Volume One (Chapters 1–22)

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner as to gain the good opinion of their neighbours.

The late owner of the estate was a single man, who lived to a very great age, and who for many years had his sister for a companion. When she died, he invited his nephew, Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal heir, to come and live with him, with his wife and family; and the old gentleman's days were comfortably spent in their society. Henry Dashwood had one son by a former marriage, John, who was already well provided for by his mother's fortune and by his own marriage; and by his present wife, three daughters. The old man's will, when it was read, gave as much disappointment as pleasure. He left Norland to his nephew — but only for his life, and then to John, and after John to John's son, a child of four, who in his occasional visits had so won the old man's heart by such charms as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old — an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise. Henry Dashwood could not sell or divide any part of it to provide for those who were most dear to him; a thousand pounds apiece was all the old man left to the three girls.

Henry Dashwood hoped to live many years and save for his family from the income of a large estate. He lived only one year more. On his deathbed he called for his son and recommended to him, with all the strength and urgency his illness could command, the interest of his stepmother and sisters.

Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do everything in his power to make them comfortable. He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold-hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was; he might even have been made amiable himself. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself — more narrow-minded and selfish.

He meant at first to give his sisters a thousand pounds each. His wife thought otherwise; and in a conversation which deserves to be remembered, she reasoned him down, step by step. How could he think of robbing his child, their poor little Harry, of so large a sum? The girls were only his half-sisters, which she considered no relationship at all. Perhaps five hundred apiece would do. Or perhaps an annuity to their mother instead — but annuities were dreadful things; people always lived for ever when one had to pay them. Perhaps, then, he had better not bind himself to anything at all, but give them presents of money now and then. And at last she was certain that his father had meant nothing more than that he should help them to find a smaller house, send them presents of fish and game when in season, and help them move their things. "They will be much more able to give you something," she concluded; and so it was settled that he would do nothing whatever.

No sooner was the funeral over than Mrs. John Dashwood arrived at Norland with her child and her servants, and installed herself as its mistress; and the widow and her daughters were reduced to the state of visitors.

The eldest daughter, Elinor, whose advice had so often been effectual, possessed a strength of understanding and a coolness of judgement which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother. She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them. It was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.

Marianne's abilities were in many respects quite equal to Elinor's. She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. In the days of grief that followed, Marianne and her mother encouraged each other in the violence of their affliction; they gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, and resolved against ever admitting consolation. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but she could still struggle; she could consult with her brother, and receive her sister-in-law, and try to rouse her mother. Margaret, the youngest, was a good-humoured girl of thirteen, who had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without much of her sense.

Mrs. Dashwood remained at Norland several months, since every place within reach that might suit her was either too large or too dear; and in that time an attachment grew up between Elinor and Mrs. John Dashwood's elder brother, Edward Ferrars, who came often to stay. He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too shy to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every sign of an open, affectionate heart. His understanding was good, and his education had improved it. But his mother and sister wished to see him distinguished — as an orator, a statesman, in Parliament, at least driving a barouche — and he had no ambition for any of it. All his wishes centred in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life.

Mrs. Dashwood loved him for his goodness to Elinor, and soon expected the marriage. Marianne was less satisfied. "He has no real taste," she said. "Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor's drawings, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth. To hear him read last night! — I felt for my sister most severely. Those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference! Oh, mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!"

"Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen," said her mother. "It is yet too early in life to despair of such a happiness."

Elinor herself could not say how things stood. She believed that Edward loved her; but there was a doubt in his manner, a want of spirits, that made her uncertain; and his dependence on his mother, who had a large fortune and great ambitions, made any engagement, she told Marianne, a matter for prudence. She esteemed him; she liked him; that was as far as she would go in words.

Mrs. John Dashwood was not long in letting her mother-in-law understand that Edward's mother had great expectations for him, and that any young woman who tried to draw him in would be sorry for it. Mrs. Dashwood could neither pretend unconsciousness nor endure the insult. That very day a letter came from a relation of her own, Sir John Middleton, a gentleman of fortune in Devonshire, offering her a small house on his property, Barton Cottage, on very easy terms. She accepted it at once.

The cottage, when they reached it in September, was comfortable and compact, but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles. It stood in a narrow valley among high hills, near the sea; and the first view of it, with its woods and pastures, and the open valley before it, gave them much pleasure. Mrs. Dashwood at once began planning improvements she had no money to make.

Sir John Middleton, who lived at Barton Park half a mile away, came at once to welcome them, a good-looking man of about forty, whose kindness never stopped: he sent them game and fruit, he lent them newspapers, and he insisted on their dining at the Park every day until they were settled. Lady Middleton was elegant, cold and reserved, and had nothing to say for herself beyond the most commonplace remark. Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children; and these were their only resources. But Sir John delighted in collecting young people about him, and the more of them the better.

At the Park they met Lady Middleton's mother, Mrs. Jennings, a widow with an ample jointure, a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had therefore now nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world. She was full of jokes and laughter, and before dinner was over had said many witty things on the subject of lovers and husbands; she hoped the young ladies had not left their hearts behind them in Sussex.

And they met Colonel Brandon, Sir John's particular friend, a man of five-and-thirty — silent and grave, but with a sensible and gentlemanlike face. When Marianne played and sang that evening, he alone of the company listened with attention, though without the raptures she thought her due. Mrs. Jennings soon decided that he was in love with Marianne, and teased them both about it unmercifully.

"But he is old enough to be my father," said Marianne to her mother, "and if he were ever animated enough to be in love, must have long outlived every sensation of the kind. When is a man to be safe from such wit, if age and infirmity will not protect him? A man of five-and-thirty has nothing to do with matrimony. And he talked of flannel waistcoats — and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble."

"Then you would have him marry a woman of seven-and-twenty," said Elinor, laughing, "who might wish to marry for the sake of a nurse and the security of a wife."

One rainy morning in October, Marianne and Margaret set out to walk on the downs, in spite of the clouds. A driving rain came on; they ran laughing down the steep hill towards the cottage; and Marianne, who had the advantage at first, had a sudden fall, and twisted her ankle. A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him, was passing up the hill. He put down his gun and ran to her help. She could not stand; he took her up in his arms without further delay, and carried her down the hill, through the garden and into the house, where he set her in a chair in the parlour.

Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at their entrance. He apologised for his intrusion so frankly and so gracefully that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression. His name, he said, was Willoughby, and he was staying at Allenham, a few miles off, with an old lady, Mrs. Smith, whose heir he was; and he hoped to call next day to ask after Miss Dashwood. Marianne had seen less of his person than the rest, for the confusion that crimsoned over her face had robbed her of the power of looking at him after he lifted her up; but she had seen enough of him to join in all the admiration of the others, with an energy that always adorned her praise. His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story; and in carrying her into the house with so little previous formality there was a rapidity of thought that particularly recommended the action to her.

Sir John told them all he knew: that Willoughby had a pretty little estate of his own in Somerset, Combe Magna; that he was a capital rider and a famous dancer; that he had danced from eight o'clock till four at the last Christmas party without once sitting down. "Is he?" cried Marianne with sparkling eyes. "And with elegance, with spirit?"

He called the next morning. He was found to be fond of music, of reading, of dancing; Marianne questioned him about his favourite books — Cowper, Scott — and found that he admired all she admired, and that she might as well have been talking to herself, so perfectly did their tastes agree. Before his visit ended they conversed with the familiarity of a long-established acquaintance.

"Well, Marianne," said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, "for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby's opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic."

"Elinor," cried Marianne, "is this fair? I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred against every commonplace notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful."

Willoughby came every day. He read with Marianne, sang with her, drove out with her; they danced together at every party at the Park, and sat apart together the rest of the evening. Such conduct made them of course most exceedingly laughed at; but ridicule could not shame, and seemed hardly to provoke them. Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings with a warmth which left her no inclination for checking this excessive display of them. Elinor liked him too; but she saw in him a propensity, which in this resembled her sister's, of saying too much what he thought on every occasion, without attention to persons or circumstances — and of slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety. In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other people, in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment of undivided attention where his heart was engaged, he displayed a want of caution which Elinor could not approve.

He was unjust, she thought, to Colonel Brandon, whom he and Marianne laughed at together as a man whom everybody spoke well of and nobody cared about. Elinor defended him: he was a sensible man, he had seen a great deal of the world, he had been abroad, he had been in the East Indies; and she found in him, in their quiet conversations at the Park, a gentleness and a sadness that interested her. Brandon told her once, of Marianne's views on second attachments, that there had been a lady he once knew, "whose temper and mind very much resembled your sister's," who had thought and judged like her — but who, from an enforced change, from a series of unfortunate circumstances — and there he stopped, and said no more.

Willoughby gave Marianne a horse — a horse that he had bred himself on his estate, exactly calculated to carry a woman. Without considering that it was not in her mother's plan to keep any horse, or that she would need a servant and a stable to keep it, she accepted the present without hesitation. Elinor at last made her see the impropriety of receiving such a gift from a man so little known; and Marianne told Willoughby she must refuse it. "But, Marianne," he answered in a low voice, which Elinor overheard, "the horse is still yours, though you cannot use it now. I shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall receive you." He had called her simply Marianne; Elinor could not doubt that they were engaged.

Margaret soon made it plainer still. She had seen Willoughby, she whispered to Elinor, cut off a long lock of Marianne's hair, kiss it, fold it in a piece of white paper, and put it into his pocket-book.

A party was formed to visit Whitwell, a fine estate belonging to Colonel Brandon's brother-in-law, where there were grounds and a lake; the company met at breakfast at the Park, everything was ready — when a letter was brought to Colonel Brandon. He looked at the direction, changed colour, and immediately left the room. He returned: business, he said, required his immediate presence in town. It was impossible to put it off for a day. He left at once, and the party was broken up. Mrs. Jennings was sure she knew what it was about: Miss Williams, his natural daughter, she said, lowering her voice — a relation of his, at least, of whom nobody knew much. Willoughby and Marianne drove out alone in his curricle instead, and were away the whole morning; and it came out at dinner that they had been to Allenham, and that Marianne had gone over the house with him, while Mrs. Smith was not even told.

"I thought you very wrong," Elinor said to her afterwards. "Are you sure you can have done nothing improper?"

"If there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure."

Willoughby begged that the cottage should never be altered, not a stone added nor a wall moved. "To me it is faultless. I consider it the only form of building in which happiness is attainable." He loved it for its smallness and its people; he hoped to find it unchanged, he said, in a year or two, and to be treated by them always with the kindness which had made everything belonging to it so dear to him.

The next morning, Mrs. Dashwood, Elinor and Margaret walked to the Park, leaving Marianne at home on some excuse, in the hope that Willoughby would come. When they returned, his curricle was at the door; and as they entered, Marianne rushed out of the parlour in violent affliction, with her handkerchief at her eyes, and ran upstairs. Willoughby was standing at the fire, much agitated. Mrs. Smith, he said, had that morning sent him on business to London; he had just taken leave of Allenham; and he did not expect to return to Devonshire immediately — not this twelvemonth. He refused Mrs. Dashwood's warm invitation to come back, in a confused, embarrassed manner quite unlike himself; and he left the cottage almost at a run, and in a minute was out of sight.

Mrs. Dashwood, after the first shock, was soon persuaded that all was well: Mrs. Smith, perhaps, disapproved of a poor match, and Willoughby had been sent away; he would soon be free and return. But why, said Elinor, if they were engaged, did he not say so? Why this secrecy, so unlike either of them? "I want no proof of their affection," said she, "but of their engagement I do want some." Her mother was hurt at the doubt, and Marianne, who passed the night without sleeping and rose with a headache, could not be asked. She would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She spent whole days playing over every favourite song she had sung with him, reading only what they had read together, and walking alone. No letter came from him; and no one dared ask her whether she expected one.

Some weeks later, walking in the valley, the sisters saw a gentleman on horseback riding towards them. "It is he; it is indeed; I know it is!" cried Marianne, and hurried on — and it was not Willoughby, but Edward Ferrars.

He was the only person in the world who could at that moment be forgiven for not being Willoughby. He stayed a week at the cottage, and he was welcome; but he was not in spirits. He was low, distant, and seemed hardly to know why he had come. He spoke of his mother's wishes and of his own want of a profession. He had always preferred the Church, but that was not smart enough for his family; they recommended the army, which was a great deal too smart for him; the law was genteel enough, but he had no inclination for it; and so, at eighteen, he had been sent to Oxford, and had been properly idle ever since. Marianne noticed that he wore a ring with a plait of hair in it. "I never saw you wear a ring before, Edward," she cried. "Is that Fanny's hair? I remember her promising to give you some. But I should have thought her hair had been darker." He coloured very deeply, and said that it was his sister's hair: "the setting always casts a different shade on it, you know." Elinor had met his eye, and was conscious that the hair was exactly the shade of her own; she believed he must have taken it from her without her knowledge. She was not displeased.

At the end of a week he left them, still unhappy, still uncertain, without having said anything that Elinor could take as a declaration; and Elinor, who would not indulge herself, sat down to her drawing-table as soon as he was gone, and busily employed herself the whole day. If her behaviour was not the same as her sister's after Willoughby's departure, it did not proceed from any want of feeling, but from her belief that it was a duty to her family not to make them miserable.

The Middletons brought new company. Mrs. Jennings's younger daughter, Charlotte Palmer, a short, plump, good-humoured woman who laughed at everything, and her husband, Mr. Palmer, a grave young man who was trying to sit in Parliament and who treated his wife and her family with studied rudeness, which made her laugh more than ever. "Mr. Palmer is so droll," she told Elinor; "he is always out of humour." She said she knew Willoughby a little, that his house was near theirs in Somerset, and that everybody in the country knew he was to marry Miss Dashwood.

Then Sir John, who had met two young ladies in Exeter who turned out to be cousins of Mrs. Jennings, invited them to the Park: the Miss Steeles. The elder, Anne, was nearly thirty, with a very plain and not a sensible face, and talked of nothing but "beaux." The younger, Lucy, was about two or three-and-twenty, pretty, with a sharp quick eye and a smartness of air, which, though it did not give actual elegance or grace, gave distinction to her person. They won Lady Middleton's heart at once by their raptures over her children. The children pulled their sashes, ransacked their workbags, took their knives and scissors, and the Miss Steeles only declared them the sweetest little angels in the world. Elinor soon saw that Lucy was clever, but ignorant and illiterate, and that her attentions, her flattery and her assiduity were all of a piece, and all with a purpose.

Lucy sought Elinor's company. One day, walking with her from the Park to the cottage, after asking many questions about the family of Mrs. Ferrars, she said, with a look of reserve:

"I dare say you are surprised at my asking. I wonder you did not ask me why. But perhaps you know that I am particularly interested in that family. You will think my question an odd one; but I am sure you are not acquainted with Mrs. Ferrars — I have never seen her myself. But the time may come — how soon it will come must depend upon herself — when we may be very intimately connected."

Elinor's astonishment can be imagined. "Good heavens! What do you mean? Are you acquainted with Mr. Robert Ferrars?"

"No," replied Lucy, "not with Mr. Robert Ferrars — I never saw him in my life; but," fixing her eyes upon Elinor, "with his elder brother."

She had been secretly engaged to Edward for four years. He had been a pupil of her uncle, Mr. Pratt, near Plymouth, when he was not yet nineteen; and they had been engaged ever since, without the knowledge of his mother, on whom he depended for everything and who would certainly disinherit him if she knew. Not a soul but Anne and Elinor knew it now. She took a little miniature from her pocket, and Elinor looked at it — and it was Edward's face. She had a letter from him, in his hand. And she had given him, she said, a lock of her hair set in a ring, the last time they met; and he had told her it was some comfort to him.

Elinor kept her composure. She returned the picture; she spoke calmly; she said what was proper. Then they reached the cottage, and the conversation could be continued no longer. Elinor was left to think and to be wretched. She could not doubt it — the picture, the letter, the ring, his melancholy at Barton, his uncertain manner towards her. Edward had been engaged when he first came to Norland; he had loved her, she still believed it — but he was bound, and bound to a woman, as she now saw, without education, without delicacy, and, worse, without real affection for him; for Lucy's confidence, she suspected, had been made in jealousy and as a warning.

Her resentment of such behaviour, her indignation at having been its dupe, for a short time made her feel only for herself; but other ideas soon arose. Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he feigned a regard for her which he did not feel? No; whatever it might once have been, she could not believe it such at present. He had been wrong, very wrong, in remaining at Norland after he first felt her influence over him to be more than it ought to be. But if he had injured her, how much more had he injured himself! If her case were pitiable, his was hopeless. What would he become, tied to Lucy Steele for life?

She would tell no one. She had promised Lucy secrecy; and she would spare her mother and sister the knowledge of a pain they could not cure. When she joined them at dinner, no one would have supposed from her looks that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love.