Abstract: This paper first explores Jane Austen’s attitude toward marriage in Sense and Sensibility through her description of Elinor and Marianne, two heroines in the novel. It then discusses the contemporary influence of it. In the Regent period, the social status of women was low and the rights were not protected. With the awakening of female consciousness, these situations were improved to a great degree. Austin thinks that marriage requires love, however, in the society at that time, class is the first threshold, and marriage turned into equivalent commodities trading, women are treated as goods to be sold. Love is not quite a consideration when it comes to marriage. Austin abhors the commercial kind of marriage, advocating free and romantic love ,a breakthrough of the traditional view of marriage, maybe it can due to the advocating of the new ideas “liberty, equality, fraternity" .However, Austen is reserve and sensible, discussing how lacking of can affect people’s life. Marianne’s elastic love toward Willoughby can be detrimental to her reputation, and when she is dumped by him, she is completely desperate and broken. Austen shows her sarcastic and contemptuous attitude toward such behaviors. On the contrary, she appreciates Elinor’s character, reasonable while abounding in feelings. The conflicts between sense and sensibility make up the characters’ complex and contradictory personalities, arousing reader's interest and thinking, thus becoming an enduring topic. The ideas put forward by Jane Austen more than two hundred years ago are still instructive today. The contradictions between money and love, sense and sensibility is weakening, since people are paying more attention to the economic foundation and expecting more resonance of taste and emotion. It can hardly be denied that people of different classes will find it growingly difficult to produce this kind of resonance. Therefore, as long as we strike the balance of sense and sensibility, get rid of unre
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