Peter Conrad on Sense and Sensibility
The Austrialian profiled writer and academic Peter Conrad upon his return to Australia to deliver the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. Mr. Conrad is an Austrialian ex-pat who, among many other things, wrote the introduction to the Everyman’s edition of Sense and Sensibility. From the article:
But here is the paradox. Being highly accomplished in his field and equally at home in Oxford, London or Hobart, Conrad has no need of those fatty Gibbonian tones that afflict some home-grown cultural critics and writers. Conrad’s lively and unvarnished tone sounds clean and contemporary to my ears. In this, from his introduction to the Everyman edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, we catch a writer making some deft distinctions without the need of scent in his sentences:
“For all their similarity of structure, each of Jane Austen’s novels constitutes a world with a mental picture of its own. The irony of Pride and Prejudice is social and lexical: it enables Elizabeth, by the adroit manipulation of double meanings, to criticise her family and society while seeming to be deferential. The irony of Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, is psychological and philosophical. It is not an instrument for social survival but the symptom of a temperamental instability.”
