Sense and Sensibility, Volume the First, Chapters Nine to Eleven

In which Marianne takes a tumble down a hill into the arms of a dashing young suitor, all too perfectly matched to her temperament and they go all Mean Girls on Colonel Brandon, and in which our narrator points out that he is currently reading Jane Austen to you and that you really shouldn't be surprised to find that he's a fan of Mean Girls.



And now we've met the charming young Willoughby, who perhaps brings out the worst in Marianne, and now our story proper can really begin.

Our first note this time around comes in at about 9:35, when Sir John remarks that Willoughby can be up dancing until the wee hours and then get up early to "ride to covert," meaning to go hunting at the thickets where game hides out.

Then, at 13:38, we get more references to Marianne's literary tastes, specifically her unreserved love for Romantic writers: the aforementioned William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott (best known today as the author of Ivanhoe, which we may read here someday if we ever want a cracking adventure story with nice big dollops of antisemitism in it). They compare to her and Willoughby admiring Alexander Pope "no more than is proper," as he was less a Romantic and more a satirical wit.

15:39 - They sang together.

Then, while talking smack about Colonel Brandon's powers of conversation around 20:21, Willoughby says that his topics might stretch as far as the existence of nabobs (someone who made a fortune in India before returning to England), gold mohrs (coins used in British India and apparently more correctly spelled "mohur" now), and palanquins (which we previously met when Around the World in Eighty Days stopped in British India). In other words, the sort of things obvious "exotic" things that anyone with a passing knowledge of current events in early nineteenth-century Britain would be familiar with, and would only be slightly more interesting to bring up than the weather.

Shortly after that, one of the grievous offenses Colonel Brandon has perpetrated against Willoughby was that he "found fault with the hanging of [his] curricle," where a curricle is a rather sporty light carriage hung between only two wheels, pulled by a pair of horses. Man, there sure were a lot of different types of carriages back in the day, huh? I suppose it's no stranger than us knowing the difference between a minivan, a pickup truck, a station wagon, and a coupe.

Also, "found fault with the hanging of my curricle" is another of those sentences that really sounds snicker-worthy to modern ears.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg, and high-res copies of the Thompson illustrations can be found in the British Library's Flickr stream. No reading ahead, though!