Sense and Sensibility Characters

Meet the Cast

Elinor Dashwood

Elinor and SenseIt's tough to be the practical one. Always having to shoot down the whimsical, maddening urges of others, always having to chime in and say, "Well, if you consider the facts…"...

Marianne Dashwood

Marianne and SenseThis is going to be brief: the fact of the matter is, as far as "sense" is concerned, Marianne just doesn't have it. She's always getting herself into a tizzy about this or that,...

Edward Ferrars

Edward Ferrars isn't entirely in control of his life. Actually, hold up – that's not quite right. It's better to note that at the beginning of the novel, he's not at all in control of his lif...

Colonel Brandon

Ever heard the expression, "Still waters run deep"? That's basically how we feel about Colonel Brandon. On the outside, he's a quiet guy – at 35, he's a bachelor approaching middle age, and h...

Lucy Steele

That Lucy Steele is certainly a tricky one. She's clever, manipulative, and self-serving – basically, everything you need to be to climb the social ladder to material success in Austen's worl...

John Willoughby

Willoughby is one serious player. He's a major pick-up artist, and he seems to leave a trail of broken hearts wherever he goes. At the end of the book, he comes right out and admits this to Elinor...

Mrs. Dashwood

Mrs. Dashwood is a lucky woman. She's fortunate enough to have had a husband to take care of her, then to have Elinor, a practical daughter, who took up the mantle of responsibility. She's kind of...

Fanny Dashwood (née Ferrars)

Fanny is totally a snob and a half. She basically only wants to associate with people richer or more important than she is. We think that it's really lame of her to constantly be dissing the Dashwo...

John Dashwood

We can't help but feel a little bad for John. On one hand, he's not exactly a good guy; after all, he basically leaves his sisters and stepmother penniless after their father dies. On the other han...

Mrs. Jennings

There's really not that much to Mrs. Jennings. She's a nice lady, but she can be on the annoying side (to put it mildly). Her roots are rather common – her husband was a businessman who made...

Sir John Middleton

Cyndi Lauper memorably noted that "Girls just wanna have fun." Well, that may be true, but Sense and Sensibility actually leads us to believe quite the contrary – most of the girls we're conc...

Lady Middleton

Lady Middleton is everything her mother, sisters, and husband are not: she's stately, calm, fashionable, and elegant. However, before you get too pleasant a picture of her, you should also know tha...

Margaret Dashwood

Poor Margaret really gets the short shrift here – her two older sisters always steal all of her thunder. All we need to know about Margaret is that she's just as romantic and silly as her mot...

Mrs. Charlotte Palmer

Mrs. Palmer is really a sweetheart. She's a giggly, silly, rather inane woman, but at her core she's a nice lady. Charlotte takes after her mother, Mrs. Jennings, in her love for gossip, and she wa...

Mr. Palmer

Poor Mr. Palmer. He's a rather serious man married to a rather silly young woman, and he's never quite recovered from this fact. We don't know much about Mr. Palmer, but what we do know paints a so...

Robert Ferrars

Robert Ferrars is a real jerk. There's no two ways about it; he's just incredibly lame. As Lucy says (before she's engaged to him, of course), he's a coxcomb, an arrogant and self-congratulatory lo...

Miss Anne Steele

Miss Steele is a harmless creature who somehow manages to do a lot of harm, if that makes sense. Sure, she's silly and annoying, but, like many of the characters here, she's not bad at heart. What...

Mrs. Ferrars

Mrs. Ferrars is a real piece of work. She's a stern matriarch who keeps a tight rein on her children – or tries to. She's got all the power, since she's control of the family's substantial fo...