In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility You Can Be “Demure and Brat All at Once”

Thick into the edits to my time-travel-rom-com novel set in the Regency era about two sisters who couldn’t be more different (one loves Jane Austen, one loves Skims), my gentle editor suggested I rethink using “demure” and “brat” to describe them. They might not be a thing by the time the novel came out, she worried, and mentioning them could feel cringey. I was loath to give them up, but she had a point. We’d be two years past Charlie XCX’s “brat girl summer” (she’s a little messy, might say dumb things, “feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown”) and nearly that long past Jools Lebron’s “very mindful, very demure” fall that was its hyper-viral antipode. Yes, Demure and Brat captured the essence of my sisters, but it wasn’t worth dating the novel.

I took the point, killed my darlings, and rewrote the scene.

Still, I can’t help but feel that Demure and Brat capture something essential about not just the moment, but the culture. It’s the reason I clung to them too: because they encapsulate a debate we’ve been having not for two years but more like two hundred. This time with new clothes (and hashtags!).

The reason we’re still talking about Demure and Brat is that they’re the modern descendants, the current iteration, of a debate we’ve never stopped having.

The first time I read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I thought she’d invented the dichotomy herself. Not until I started researching my second novel about philosopher and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft did I realize that much of the 18th century was a knock-down-drag-out fight over the merits of each. Enlightenment hardcores (Team Sense), who championed reason, restraint, and virtue, sneered at what would later be labeled Romanticism (Team Sensibility), whose true believers privileged feelings over facts and spawned a literary movement to elevate them.

Wollstonecraft’s life epitomizes the tension between them. At first glance, she’s Team Sense all the way, modest in her dress, refuses to rouge her cheeks, powder her hair, wear a corset. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that women should stop being socialized in sensibility and instead receive the same rational instruction that men do. (Emphasis mine.) As a book reviewer she skewers the deluge of sentimental novels written by “scribbling women” with their “tissue of pretty nothings.” Returning a batch of books to her publisher, she asks, “Do you wish me to look over any more trash this month?” and claims the same review would do for all of them. “Sensibility is the never failing theme, sorrow torn to tatters…moping madness, tears that flow forever, and slow consuming death.” Of one novel she writes, “This frivolous history of misses and lords, ball dresses and violent emotions…is one of the most stupid novels we ever impatiently read. Pray Miss, write no more!”

Team Sense, right? Yet there’s nothing demure about her. After a love affair, a child out of wedlock, and a brutal rejection, she becomes something of a hot mess herself (fits of trembling, bouts of depression, two suicide attempts). Wollstonecraft wears her heart on her simple muslin sleeve. Her auto-fiction(ish) novel, The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria has enough weeping and trembling to compete with the “trashiest” novels she once detested. But it’s her last work, the groundbreaking Letters from Sweden (part travelogue, treatise, memoir, love letter, suicide note), that elevates the inner life as a source of rapture and truth, feelings that beget ideas. The book arrives on the scene six years before Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads (considered the first Romantic manifesto). According to Wollstonecraft biographer Charlotte Gordon, “It is Letters from Sweden that ‘vindicated’ emotion, subjectivity, and psychological complexity, the book that showed the Romantics a new writing world.”

By the time we get to Sense and Sensibility (about two sisters who couldn’t be more different), the backlash against the “cult of sensibility” is at full throttle. Published in 1811, the novel is greeted as a parody of sensibility. Elinor Dashwood is the epitome of Sense, self-contained, controlled, restrained. She has strong feelings but governs them. She’s mindful, she’s thoughtful, she’s considerate of societal expectations. Elinor Dashwood is Demure done right. Marianne Dashwood is pure Brat energy (think Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”). Unceremoniously dumped by the dashing Willoughby, she spends most of the novel weeping, lamenting, sighing, high octane emoting, making zero attempt to conceal her overwrought anguish. Marianne is Sensibility on steroids.

In a ridiculously fun episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time podcast, scholars John Mullan and Hermione Lee get into something of a literary brawl with Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin about what Austen is really up to and where she stands on the Sense vs. Sensibility debate. Mullan comes down hard on the side of Austen mocking Marianne, even laughing at her. She’s not just rescuing Marianne from her own crippling sensibility, he says, but the novel itself. Until Austen, every heroine of an 18th century novel is “glistening with sensibility.” (Like it’s a bad thing.)

Hermione Lee piles on too, pointing to a scene where Marianne’s weeping so hard she can’t finish the letter she’s writing. “She covers her face with her hand and makes this muffled screaming noise. You get this violent sense of agony, but it’s always being pulled back and I think that’s the nature of the way Jane Austen sees life, that the scream has got to be muffled.”

Which sets Claire Tomalin off. “Goodness, you two, you’re very tough about Marianne!”

She agrees we can divide the human race between those who identify with Marianne Dashwood and those who don’t and that we are meant to laugh at her silly behavior at the beginning of the novel (the parodic element). But then something else happens, she thinks, something more ambiguous and more interesting. “Jane Austen actually changes as the novel progresses,” says Tomalin. “She sees something else in Marianne. There’s a kind of purity in her desire for language to be true, authentic, sincere, original, even if it gets her into trouble. I think the book values that very much.”

It’s the moment I love most in their heated conversation, the one that stops me each time I listen, because novel writing changes me too. When I first conceived the novel years ago, I’d had my own storybook wedding in a 14th century parish church in England, where we were living, but also lost a baby soon after, tried to keep a stiff upper lip but descended into depression and had to leave. Twenty years later I left my marriage (also in London), a messy affair with me pitting my own happiness against my role as a wife. I can be gracious and charming and self-effacing, like my lovely mom, but I’ve got my dad inside me too, fierce and commanding. My life has been a tug-of-war between my own binaries, as it is for so many women.

Women are asking not who we ought to be, but who we want to be. A question good enough for any century.

It turns out to be the question around which my novel revolves, even if I didn’t quite see it starting out. The reason we’re still talking about Demure and Brat is that they’re the modern descendants, the current iteration, of a debate we’ve never stopped having, asking the same old question: How ought a woman to be?

At first, I was playfully riffing off Pride and Prejudice for the love story that ensues when my heroine finds herself trapped in the Regency world. But when my editor suggested centering the sisters early on, I began to see how much it resembled Sense and Sensibility. Cassie Blake is Marianne Dashwood, a party-girl-slash-influencer in a crop-top and cargo pants who says whatever pops into her head and doesn’t mind being messy. Annabel Blake is Elinor Dashwood. She’s a book-loving introvert who could hold her own at a high tea to which she might be wearing a vintage Laura Ashley dress and a pair of ballet flats. One is sense, one is sensibility. One’s demure, one’s brat. One gets what she’s always wished for, one loses what she took for granted.

Only when the two sisters are translated to a different time and place do they contend with the stark reality of the choices women face. They interrogate themselves and learn from each other, come to value the strength in their sister’s way of being in the world. Like Elinor and Marianne, like Wollstonecraft, like me, maybe even like Jane herself, they evolve as their stories do, away from the binaries that limit them.

Brat was never just a backlash to “clean girls” with their neat buns, giant pink reusable cups and yoga mats writing in their journals after Pilates; it wasn’t just a girl smoking a morning cig wearing last night’s make-up. It grappled with grief, aging, anxiety, womanhood. And even as Demure took off on TikTok, most women got the side wink. What do you do when you’re hungover at a CVS with Taco Bell refried beans stuck in your hair? “I’m very cutesy with it,” says Jools Lebron. “My spray tan blotching off? Very demure.”

Even as the new “masculinism” in some circles asks that women be quiet, our scream isn’t muffled, it’s sung. It’s true, authentic, sincere, and original. We can be demure and brat, sense and sensibility, sometimes in quick succession or all at once in a single day. Here’s where we are now; none of it is dated at all. Women are asking not who we ought to be, but who we want to be. A question good enough for any century.

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Sometime This Century by Samantha Silva is available from Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.