“I require so much!”
Marianne Dashwood made this impassioned declaration in chapter 3 of Jane Austen’s 409-page Sense and Sensibility and sometime into Georgia Oakley’s 2026 movie adaptation currently playing in theatres. Those four words, uttered with such flagrant confidence, caused my Indian body to cringe reflexively. As a lifelong Janeite, Marianne’s demands have always made me uncomfortable in ways I’ve never been able to justify. Maybe because, growing up watching my grandmother, mother and aunts—especially how they waited day and night on the men around them—I learnt that wanting too much is not very becoming of a ‘good woman’. Marianne Dashwood demands that her future husband’s taste should “in every point coincide with my own”, that he must love the same books and music as she does, that his eagerness should “know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue”. I did not like Marianne, not because she is inherently unlikable. It’s because she rejected the one thing Indian womanhood hinges on: shrinking herself to make space for others.
Online, everyone is very good at telling Indian women to know their worth. My feed is filled with self-love podcasts and conversations about emotional availability. We have an entire vocabulary around recognising the bare minimum, submitting our icks and asking for the love we deserve. Yet, when a woman like Marianne Dashwood actually does it, we dismiss her as too brash. We may tell ourselves that we now have the agency to seek love, that we city girls are financially independent enough to, like Marianne, marry strictly for passion, unlike Elinor, who is encumbered by the practical realities of money. But the truth lies in the numbers: In a 2018 survey of more than 1,60,000 households, 93% of married Indians confessed that their union was the product of an arranged marriage. Higher levels of education have done little to reduce these numbers; around 87% of Indians with postgraduate or master’s degrees still prefer to enter the arranged marriage market rather than fall in love organically.
The thing is, we like the idea of Indian women knowing their worth only when they do it in measured ways. We’ve never known what to do with those who go off-script. Which is why, when Dia Mirza posts an image of herself with the caption ‘A working wife extends a husband’s life’ on Karwa Chauth or Swara Bhasker questions whether the ending of Padmaavat suggests that rape is the end of a woman’s life, most of the pitchforks wielded against them are held by the hands of other Indian women.
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood represent two strains of womanhood in India. We’re the eldest daughters who always understand; we’re the sisters whose lives orbit around our brothers’; we’re the wives who do not make a fuss even after being disrespected at dinner. We’re Elinor Dashwood. We’re who society asks us to be. But there are also the rebellious Mariannes among us—spectacularly impulsive, even when they risk misreading people and their intentions. Yes, none of it makes her an ideal woman, but it’s not fair to turn Marianne into a cautionary tale either. After all, even in the Regency era, she managed to enjoy an important luxury that Indian women are seldom given access to: make a mistake and have a breakdown over it.
Perhaps this is why we continue to judge Marianne Dashwood while privately mourning our fifth situationship of the year. Like Elinor, we show only the most restrained parts of our heart on Instagram, even as, like Marianne, we simp over a man in private. What kind of conditioning makes us rejoice when Marianne enters her ‘sensibility’ era and marries the steadfast Colonel Brandon, never mind the 18-year age gap between them, or the fact that Marianne is 16 when they first meet?
