Colonel Brandon is a fictional character in Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility. A quiet and reserved man, he forms an attachment to the younger of the Dashwood sisters, Marianne.
Background
The younger son of a landed family in Dorsetshire, Brandon made a career in the army, until at the death of his brother he inherited Delaford. We are told that at that point the estate was encumbered, but it appears that at the time of the book's action they had all been resolved: “His property here, his place, his house, - everything in such respectable and excellent condition!”.
Character
In terms of activities and life experience, Colonel Brandon is perhaps the most Byronic among Austen's leading men. He attempts to elope with his teenage cousin Eliza for whom he has a passionate attachment; he has the mortification of seeing her married for mercenary reasons to his elder brother; he serves his country abroad and returns to rescue the dying Eliza from a debtors' prison; he raises her illegitimate daughter, only to have to fight a duel with her seducer; and he forms a second, passionate attachment to another vibrant seventeen-year-old girl, Marianne. His very name links him to the rake in Richardson's Pamela – Mr B. of Brandon Hall – and his experiences are in many ways a benign retelling of the latter's life. In social life and in courtship, the Colonel may be considered an uninteresting character. Unlike the traditional romantic suitor, the Colonel is melancholy, taciturn, he cancels expeditions, intrudes at inconvenient moments, speaks only to Elinor and not to Marianne. He is set up in opposition to John Willoughby – the latter having all the romantic trappings, discourse, and marries for money; while the outwardly dull Colonel marries for love. Despite this, critical dissatisfaction with the starkness of the typology, and with the book's outcome, is pervasive. The Colonel seemed to lack appeal to the 20th-century reader, making his eventual success in wooing seem unlikely. For a figure closer to Jane Austen's time like Henry Austin Dobson, however, the marriage was a mark of her realism: “Every one does not get a Bingley or a Darcy ; but...not a few enthusiasts like Marianne decline at last upon middle-aged colonels with flannel waistcoats”. Some scholars have seen parallels between Colonel Brandon and Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India. Hastings had been rumoured to be the biological father of Eliza de Feuillide, who was Jane Austen's cousin. Linda RobinsonWalker argues that Hastings "haunts Sense and Sensibility in the character of Colonel Brandon": both left for India at age seventeen; both may have had illegitimate daughters named Eliza; both participated in a duel.
