Light and Shade--Marriages Mirrored in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen deliberately confines her description to the small tranquil world of the English landed gentry of her time, and takes love and marriage as her constant subject matter. As a writer with sharp insight, she acts not as a romantic matchmaker, but as a realistic painter who presents a picture of her society and her class with light and her class with light and shade in right proportion.
In her earlier major works Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, marriage serves as the main thread, the central subject, and the comic ending. The first story focuses on how the elder Dash…