To what extent is Chapter 1 of Sense and Sensibility a fitting introduction for the novel to come?

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To what extent is Chapter 1 of Sense and Sensibility a fitting introduction for the novel to come?

In this novel, Austen is setting out rules of conduct for women in a time when England was moving from a period a long stability to sudden and total change. Unless people knew how to behave, she thought, chaos would ensue.

England was entering the Industrial Revolution, having just seen the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. A new literary style was sweeping the nation, one to which Austen was much opposed: Romanticism. A dichotomy had arisen from the popularity of Romanticism within the literary groups of the time. It is possible to label these two groups as 'Sense' and 'Sensibility'. (The Gothic style also came about at this time, championed by those who had suddenly discovered freedom [both literary and, in some cases, physical] with the fall of oppressive governments surrounding England - Austen also wrote anti-Gothic novels, like Northanger Abbey.) Austen was definitely in support of 'Sense', which this novel shows so clearly.
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Austen argues her case for sense over sensibility by polarising the main protagonists on the subject. Marianne represents sensibility in all its dramatic, baroque and over-the-top glory, whilst Elinor represents sense (not cold, emotionless logic, but a tactful reason about situations). Although Austen shows the reader the downsides of both poles, sensibility is harshly and heavily punished and in the end sense wins out when Elinor gets to marry the man she wants and Marianne gives up sensibility and accepts an unconvincing happy ending with a socially respectable result. Austen, then, is writing not a novel, but a ...

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