The Making of Margaret Dashwood
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is famously about two sisters: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Very few words in Austen’s book share information about the third and youngest sister, Margaret. The Making of Margaret Dashwood seeks to fix this problem by focusing entirely on her.
Margaret Dashwood only wants more choices for what to do with her life, but what is even available to her? She doesn’t see a lot of prospects for marrying, as the only young man to come her way recently is annoying and very different from her. The book picks up shortly after the time Sense and Sensibility left off, though it’s entirely possible to enjoy this book without ever having read Austen. Elinor, Marianne, and other favorites make appearances here, and we get to see how their lives ended up, even as we focus on teenaged Margaret and the adventurous young man she’s just met.
The book is more than a simple romance, though, including historical figures like William Wilberforce that allow a window into slavery, politics, and human rights in early 19th-century England. Carol Pratt Bradley weaves old and new characters together seamlessly and writes in Austen’s style without seeming pretentious.
