During the last class meeting of my Jane Austen seminar, the students and I took an internet quiz to find out which Austen character we most resembled. I teach at a Jesuit liberal arts college, so it came as little surprise that several of the hard-working, conscientious, and religious seniors matched with either Jane Bennet or Fanny Price. But Elinor has always been my girl.
Still a teenager at the start of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood is nonetheless a fully-formed adult, attentive to practical matters, to social norms, to the needs and feelings of others. In the novel’s opening chapter, we learn that both Mrs. Dashwood and her middle daughter Marianne are good-hearted and deeply intelligent but also wildly impractical, continually caught up in emotions they are unwilling to moderate, let alone restrain. Elinor herself is not lacking in emotion: the narrator tells us that she has “an excellent heart” and that “her disposition was affectionate and her feelings were strong.” Yet Elinor restrains her emotions even while being “deeply afflicted” by her father’s death; she is “sensible” not because she is cold like Fanny Dashwood, or calculating like Lucy Steele, or without affect like her half-brother John, but rather because she knows “how to govern” her strong feelings.
Exhibiting financial prudence along with emotional self-control, Elinor stands firmly apart not only from her mother and sister, but also from the beloved father who, after the death of his wealthy first wife, subsequently took a second wife with no money, believing that he had all the time in the world to provide for her and their three daughters. Alas, not true. Of course, the precarity caused by his unexpected death and the Dashwoods’ subsequent expulsion from Norland, the family estate, precipitates the novel’s plot, a precarity ultimately resolved through Elinor’s marriage to Edward Ferrars and Marianne’s to Colonel Brandon.
But through all the loss and struggle (whether at Norland after her father’s death; at Barton during Willoughby’s abandonment of Marianne and Lucy Steele’s revelation of her prior engagement to Edward; or in London and at Cleveland, where Elinor must face the near-fatal repercussions of Marianne’s depression and illness), Elinor is always in control. Sometimes from behind the scenes and more often than not from within them, hers is the narrative consciousness that guides our moral—and often emotional—response to the painful events that transpire, and hers the model of self-regulation that sets her apart from both sister and mother.
As with the Dashwood sisters, death precipitated my own adolescent plot; yet it was the untimely loss of a mother, not a father, that set my family adrift. When my mother died of breast cancer at thirty-eight (near the ages of Mrs. Dashwood and Colonel Brandon), I was, like Marianne at the start of Austen’s novel, “not seventeen.” As the oldest of three children, I took on Elinor’s role, becoming a practical as well as emotional caretaker for my younger siblings and even, at times, for my father. While Mr. Dashwood’s death meant the loss of financial security for the Dashwood women, much the way the death of Austen’s father would later circumscribe her life with her mother and sister, my own family lost our emotional center.
My mother was sick for five years; her death, unlike that of Mr. Dashwood, should not have been an unexpected event for our family. And yet it was. “When did you know?” a writing teacher asked me many years later. He wanted the timeline, the clear-cut narrative of how my brother, sister, and I learned about our mother’s breast cancer—about the mastectomy, radiation, more surgery, chemotherapy—and he especially wanted to know when we knew she would die.
But I didn’t have a clear-cut answer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and my sister five when our mother was first diagnosed. For the next five years of her too-short life, it was as if we’d always known, but at the same time like there was nothing special to know. No one kept her cancer a secret, but somehow the facts of her illness had no bearing on how she lived—or at least on how we kids treated her, and on how she cared for us.
Following our mother’s lead, we normalized not just the seriousness of her cancer but also the visits and treatments themselves. Like Mr. Dashwood believing he will live long enough to provide financial security to the wife and daughters who will lose Norland after his death, we lived in a fantasy, one that staved off mortality by adopting our mother’s attitude. There was something alchemical about the way she could transform illness and pain into an impression of wellness, a semblance of normalcy. And her will was so strong. We feasibly could embrace the belief that maybe she really would make good on the promise implied by the martialized language of cancer—that she would conquer her illness, win her battle, beat back the malignant cells invading her body.
On the day my mother could no longer keep from us the reality of her imminent death, the magic circle she had drawn to protect us evaporated. Just like that, we were left exposed, out in the cold. For the first time in my life, I felt unparented, alone.
I was not yet seventeen when I walked out of my mother’s hospital room on a brutally hot June day, dressed in my favorite Indian-print sundress, outfitted in a kind of existential knowledge I was wholly unequipped to handle. That day, something shifted in the tectonic plates of parent-child responsibility. To keep from plummeting, I tried to fill the enormous void my mother’s death created by taking her place. I drove the carpool, shopped for food, supervised homework; perhaps even more important, like Elinor Dashwood I stayed strong for those I believed needed my strength, subsuming my own loss within what I imagined was the even greater loss suffered by others.
And like Elinor, I kept silent. “I’m fine,” I told myself and everyone else. After all, I was just following orders—acting strong, the way my father had told us to at the funeral, believing that it was what our mother would have wanted. And while I didn’t know it then, I was being loyal to my mother too, keeping the code of silence she’d enforced with everyone in her life.
I became, like Elinor, the sage counselor, the one who listened: to my friends, my siblings, even at times the adults. What took years to recognize seems so obvious now: that helping other people was a defense against opening myself up, against allowing myself to be vulnerable. How could I be, if being vulnerable meant feeling those things I’d kept buried for years?
It took almost a decade, but I finally started therapy in graduate school. There I excavated my own repressed emotions and confronted the depression caused by their denial in work as arduous as the dissertation I was also struggling to complete. Writing, many years later, about Sense and Sensibility, I used Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” to unpack Marianne’s own adolescent depression, but she is not the only character in the novel who suffers. Colonel Brandon, Edward Ferrars, and Elinor herself experience “low spirits” or melancholy, but Elinor’s state is more muted—not because she feels less (whether about her father’s death or about Edward’s silence and secret engagement to Lucy Steele) but rather because she makes the Herculean effort not to show her pain so that she will not cause her mother and sister to suffer.
While Elinor tries again and again to exhort Marianne, after her betrayal by Willoughby, to govern herself, it is not until after the illness that nearly kills her that Marianne can both acknowledge and take responsibility for her self-centered behavior—and recognize the enormity of Elinor’s own exceptional “self-command.” In contrast to Marianne’s performative grieving, Elinor consistently acts to suppress her own. I use suppress rather than repress, because I think one key point of the novel is that she feels pain deeply and consciously, but chooses not to show or act on it. Elinor’s is a silent grief, a solitary pain exposed only to the reader.
First after her father’s death and then after the “extinction of all her dearest hopes” upon learning of Edward’s engagement, Elinor has kept her feelings hidden. Unwilling to give Lucy the satisfaction of knowing she has hurt her rival, Elinor conceals “an emotion and distress beyond any thing she had ever felt before” even as she is “mortified, shocked, confounded” by Lucy’s engagement to Edward.
Austen’s plot choices—to let Marianne live, to have Lucy Steele run off with Robert Ferrars—function to spare Elinor the pain of lasting loss. Yet even as the novel’s events give rise to the marriage that Elinor had all but given up believing was possible, Austen withholds any kind of emotional catharsis for Elinor. After nervously cutting the sheath from a pair of scissors, Edward clears up the misunderstanding as to which Ferrars brother had gotten married. In his usual halting style, Edward says, “Perhaps you do not know—you may not have heard that my brother is lately married to—to the youngest—to Miss Lucy Steele.” Edward’s “words were echoed with unspeakable astonishment by all but Elinor, who sat with her head leaning over her work, in a state of such agitation as made her hardly know where she was.”
As Marianne and her mother echo Edward’s words, Elinor remains in a kind of silent distress. When she does finally respond, it is only to leave the room so that her subsequent outburst happens off-stage: “Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease.” Much turns on that “almost”—the word that strikingly reveals that which is to be resisted. Still in control, Elinor continues to hold herself back; her “tears of joy” happen offstage, in private, behind literal closed doors. Even after hearing that the “obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love” have been miraculously removed, Elinor continues to suppress any public display of emotion, instead enjoying her moment of agitated elation in seeming solitude.
That solitude extends to the novel’s readers as well as its characters. Having previously been granted full narrative access to the thoughts and feelings Elinor conceals from other characters, we are subsequently shifted from Elinor’s perspective to that of Edward when the narrator’s coy “perhaps” speculates as to his interaction with Elinor’s flustered response: “Edward, who had till then looked any where, rather than at her, saw her hurry away, and perhaps saw—or even heard—her emotion.” Even while staying in the room, Edward, too, remains alone with his own thoughts and feelings; in a kind of insensible “reverie,” he neither hears nor speaks, leaving the Dashwood women “to their own conjectures.”
Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay, by contrast, allows Elinor to weep aloud in the public space of the family’s sitting room, and it is in that moment that the film’s center of gravity shifts. Unlike the character in the novel, the onscreen Elinor doesn’t take heed of other people, doesn’t control herself, doesn’t hold back. For a remarkable minute and twenty seconds, we watch and listen as Elinor sinks into a chair, turns away, covers her face—all the while hardly able to catch her breath for crying.
The camera pans first to Edward, then moves to Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne, and Margaret. As the women quickly exit the room, Edward stays to give his confession-cum-apology—all to the sound of Elinor’s sobs. Overtaken by her body and her heart, Elinor ignores, for the first time, the demands of propriety; she lets her emotion speak. In this moment, we are captivated not by Thompson’s age-bending, or her off-kilter beauty, or her on-screen charisma. Rather, we are transfixed by the permission she is granted to feel, and to show that feeling: not just to the film audience but to Edward, the character who stays in the room, and whose sustained physical presence fills the void previously created by his secret engagement.
Elinor’s painful sobbing has turned us into spectators of a deeply private encounter. At the same time, we become witness to something difficult and profound, a moment of shared vulnerability in which Elinor’s happy tears provide the visual as well as sonic backdrop for Edward’s earnest confession.
As a parent, I feel that amalgam of pain and joy every time I partake in life-stage events with my children that my own mother didn’t live to experience with me. My mother died the summer before my senior year of high school. She wasn’t there for my first and only college interview at the same New England liberal arts college my father had attended, in the same town where my newly-married parents had lived while my father completed his final year and my mother worked as a secretary, on the same bucolic campus whose leafy paths and stone war memorials I had explored on countless family visits.
Those memories, my mother’s palpable absence, haunted me even as I performed the excellent student at my interview, even as my father told me how proud my mother would have been of my achievements, my acceptance.
Twenty-five years later, driving my own daughter to visit the very different New England college she would fall in love with and make her own, I feel that familiar hollowness, the gravitational pull of my mother’s absence. When my mother died, I was set adrift, an astronaut whose cord to the mother ship was suddenly cut.
Even if I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, being with my daughter on that college visit felt like a gift. It’s a paradox that I am still struggling to comprehend, but I experience the thought of separating from my daughter not as absence but presence, less the pain of emptiness than the gratitude of fullness: her preparing to leave reminds me that I am still here, the mother ship fully operational. The lifeline will be extended, but she can tug at any moment and I will pull her in. Or, I will watch from afar as she floats, graceful, on different air.
I braided those two college visits—mine and my daughter’s—into an essay that I recently workshopped with students in my first-year seminar, when they were studying creative nonfiction and writing their own stories of loss, of mental and physical health challenges, of familial tensions and misunderstandings. As extraordinary as the narratives students were willing to share was their deeply empathetic response to each other’s writing. Like the reader who alone knows of Elinor’s suffering, like the audience to Ang Lee’s remarkable film, like Edward in the room with a sobbing Elinor, these students bore witness to each other’s pain in the thoughtful and compassionate letters they wrote to one another in advance of our workshop discussions.
Yet the ability to create these kinds of sacred spaces depends on a vulnerability Austen withholds from her protagonist at the novel’s conclusion. While providing a paragraph detailing Elinor’s processing of Edward’s news in which “she was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity,” such description is nonetheless presented in the service of regulation, of self-control: “happily disposed as is the human mind to be easily familiarized with any change for the better, it required several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquility to her heart.” In my own life and in my classroom, I look instead to the sitting room of Barton Cottage and to Emma Thompson’s Elinor as she weeps in public.
Shawn Lisa Maurer is a professor of eighteenth-century literature at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she also teaches courses focused on coming-of-age narratives in fiction, creative nonfiction, and film. Her most recent scholarship, which explores adolescence in Jane Austen, has given her new insight into the tangle of emotion and behavior at the heart of When Did You Know?, her current memoir project. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.