Before Willoughby

What Jane Austen does with the next three chapters (6-7-8), which are far from the most memorable in the book, fills me with awe. I look at this stuff and think, no human being could be that good at writing. That will probably puzzle some because, as I say, this is not memorable writing.

So why am I so impressed? Well, we've had the backstory and now we are about to start the story. In chapter 9, Willoughby makes his entrance. Before that, in three short chapters, Austen gives the setting and the rest of the cast she needs too get the story rolling. She does this in a very compressed way and it all feels so easy and comfortable.

First we get the cottage in a paragraph that could have come out of Northanger Abbey:

As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable and compact; but as a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles.

Not all is lost for Romantics, however, as we will later learn that the chimney smokes.

Otherwise it is modern, almost always a good thing in Austen's view. Which makes me wonder whose sentiment this is—the feeling that it is defective as a cottage? I honestly couldn't say at first. I was relatively sure it's not Elinor's. Marianne? Quite possibly. Mrs. Dashwood? Normally I'd say yes but she actually has to live in the place and that tempers her romanticism. And she immediately plans improvements. Margaret? Probably but Margaret is little more than a plot device in the novel.

What about Jane Austen herself? One of the recurring images in her novels is Gray's Elegy and she loved Cowper. She could understand the appeal of the movement that was becoming Romanticism because she was part of it. She was as much swept up in the spirit of her times as anyone else. My suspicion is that at some point, however, she decided not to just ride the wave with everyone else.

If I am right, then the book we are about to read is the story of the limitations of sensibility as experienced by someone who rides the wave herself for a while and suffers the consequences. So, to answer my question, the person who thinks the cottage is defective is most likely Marianne. And I think we get confirmation of this in a few chapters.