Note: I disagree with Austen scholar Ellen Moody on her P&P chronology, which ignores the billeting of soldiers upon Meryton as a plot point dating the story, and disregards the modest but plainly stated age gap between Wickham and Darcy. I have my nitpicks with her S&S chronology as well (notably Edward’s age: how do you add nineteen to four and get twenty-five?) but I agree with her, for the purposes of this discussion, that the majority of the novel takes place from spring of 1797 to spring of 1798. Because of the varying ages of the major players in the story, their parents’ relationships probably took place at different times, and I will attempt to point out the respective timeframes as best I can.

-Mr. Henry Dashwood and his two wives: John Dashwood, Henry’s son by his first wife, married “very young” and “shortly after coming of age” and John’s son Harry is five-ish at the time of Henry’s death. Assuming John married at age twenty-one, and he and Fanny produced Harry nine months to a year later, John should be something like 27 at the start of the story, about eight years older than nineteen-year-old Elinor. Nobody seems to imply Henry Dashwood’s second marriage was at all untoward or hasty (and you know Fanny Dashwood was capable of going there), which in turn suggests that John’s mother died a minimum of two years before Henry Dashwood remarried, and possibly more. We might reasonably guess that the first Mrs. Dashwood died in childbirth, and John’s distinctive personality – gracious when it costs him nothing, but essentially self-centered – is the grownup version of the child who was rather spoiled by servants who felt sorry for him, and a father and step-mother who were determined to not treat him as being in any way “lesser” in their hearts than the children of the father’s second marriage.

–Given this mixture of information and surmise, we can put Henry Dashwood’s first marriage around 1769 or 1770 (maybe earlier, but not a lot earlier, for reasons we will see below). This means that it could theoretically be happening at the same time as the future Mrs. Bennet’s crush on/romance with a military man, but in a different part of the country. The first Mrs. Dashwood is said to have been wealthy in her own right, with a fortune settled on her son (half when the son comes of age, the other half when her husband passes). We might imagine a fragile Anne De Bourgh type, with dragonish relatives, rather far above the highly respectable Dashwoods in status, who drew up the marriage-articles with great firmness. Henry Dashwood seems to have been a kindly, good-natured man, and perhaps the vulnerabilities of this poor little rich girl spoke to that side of his personality.

–In a discussion of Col. Brandon’s age, the widow Dashwood(1) describes herself as being forty(2), which would make her twenty-one at the time of Elinor’s birth. Notably, in all the many discussions of the large age gap between Brandon and Marianne, nobody says or implies there was a similarly large age gap between Henry Dashwood and his second wife. If Henry married his first wife very young, like his son John after him, he would have been around twenty-nine or thirty by the time of Elinor’s birth, his eldest child by his second marriage. This would make the age gap between him and his second wife roughly the same as between Lizzie and Darcy in P&P.

–From here we can lay a few guesses about the romance between Henry Dashwood and his second wife. She is a passionate, impulsive, attractive woman, similar in looks and personality to her daughter Marianne. She doesn’t seem to have suffered through anything as dramatic as Marianne’s heartbreak over Willoughby, or she would have been warier around that kind of gentleman. She is very ready to believe Willoughby’s insinuations that his cousin Mrs. Smith rules his life, so it is possible she had rather overbearing relatives growing up, although not up there with Fanny Price’s or Clarissa Harlow’s overbearing relatives.

–She is deeply moved by Brandon’s long, silent, hopeless admiration of Marianne when she learns about it, and she immediately assumes, which her daughter Elinor doubts, that Brandon fell for Marianne at first sight. Based on what intrigues the Widow Dashwood about Brandon, I imagine Widower Henry as a polite, courtly, helpful kind of guy, rather sad, who fell for the second Mrs. Dashwood around 1778, very early in his acquaintance with her, but he was slow to express his feelings for fear she wasn’t interested. Obviously, love found a way. Try not to think too hard about the Dashwood women’s differing and evolving reactions to Col. Brandon, who in this interpretation has many traits in common with Henry Dashwood but possibly a better head for business, and definitely the grimmer qualities that surviving combat gives a man.

-We know very little about John Willoughby’s family. There’s an easily overlooked reference about how “any young man of five and twenty” would automatically agree with the literary opinions of a girl like Marianne, which seems to fix his age at 25, and his parents’ marriage around 1771-1772 or somewhat earlier. Willoughby seems to have no living relatives closer than an older cousin, Mrs. Smith of Allenham Court.

— His own estate is apparently worth 600-700 pounds, and for all his complaints about his debts, he never attempts to blame his father for his financial situation, which implies that his father was at least better with money, although possibly (we don’t really know) a charming rake like his son. Willoughby treats Elinor almost like a mother figure in his last meeting with her, wheedling at her like a small child. I don’t know whether this reflects his relationship with Mrs. Smith or his relationship with his own mother. Basically, the only thing we know about Willoughby’s parents is that they are dead, have been dead long enough for him not to play the orphan card when angsting at people, and his parents, or whoever managed the kid and the estate after their death, were better at handling money than at raising children. I personally would try to figure out what other Austen parents were courting/marrying around 1771-1772, and then write the elder Willoughbys as foils for them. If you would prefer to imagine Willoughby’s family history as being similar to Frank Churchill’s (moderately well-off man marries higher status woman who dies early, woman’s family swoops down and takes over the rearing of the man’s son) only without the name change and with a dead father instead of a live one, that’s probably workable too.

-Edward Ferrars is around 23 in 1797; Lucy says they’ve been engaged four years at that point, and Elinor mentally describes him as having been nineteen at the time of the engagement. His parents were thus married around 1774 or sometime earlier; his mother doesn’t seem like the kind who would enjoy intimacy enough to get started having kids right away, so there’s room to handwave the exact date.(3) His mother we’ve met: a nasty piece of work, wealthy in her own right. Edward’s father seems to have made some effort to shield his shy, sensitive eldest son from the bullying and abuse that went on at public school by sending Edward to Mr. Pratt’s school in Longstaple. At least, it’s not clear why Mrs. Ferrars would have decided to do this on her own, when her younger and preferred son Robert went to a fancy public school. Edward’s “gap year” after he was done with Mr. Pratt’s(4) school and before he went to Oxford might be consistent with his father dying suddenly and him being at loose ends because nobody cared enough to do anything with him. Fanny Dashwood (nee Ferrars) is a mini-Me of her mother; Robert resembles his brother only to the extent of being somewhat naive and easily manipulated by women. They show none of the signs of a possibly more benign parental influence that Edward does.

–The late Mr. Ferrars perhaps resembled his son in personality, with possibly the added trauma of a public school in his past. His marriage was something both families wanted to secure their fortunes, and he entered it out of a sense of duty (possibly someone used the “betrothed to each other in your cradles” line on him, more successfully than Lady Catherine did). He may have had some romantic disappointment, either a woman who friendzoned him (Willoughby’s mother? Second Mrs. Henry Dashwood?) or someone he only met after his engagement, and had a one-sided attraction to, but he felt he couldn’t honorably withdraw from the engagement. I say this because Mr. Ferrar’s confiding such a thing to Edward late in Mr. Ferrars’ life, would help motivate Edward in his handling of the relationship with Lucy, and family stories about Mr. Ferrars being friendzoned or ignored by women he was attracted to would perhaps help encourage Edward in his initial belief that Elinor was not attracted to him (implied by his statement that he thought he was only risking his own heart, not hers, in befriending her).

–on a related note, and I am paraphrasing here, Elinor thinks Lucy was possibly a nicer and less cynical person when Edward first knew her. Worth keeping in mind, if you want to do fanfic about this episode in Edward’s life.

Next time: That rather grim family, the elder Brandons. Also, the Middletons and Jenningses.

(1) She is mostly likely an Elinor like her eldest daughter, although there is a slight chance that one of her daughters is named after her husband’s spinster aunt who kept house for Henry’s uncle at Norland until the uncle died.

(2) You will occasionally find Brandon-bashers being all “herr-derr, should have gone for the mother, since she’s just like Marianne, and the mom’s not that old, could even still have had kids.” Yeah, well, having kids at forty is a roll of the dice even with modern medicine; it was a dangerous roll of many, many dice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A man who wanted an heir of his body and also felt some responsibility towards the mother of that heir, would have chosen a younger and more fertile woman, to increase the chances of both mother and child surviving.

(3) For various reasons, I don’t think her husband would have made her do much of anything she didn’t want to.

(4) Every time I see Mr. Pratt’s name in this book, I think of William Pratt (stage name: Boris Karloff) and imagine Mr. Pratt being like the more benign sort of Karloff character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88wMrLGch9w