets stuck with the "noisy" and virtually portionless Lydia Bennet) and more warmhearted than Mansfield Park's textbook narcissist Henry Crawford. Willoughby may strike trendy Wordsworthian poses with his effusions on cottages ("I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness is attainable"), but at least he has enough sense to abhor his own callowness, and enough sexy boldness to discompose even the rational Elinor. "She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess . . ." His opening line when he at last explains to her what he's been up to ("Tell me honestly, do you think me most a knave or a fool?") is one of those Byronic flourishes that make him the person in Sense and Sensibility you'd most want to dine with and least want to trust.
From the Trade Paperback edition.