Love affairs

Marrianne Dashwood just found out that Edward Ferrars is going to marry another women other than the one he really loves. She believes that he loves her sister, Elinor. When she tells Elinor what she has learned, Elinor reacts calmly--too calmly for Marrianne. You see, Elinor already knew Edward was going to marry another women but couldn't tell anyone because it was a secret that someone had told her.

Marriane questions Edward's passion--and Elinor's for Edward. "Can he really love her?," she tests Elinor. "Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn, to be on fire all full of passion..." "What do you know my heart?" Elinor responds, "What do you know of anything but your own suffering. For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to dicuss it with a single soul. Having it forced on me by the very person whose prior claims laid ruin to all my hopes. I have endured her exulations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you."

Sense and Sensibility is about a family of a mother and three daughters. The husband and father had been married before, and the first wife died, so he married again. In the first marriage, he had a son. When the father dies at the beginning of the movie, all of the family fortune and the family estate goes to the son. On his death bed, the father pledges his son to take care of his second wife and daughters. The son says he will.

But then John Dashwood (James Fleet) and his wife, Fanny (Harriet Walter), decide not to give them hardly any money. The mother and the daughters must move out of their home and live in a cottage on the estate of the mother's cousin, Mr. Palmer (Hugh Laurie) and his wife Charlotte(Imelda Stubbs).

But right before they leave their own house to live with Mr. Palmer, Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson), the oldest of the sisters, meets Fanny's brother, Edward Ferrars(Hugh Grant). They seem to fall in love, but Fanny's family would never let her brother marry a poor person. So they separate with just the hope that they might get together again.

Then one day Elinor meets Lucy Steel (Imogen Stubbs), and Lucy tells her that she has been secretly engaged to Edward for five years. She doesn't know that Elinor and Edward had fallen in love the year before.

Is Edward a two-timer or is there an explanation?

I won't tell you any more about this part of the movie, but I will tell you one thing: you should watch the movie.

Sense and Sensibility, with a screen play adapted by Emma Thompsen from Jane Austen's first published novel, is a great movie.