People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them. (Fanny Dashwood)

"Sense and Sensibility". Elinor is "Sense" and Marianne "Sensibility". Austen is emphasising again how English women should behave in society, and she seems to regard Elinor as the proper model. Marianne's excessively emotional approach to life could potentially cause her ruin. In fact, it appears she narrowly escaped a possibly shameful end when it is revealed what Willoughby has been responsbile for! In the ned, Elinor recieves her prize for being rational and patient when she marries Edward Ferrars; Marianne learns that handsome men who read poetry may not lead to happiness, and she is better off married to someone more respectable and trustworthy!
There are a lot of scenes from this novel that will remind you of "Pride and Prejudice" (the scenery and the horses). Some of the charcaters may be similar (e.g. Wickham and Willoughby), or completely different (Mrs Bennet and Mrs Dashwaood). Both novels are written as seen through the eyes of the sisters with sense (Lizzy and Elinor).

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"

Thus opens the first chapter of Jane Austen's masterpiece "Pride and Prejudice". After some 1,300 years of English literature we are actually hearing a woman's voice. Not that there were no women writers before Austen, nor that she was recognised in her own time. However, she is now accepted as one of the three "giants" of English literature after Chaucer and Shakespeare, and that is an achievement.

Today, at a time when women have rights to education and employment and have more legal protection, it might seem that Austen's subject matter is trivial-love and marriage. But there are several things we must keep in mind about the period in which she was writing. Firstly, marriage was not a matter of love, but of logic and convenience. People married for financial reasons or for status. Girls had no right of inheritance, and were left on the streets if their fathers died, unless they married or had a kind relative to look after them.

While Jane Austen is not as fiercly "feminist" as her contemporary, Mary Shelley, and it appears that she accepts the fate of the women of her time, her character Lizzie Bennet, the heroine of "Pride and Prejudice" has an admirable independance. She does not want to marry for money, but for a deep love, and she refuses her cousin's proposal, although the marriage would solve all her family's problems. She also refuses Darcy's proposal in the middle of the novel, because she refused to be humiliated by him. He constantly reminded her of her lowness in station in comparison to his own nobility. However, throughout the remaining half of the novel, both Darcy and Lizzie come to know each other and themselves, and when Darcy proposes again at the end of the novel, Lizzie accepts because he sees her as equal and she realises how inherently good he is. In this way, Austen allows her heroine to have some choice in her marriage and preserves her dignity.

Blake's "London"

With the day section, we read Blake's "London":

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening Church appals;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most, thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

In this poem he is attacking the corruption that urbanisation brought to English society. People are unhappy, afraid; and often this fear is of their own making - the "mind forg'd manacles". He attacks the Church for its hypocrisy-while it claims to be the defender of the meek and helpless, it refuses to allow chimney sweeps to enter churches to worship. He also attacks the monarchy, saying it is the cause of war and the needless death of soldiers. The image he paints is Hell on Earth.

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

William Blake. Accepted into the "Romantic Canon" after his death, as he was viewed as being insane while he was alive.Like John Keats, he was a "Cockney" and recieved a minimal education, as was normal for the children of the lowest possible respectable class of English society. Perhaps it was his lack of formal education that allowed his creative tendencies to flourish.

A fierce supporter of individualism, he stated that "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's", and that's what he did-create a whole new method of writing poetry. His method was "dialectic", that is, he combined two opposing forces to synthesise a third, more powerful force. Hence the titles of his books of peotry "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". Blake's world of poetry was a mystical, new universe.

We looked at two sets of complementary poems-"The Lamb" and "The Chimney Sweeper" from "Innocence" and "The Tyger" and "The Chimney Sweeper" from "Experience", and we saw how in order for innocence to be "good", some evil is necessary!