When Deresiewicz first read "Sense and Sensibility," he says he was unimpressed with the book's message. Two sisters fall in love in the book and it was the whirlwind romance of younger sister, Marianne, and the man she first falls in love with, John Willoughby, that most impressed Deresiewicz. But the romance that Austen seemed to want the reader to root for, wrote 锘緿eresiewicz, was that between the elder sister Elinor and Edward Ferrars, a character who seemed quiet and tepid to Deresiewicz. "Elinor, meanwhile, was involved in a romance of her own 鈥� if you could call it that," Deresiewicz wrote of the plotline. But after pondering over the story again and remembering a romance he'd embarked on, which had moved quickly because it had seemed so right but then crashed and burned, he began to see what Austen had meant. "Knowing yourself, Austen taught me, is not enough," Deresiewicz wrote. "You also need to know the person you fall in love with, and despite what Marianne and I believed, this doesn't happen overnight... Elinor's way of going about things is the right one: to see a great deal of a person, to study their sentiments, to hear their opinions."
