That little paragraph at the end of Ch. 1 always makes me feel sorry for the afterthought Miss Dashwood, Margaret. Her sisters are interesting, and will have the novel's plots woven around their emotions and thoughts, and the events that happen to them, but poor Margaret! Romantic, lacking sense, with no prophecy of future importance in this early sketch. No wonder some of the adaptations imbue her with attributes she does not have in the book. How could we have her acted on screen as blankly as she is drawn here? A viewing audience needs more of a hook!

I have a not-so-secret wish to steal any time machine that comes my way and get a gander at Elinor and Marianne, the epistolary novel upon which Sense and Sensibility is based. I hypothesize that Margaret was the correspondent needed at some point in THAT work to transmit information (that adults would not), and is therefore a left-over.