A Literary Precedent for Greens’ Feelings

Senseless Sensibility

Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility* provides
The Greens with their text:

Marianne Dashwood’s
conjecture of one moment
is belief the next.

For fine-feeling folk,
to wish is to hope and to
hope is to expect,

overvaluing
feeling; for reason feeling
reason to reject.

 

* In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Ch. IV), Elinor “knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.”