Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience—or give…

In chapter 19 of Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars is ending a visit to the Dashwoods at Barton Cottage, in low spirits. His family, he has explained, could never settle on a profession for him: the church, which he preferred, was not smart enough for them. So he was sent to Oxford and has been “properly idle ever since”; his sons, he says, will be brought up to be as unlike him as possible.

Mrs Dashwood, Elinor’s mother, tries to cheer him: he wants, meaning lacks, nothing but patience, or hope, and his mother will surely make him independent in time. Edward replies that he may “defy many months to produce any good” to him. The reader later learns why: he is secretly engaged to Lucy Steele, while he loves Elinor.

Published in 1811 as the work of “a Lady”, Sense and Sensibility was Austen’s first novel to appear in print. Mrs Dashwood’s hopes are misplaced, since Edward’s mother will disinherit him, but her gentle formula has outlived the story.

Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 19 (Mrs Dashwood to Edward Ferrars), 1811

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work