Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition by Jane Austen, ed. by Patricia Meyer Spacks (review)

In considering Patricia Meyer Spacks’s annotated edition of Sense and Sensibility, we might wonder—we are forced to consider, really—whether it is necessary to spend thirty-five dollars on the big, heavy, gorgeous, lavishly illustrated coffee-table edition from Harvard University Press rather than spending half that on the Norton critical edition, which includes useful critical and contextual materials, or even less: the Oxford edition, with Margaret Doody’s excellent introduction, costs a mere US$7.00. Does purchasing this edition—or requiring students to purchase it—make sense? Is it sensible? Spack’s own precise pinning down of these terms is one clue as to why we might want to invest in this book, despite the number of copies of Sense and Sensibility we likely already own.

The very useful introduction not only defines the titular terms, contextualizing them for the reader and insisting on the most particular and nuanced reading of them in every instance, but it also sets up the reader for attentiveness to the issues of love, marriage, money, gender, and power in the novel. Like good critical introductions, this one advances a crucial interpretive framework that may not be evident to less experienced readers of Austen: “Not only is the novel,” Spacks argues, “a tale of two sisters. It is, by extension, a story of women and how they make their way in a world where men possess most of the public forms of power” (25). The help that the editor provides to her readers does not end with the introduction.

The ways in which the text is illustrated (with pictures, of course, but also with explanatory text and cultural contexts) are at least as impressive as the illustrations themselves. Spacks, like most editors, supplies definitions of terms unfamiliar to most modern readers, provides help for modern readers and those unfamiliar with British geography, and notes changes between editions. Unlike most editors, she does not stop there. The notes work to situate the novel in cultural contexts: both the moment of its publication and its current reception. Spacks traces the connections between Sense and Sensibility and Austen’s other novels (in the space of one chapter, noting, for example, the discursive resemblance between Sense and Sensibility’s Mrs Palmer and Northanger Abbey’s Mrs Allen, contrasting Mr Palmer’s insulting of Mrs Jennings and Emma’s insulting of Miss Bates in Emma, and comparing the choices of silly wives made by Mr Palmer and Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Bennet); she connects the book to its literary predecessors (she provides portraits of Frances Burney, Cowper, Scott, and Pope); and she gives readers information about the novel’s reception, both at the moment of its publication, and over the course of its enduring popularity (illustrations are included from several sources, such as the 1901 Macmillian edition and stills from Ang Lee’s 1995 film version). For students of Austen, as opposed to casual readers, Spacks summarizes the most important critical threads in scholarship regarding this novel, and explains what is at stake in—by way of example—Claudia L. Johnson’s reading of the novel as one which questions the patriarchal ideology that others, like Marilyn Butler, argue that it represents (418). Best of all, perhaps, is the way that some of the notes feel almost like her own marginalia, as if we are reading a copy we had borrowed from Spacks herself: when Colonel Brandon is called away, upsetting plans for an excursion to Whitwell, Austen writes, “The complaints and lamentations which politeness had hitherto restrained, now burst forth universally; and they all agreed again and again how provoking it was to be so disappointed.” Spacks notes, at the end of the first clause, that “politeness has certainly not previously restrained several members of the group” (112). The fantasy that this note enables—of a less mediated access to an expert Austen...