In Sense and Sensibility, which makes use of shematized heroines drawn from the dictatic tradition of women's writing, it proved difficult to bring the necessary irony to bear upon their contrasted roles without 'deserting' the caracters who play them. Published in 1811, its origins go back to as early as 1795, and its similarities to Maria Edgeworth's Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795) and Jane West's A Gossip's Story (1796) are plain. That is title and its treatment of reason and feeling are directly relevant to contemporary feminist debate is, perhaps, now generaly accepted.
    Sense and Sensibility opens with the ejection from the family estate of the widowed Mrs Dashwood and her daughters, and it includes some brilliantly satirical passages in wich the meaness of their half-brother, who has inherited virtually everithing, is displayed. Urged on by his totally unscrupulous wife, he reinterprets the promise given to his dying father to make proper provision for them, Whittling down his original notion of giving them three thousand pounds to 'some little present of furniture' when they find, as best they may, somewhere else to live. Here's Austen's scenario implies a criticism of that adopted by Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison. The Dashwood sisters cannot  depend upon their brother to secure their rightful place in the world, and it is in a society where sensitive, intelligent and non-exploitive women are shown as peculiary vulnerable that Austen sets her story of devoted, and schematically contrasted, sisters.
    Elinor Dashwood, at nineteen, is the representative of female rationality and prudence. Marianne, at seventeen, carries, in her response to life and her way of seeing the world, an essentially poetic sensibility. Elinor's attitudes and conduct are shown to be more worthly of respect than marianne's, and in this the novel conforms to the conservative, didactic models on which is based - but there are important modifications. Both Austen heroines are allowed enough complexity to prevent them from becoming simple types of either Sense or Sensibility. In the first chapter we are told of Elinor's 'excellent heart' and 'affectionate disposition', while it is Marianne who is said to be 'sensible and clever'. Besides being contrasted with one another, Elinor and Marianne are contrasted with the common run of less inteligent, less sensitive and less moraly scrupulous characters who make up the society in which they live; the half-brother who inherits the Dashwood estate, Sir John Middleton the benevolent but brainless baronet, and their defective wives - the mean and narrow-minded Mrs John Dashwood, the silly Lady Middleton. Beside them the superior qualities of both the Miss Dashwoods stand out, and are further accentuated by the lack of heroes quite equal to them. Elinor's Man of Sense, Edward Ferrars, cuts rather a foolish figure for thegreather part of the novel, and Colonel Brandon, the respectable Man of Feeling whom Marianne eventually accepts, remains a sightly comic figure, his flannel waist-coat being quite as memorable as his delicate feelings.
    the schematic design of Sense and Sensibility requires the exposure of Willoughby, the anti-hero, as corrupt, but it is between Elinor, Marianne and Willoughby that deeper levels of feeling and more complex moral responses are suggested. This is well illustrated in chapter 7 of the third volume, where the repentant Willoughby explains himself to Elinor. the novel closes in a curiously cool way, whith as much emphasis on the continuance of relationship between two sisters as on their marriages. Austen has let us hear silences that speak beyond the 'argument', and beyond the formal comic conclusion of this novel.*
 

*Angela Leighton, 'Sense and silences: Reading Jane Austen Again', in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, p 140.