Despite his endless flirting with Marianne (including buying her a horse and keeping a lock of her hair), Willoughby reveals to her that he was never interested in her romantically—an example of situational irony. Readers assume—as Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood do—that Edward has asked Marianne to marry him and is just in London for work-related matters when, in fact, he is in London in order to find a wealthy woman to marry (which he finds in Miss Grey).
As Willoughby writes in a letter to Marianne after ignoring her at a party he attended with Miss Grey:
That I should ever have meant more, you will allow to be impossible, when you understand that my affections have been long engaged elsewhere, and it will not be many weeks, I believe, before this engagement is fulfilled.
Though readers later learn that Miss Grey is the one who wrote this letter and forced Edward to transcribe it (threatened, as she was, by Marianne’s romantic letters to Edward that she found and read), this is still a shocking moment of situational irony where Edward’s entire character comes into question.
The moment that Marianne reads Edward’s letter is also a moment of dramatic irony, as, immediately after reading it, she tells Elinor that she has no idea how she—Marianne—must feel when, really, Elinor is silently suffering over Edward’s similar betrayal of her for another woman. The underlying irony comes through in their conversation in which Elinor implies that there are painful matters of which Marianne is unaware:
“I cannot, I cannot,” cried Marianne; “leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me; but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! Happy, happy Elinor, you cannot have an idea of what I suffer.”
“Do you call me happy, Marianne? Ah! if you knew!”
Austen is known for the layers of irony she is able to weave into a single text, and this moment is a prime example of that.
In an example of dramatic irony, Margaret, Marianne, and Mrs. Dashwood don’t know—as Elinor and readers do—that Edward has been engaged to Lucy Steele for four years. Because of this, they talk about him as if he’s still the perfect suitor for Elinor, offering him compliments that Elinor accepts silently because, as the sister who has “sense,” she believes that she must keep painful feelings and truths to herself.
In one scene, Marianne even interrupts a tense moment where Edward finds himself alone with Elinor and Lucy (two women he has led to believe he would marry) by singing his praises:
“I am very sure that conscience only kept Edward from Harley Street. And I really believe he has the most delicate conscience in the world; the most scrupulous in performing every engagement, however minute, and however it may make against his interest or pleasure. He is the most fearful of giving pain, of wounding expectation, and the most incapable of being selfish, of any body I ever saw.”
While Marianne believes herself simply to be doting on her future brother-in-law, she is inadvertently highlighting how Edward has not at all lived up to his perceived character traits of selflessness and conscientiousness. Readers, like Elinor and Edward, know the truth, however—that he is actively hurting both women by withholding his true feelings from them.
