Gina Ruiz

Professor Devoney Looser

ENG 535

29 April 2023

This was an essay I wrote in Professor Looser’s class. The assignment was to take a word from a Jane Austen novel we were studying and truly examine it. I loved this assignment and got a lot more out of it than I thought I would. I chose the word “fortune” because it cropped up so many times, not only in Sense and Sensibility but throughout Austen’s body of work. This taught me a good lesson about close reading and how each word in a written work matters. I have taken that knowledge to heart in my own work and am being very careful with words in the novel I am writing.

Sense and Sensibility is a novel of manners set in the southwest of England. The novel revolves around the fortunes of the Dashwood family, particularly the two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, in both the financial and chance connotations of the word. Sense and Sensibility offers a look into the lives of 19^th-century middle-class life for women and gives insight into just how transactional society was through how much the word fortune is used in the novel. The word appears in Sense and Sensibility thirty-eight times (Matsuoka) eleven times in the first few pages alone, giving evidence of fortune’s importance in the novel and the lives of the Dashwood women. Fortune, in both its meanings, plagues the Dashwood women.

At the beginning of the novel, Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters lose their husband and father, which sets up a series of events that will change their lives. In nineteenth-century England, the death of a patriarch could and often did mean instant poverty for a family, the loss of a home, and other hardships. In the case of the Dashwood women, both mother and daughters have lost the right to their home at Norland and the comfort of the late Mr. Austen’s fortune. Mrs. Dashwood is usurped by her stepson’s wife as the woman of the house – a woman who wants her and her daughters gone. Further, Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters are dependent upon their stepson and brother to do the right thing and endow them with the money that will secure their future. Dowries or a “marriage portion” were also very important in the era. A woman without a dowry or portion, often could not marry and her future and fortune were further negatively impacted.

Marriage was a business transaction. While Austen gives love much importance, she illustrates how much fortune, either money or chance, can foster or suffocate that emotion. If a man has a good fortune, he has a better chance at winning the hand of the lady he desires, while if a woman has beauty it can make her fortune in drawing suitors with large fortunes to her. The repeated use of the word “fortune” and the casual way Austen’s characters discuss a person’s income or lack thereof illustrates just how transactional society was in Austen’s time and how people had to consider the fortunes of others, whether they had a vested interest or not. The fortunes of others, both financial and those of chance, made for good gossip. By Austen’s repetitive use of the word in both its connotations, the author is making a political statement against the priority of such pecuniary matters as it pertains to love and marriage, while at the same acknowledging the importance of same in her society. Thus, she is critiquing her society through the satire and comedic vehicle of her novel and the repeated and well-placed use of the word “fortune,” as well as allusions to it in the names of her characters.

The word “fortune” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with many connotations and meanings. Two definitions of “fortune” in the OED are “one’s condition or standing in life; a prosperous condition” and “position as determined by wealth; amount of wealth; concrete a person’s possessions collectively” Also.  “a man of fortune: one possessing great (usually inherited) wealth.” Austen uses these definitions of the word repeatedly when describing both the main characters in the story and peripherally mentioned ones, such as the long-dead Eliza or Ms. Morton. Further, Austen alludes to reputational fortunes in danger by naming her main characters Dashwood. Margaret Doody expounds on the poetic meaning of the name “dashed from the wood” like the fallen leaves Marianne loves. Throughout the novel, things fall or are dashed away” (Doody). Further, Doody gives more history of the name, explaining that Sir Francis Dashwood was a real person, who was an “unsuccessful Chancellor of the Exchequer (1762-63)” (Doody). Further, he had a terrible and scandalous reputation as a seducer. Doody makes the connection that the reputations of the Dashwood sisters were in “emotional and sexual danger” (Doody). The Dashwood’s reputations would have been ruined had they succumbed to those dangers and their fortunes would have fallen even farther. A damaged reputation for women in Austen’s time often meant exile, loss of any chance of marriage and financial security, like Colonel Brandon’s ward, who is banished to the country to have her child by Willoughby. Had Willoughby ruined Marianne as he did Eliza, it is doubtful she would have married Brandon and had the security of his fortune. Further, her sexual ruin would have damaged the reputations of her mother and sister, leaving them perhaps homeless or, at the very least, gossiped about everywhere they went. Their reputational fortunes and their chances of attaining financial security through marriage would have fallen away.

Austen’s use of the word “fortune” describes the social standing her characters have in life and how much money they possess, as well as their luck in life and love. The word fortune is repeatedly used in casual conversation in Sense and Sensibility. While we would think it crass to discuss money and salaries so openly; Austen’s characters thought nothing of talking about someone’s income in everyday conversation. What is even more interesting was how well-informed they seemed to be on another’s fortune and how easily they worked that number into their conversations, such as the exchange with John Dashwood and his sister Elinor: “Who is Colonel Brandon? Is he a man of fortune? …What is the amount of his fortune? I believe about two thousand a year” (Austen 121). There is no hedging about speaking of money so openly, it is so casual in the conversations of Austen’s characters.

It is fortune in the financial sense that drives Mrs. Jennings and she attaches a value to beauty in her matchmaking schemes. Beauty is just as transactional as money in Austen’s world, “It would be an excellent match, for he was rich, and she was handsome” (Austen). Mrs. Jennings’ position in the world, “having an ample jointure” imbued her with a sense of power over others and a feeling that she was right to meddle. The fortune she had as well as time on her hands allowed her to meddle in the lives of others and feel righteous in doing so. In Mrs. Jennings’ case, fortune in both the financial and luck sense of the word has imbued her with the power and confidence to initiate these transactional alliances. In Mrs. Jennings, Austen is illustrating that with a woman could be powerful, opinionated, and live outside of at least some of society’s strictures if she has enough wealth to facilitate it. Nowhere in Sense and Sensibility is the idea put forth that Mrs. Jennings needs a man. It is her fortune that sustains her independence and her matchmaking that gives her joy. Austen is arguing that a woman if she has her own income, can do as she pleases and does not have to be defined by a man.

Marianne mentions the transactional society in which they live when she discusses the marriages of women she sees as older with with her sister Elinor. ”…if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse…In my eyes it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing. To me it would seem only a commercial exchange, in which each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other” (Austen). While this passage is satirical and shows Marianne’s youth, it gives a clear picture of how Austen thought her society worked. Marriage was transactional and fortune or finance was key. Further, Marianne, though young and portrayed as overly sensitive, conveys Austen’s key point; that marriage in her society is a commercial exchange or business transaction and not motivated by love. The Dashwood sisters cannot make an equal alliance based on their meager fortune alone.

The OED gives another definition of the word “fortune” as “chance, hap, or luck, regarded as a cause of events and changes in men’s affairs.” This definition pertains to the Dashwood women as they have lost their fortune and had a change in their fortunes through the greed of their brother and his wife. This connotation of the word is also prevalent in Sense and Sensibility as the Dashwood sisters navigate relationships, love, and the move to a new home in a new village. It is fortune in this sense that leads Marianne to meet Willoughby when she twists her ankle in a fall (Austen). It is fortune (misfortune) or chance that has given Brandon insight into the lack of character of Mr. Willoughby through the ruination of his own ward. (Austen 113). It is his ward’s misfortune in meeting Willoughby that gives Elinor the information she needs to convey to her sister, and it is Marianne’s fortune or luck that preserves her from the same fate. She can go on, once the grieving is past because she was fortunate enough not to be victimized as badly as Brandon’s ward, Miss Williams.

The villains of the novel, Willoughby, John and Fanny Dashwood operate through greed and fortune in both the financial and chance sense of the word. John and Fanny inherit Norland, the fortune left behind, and it is their greed and meanness that force the Dashwood women out of their home and into Barton Cottage. While they’ve inherited a fortune, they do not mean to share it and are in fact, resentful of any small portion of it that the Dashwood women are entitled to and that they cannot usurp. Willoughby marries into money. He chose fortune over love and enjoys that fortune, while still longing for Marianne. Each of Austen’s villains is motivated by greed, money, and their sense of entitlement. Their motivations and their actions change the fortunes of the Dashwood women.

Fortune, whether it be money or chance, changes and informs the lives of the characters in Sense and Sensibility. The fortunes of the characters and the impact finances have on their lives is a continuing theme. Love and marriage are important, though they depend much on fortune, both in its financial and luck connotations. Greedy and nefarious people threaten the fortunes of others and sometimes seem to escape justice and misfortune, as in real life. Fanny Dashwood does get a little comeuppance as Elinor marries her brother and Lucy marries the other. Austen uses the word “fortune” repetitively to drive home just how much the society and class of her day revolved around the fortunes of others, rather than what was truly important – love. Some of Austen’s characters do end up in happy unions but it is fortune, both luck and money, that helped them attain it. It is Lucy’s fortunate decision to marry the richer Ferrars brother that frees Edward for Elinor. Sense and Sensibility is a political statement Austen is making against her society and its obsession with wealth, even while acknowledging that love cannot thrive in poverty.

Works Cited

“fortune”. n.d. 28 March 2023. <https://www-oed-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/view/Entry/73751?rskey=9mHg1I&result=1#eid>.

Austen, Jane. Jane Austen: The Complete Novels. Ed. Karen Joy Fowler. London: Penguin Books, 2006.

Doody, Margaret. Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Print.

Matsuoka, Mitsuharu. “”fortune” Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility.” 1 4 2023. The Victorian Literary Studies Archive. <http://victorian-studies.net/concordance/austen/>.