​Scholars generally agree that Sense & Sensibility began life as an epistolary novel, a novel in letters. This is a form of novel which was rapidly losing popularity at the time, which may be why Austen re-drafted it as a narrative.
        It is puzzling to try and backwards-engineer the Sense & Sensbility we have today as an epistolary novel – who is writing letters to whom? The critic Brian Southam surmised that Elinor and Marianne each had a girl friend, a confidante, that they wrote to, which means that in the re-write these best friends were excised. I doubt it; I don't think Austen would eliminate two major characters from a book. I think it's more likely that Marianne and Elinor are separated for most of the time and are writing to each other. Perhaps only Marianne went to London with Mrs. Jennings, in pursuit of Willoughby, and poured out her hopes, her fears, and her final betrayal in letters to Elinor.
   With such a version, you wouldn't need Margaret, the third sister, as a character because as I noted in my Mother's Day post, Margaret's only useful function in the novel is to keep her mother company when both of the older girls go to London. So perhaps Austen didn't edit out two female friends, maybe she edited in Margaret.
     But on the other hand, the novel as we know it is told through Elinor’s consciousness. And since she doesn’t confide in anyone, what would her letters say? “Having a quiet time in Devon, I visited with Lucy Steele, everything's fine, don't worry about me”? I can't explain how Austen would have handled the Edward-Lucy-Elinor plot with letters.
     Still, there are some recognizably 18th century vestiges in the novel. One is the frequency of the Johnsonian cadence.

• His abilities in every respect improve as much upon acquaintance as his manners and person.
• In showing kindness to his cousins therefore he had the real satisfaction of a good heart; and in settling a family of females only in his cottage, he had all the satisfaction of a sportsman…
• My gratitude will be insured immediately by any information tending to that end, and hers must be gained by it in time. 
• We met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct.
• Do not, my dearest Elinor, let your kindness defend what I know your judgment must censure.

      Another 18th century remainder is the “inset narrative.”  That’s when one character takes center stage and explains their backstory, as Colonel Brandon does in Sense & Sensibility. The device of the inset narrative would have been a familiar one to Austen's readers; it appears in other 18th century novels. In Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, Mary Waldron gives the examples of the novels of Henry MacKenzie, or Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. Austen breaks up this story-within-a-story with exclamations and reactions from Elinor, and she tells us that Brandon has to interrupt himself to try and regain his composure. In the original version, his tale could have been told in more detail in a series of letters to Elinor, with breaks at the dramatic parts: ("even now the recollection of what I suffered—”)​

      In the inset narrative, Colonel Brandon tells Elinor about how his elopement with Eliza, the girl he loved, was thwarted. He left England with a broken heart and went with his regiment to the East Indies. He came back to find Eliza dying, and she entrusted her illegitimate daughter to him. He brought her up, that is, he provided for her in the same way that Harriet Smith was provided for in Emma. Who knows what he planned to do for her when she grew up and got engaged?  But instead, Eliza was seduced by Willoughby. “Such,” said Colonel Brandon, after a pause, “has been the unhappy resemblance between the fate of mother and daughter! and so imperfectly have I discharged my trust!” 
    Brandon fought a duel with Willoughby: “we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.” Perhaps Willoughby fired first and missed, and Brandon fired his pistol into the air in a gesture of contempt. And for what it's worth, Brandon has presumably faced danger in battle while Willoughby loafed around in England.  
​    The man that Marianne thinks is her beau ideal turns out to have feet of clay. As Mary Waldron says, Willoughby talks romantically but acts rationally in abandoning Marianne for a wealthy heiress.
      Colonel Brandon's story, then, is like the plot of a sentimental and tragic novel. He loved Eliza, and now he loves Marianne, with a chivalric kind of love. He has an elevated, idealistic view of Womankind. He is horrified when he hears of Eliza’s divorce because he knows it means she’s committed adultery. This is enormously painful to him; better that she had died like a sentimental heroine than stooped to this kind of dishonour. On top of that, he gives a valuable living away to Edmund Bertram – a man he barely knows -- in the assumption that he is helping him marry the girl he loves.
    Brandon loves Marianne silently and hopelessly. It's so poignant when John Dashwood says to him: “one must allow that there is something very trying to a young woman who has been a beauty in the loss of her personal attractions. You would not think it perhaps, but Marianne was remarkably handsome a few months ago; quite as handsome as Elinor. Now you see it is all gone.” Austen doesn't give us Colonel Brandon's answer. He's just standing there quietly, his heart bleeding for Marianne.
       Willoughby never was the romantic hero. Willoughby was an imposter. Colonel Brandon stands revealed as the true romantic hero.
     But not according to Helena Kelly, who casts a jaundiced eye on all of Austen's heroes except for Darcy in her book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical. She suspects Brandon of lying about his relationship with Eliza. She thinks he seduced Eliza and got her pregnant, then scampered off to India when she got married to his brother. When he judges Eliza for slipping from the paths of virtue, he's covering up his own guilt in the matter.
     Brandon is already in Kelly’s bad books because of his India connection. Serving with the army or with the East India Company’s army in India means that he’s a colonial exploiter. "Brandon is tainted by association." ​

   It's true that public opinion about India was mixed in Austen's time and it became a long-standing political issue as well. I could go on a long digression about India and colonialism. But the question is, how did Brandon's colonial connection go down when Austen published the book? The knock against "nabobs" -- guys who got rich in India -- is that they were vulgar social climbers. Some people also condemned the exploitation of India. But on the other hand, the East Indies was an outlet and an opportunity for the younger sons of the gentry, and Austen's readers were the gentry.  Brandon is not a "nabob" -- that is, he didn't go to India to get rich, he went over as an army officer. 
   I'll refer you again to historian Rory Muir's book, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen's England. ​Our Colonel Brandon, like all younger sons, had to find a profession, and in those days, his options were severely limited: basically the army, the navy, the church or the law. He was limited by social strictures and, because it was a pre-industrial age, there weren't that many job choices out there. Brandon can't start his own environmental consultancy or IT start-up. So he did what thousands of younger sons did -- he joined the army. So too did the foremost hero of the age, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. He was a younger son who went to India. 
​     Austen's readers would have been thoroughly familiar with this scenario -- it was what many of the young men in their own families had done or would do. It would be a mistake to think that many readers blamed Brandon for going to India, even if British involvement with India was criticized at the time. 

     I only mention this because Countess Cowper had no objection to giving her blessing to a book which portrayed the nobility as decadent, selfish, immoral, people. The idea that it was daring or revolutionary in Austen’s time to attack the extravagance and corruption of the titled classes is just not accurate. Decrying the excesses of the rich and privileged was an extremely common topic for a novel, almost expected, one might say. Novels were expected to convey a moral lesson and the nobility were an easy target. (For more spendthrift, stupid nobles, check out Maria Edgeworth's Belinda or her Castle Rackrent.) Readers of the day loved to tsk-tsk over the rakish young viscount who loses everything at the gaming table, or Lady So-and-So who bankrupts herself giving lavish entertainments to vie with another society hostess. These characters populate the pages of Modern Times. Helme moralizes over them but she provides the salacious details as well. Apart from Sir Charles, the virtuous people in Modern Times are all from the middling classes.

    Elizabeth Helme probably never saw a lavish masked ball or a high-class gambling den in her life, but unlike Austen, Helme never drew back from depicting scenes and places where she had never been. A brief flashback segment of the novel is set in the West Indies, where a dissolute, vapid baronet and his selfish, shallow, wife and their spoiled, bratty daughter (check, check and check) live for a few years after they've squandered their inheritance. I think the main reason the author sends them to the West Indies is that in novels, its a place where people got rich quickly. The baronet obligingly gets rich and then dies, so Lady Neville and Fanny go back to England to be reunited with the older daughter Elizabeth. At the same time the widow meets up with her brother-in-law Sir Charles. He is upright and decent, so she dislikes him, but she has to be civil because he controls the family purse-strings. 
   In the opening scene of the novel, the carriage conveying the widow, her spoilt daughter, and Sir Charles arrives at the old family estate. From the road overlooking the church yard they observe a funeral procession for a servant, with Elizabeth walking behind the coffin. Mom is horrified: “Can a daughter of mine… trudge on foot, like a common pauper, to the funeral of a domestic!”
    A Brontë could have made so much of a scene like this – the tolling church bell, the mourners, the beautiful girl walking behind the coffin, the carriage silhouetted against the setting sun. However, Helme is not Brontë. Though Helme was praised for the moral tone of her novels, one of her reviewers said she should not “flatter herself with any expectation of figuring among the foremost of our literary countrywomen."  
​    At any rate, Lady Neville, upon learning that smallpox is raging in the village, quickly turns the carriage around, but Sir Charles jumps out to comfort his niece Elizabeth, and to visit the grave of his long-lost sweetheart. Then we meet the virtuous clergyman Mr. Willoughby and his family, and the virtuous but poor clergyman Mr. Griffiths and his family.
     Then, long story short, everybody goes to live in London where some idle cads who have gambled their inheritances away set their sights on the young heiresses Elizabeth and Fanny. Fanny and Elizabeth are kept in the background for long stretches of the novel; as though Helme wasn’t interested in them or didn’t know how to make them interesting.  The girls do the usual heroine stuff: they are covered with confusion, they blush, they turn of a deathly pallor and faint dead away when the plot calls for it.

   “Fanny had been born amidst folly, and nurtured by caprice and extravagance; most fortunately for her, a strong natural sense, though not early cultivated, and some happy concurring circumstances, timely rescued her from impending danger, and was finally conducive to her quitting the paths of error, and becoming a rational being.” 
​     There are three weddings at the end (Miss Griffiths the governess finds love as well), but unlike Colonel Brandon, Sir Charles Neville doesn't remarry and there is no hint of a romance for him. He is too old, perhaps, to ever feel or inspire affection again.
   Since Modern Times is a posthumous novel, possibly Elizabeth Helme was dying when she wrote it; the happy wrapping-up at the end is rather abrupt. Out of the blue, a long-lost relative returns from India with a staggering fortune and the virtuous get their reward here on earth. Although Helme is critical of slavery in the West Indian part of the narrative, she still uses the a "golden nabob" as a plot device. As I’ve learned, “Uncle So-and-So died and left you his dubiously-acquired fortune” is an exceedingly common plot device for the era and even Charlotte Brontë wasn't above using it in Jane Eyre.