The main theme in this novel is the danger of excessive sensibility. Austen is concerned with the prevalence of the “sensitive” attitude in the romantic novel which, after the 1760s, turned to emphasizing the emotional and sentimental nature of people rather than, as before, their rational endowments.
Austen may have wanted anonymity not only because of her gender and a desire for privacy, but because of the more general atmosphere of repression pervading her era: her early writing of Sense and Sensibility coincided with the treason trial of Thomas Hardy and the proliferation of government censors as the Napoleonic …
The major conflict or problem in the novel is the protagonists’ challenge in finding proper husbands. The two girls are very different, as Elinor uses her good sense in choosing a man worthy of her love. Marianne, however, is ruled by sensibility and suffers a broken heart….. at least until she gets her sense back.
