By showing us how two sisters handle their love relationships, Jane Austen sets out to demonstrate the dangers of excessive sensibility. To say that Elinor Dashwood stands for sense and her sister Marianne for sensibility is to put the case too baldly. Elinor is sensible and prudent, but she too has strong feelings. It is just that she keeps them to herself; feelings should be private things, she - and her author - believe. Marianne is not without sense, but is has been overridden by the almost morbid cultivation of her sensibility. She possesses genuinely strong feelings, which she feeds and glories in, whether joy or grief. The conventions of society are beneath her notice, because she considers herself a superior person.
Most readers find Marianne's warmth of heart, spontaneity and openness of manners bewitching. They suit the spirit of our age better than the stiff decorum she herself scorns. And Marianne's transgressions of society's rules hurt nobody more than herself, so there seems little to forgive her for. Most of the characters she is rude to are either too obtuse to notice - like the loveable but limited Mrs Jennings - or they are despicable anyway.
Nevertheless, such is Jane Austen's skill in manipulating our responses, we favour Elinor's point of view. We see most of the action of the novel through her eyes. Elinor, for all her calm good sense and self-control, is never insufferably priggish. We know that inwardly she suffers deeply, though the people around her have no idea. We understand that having a mother who can be as romantically unworldly as Marianne herself, almost foists on Elinor the role of the prudent one of the family. Elinor is finally saved from priggishness by her ability to laugh wryly at herself.