Jane Austen's Short Lexicon of Fine Names

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http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions/no36/jane-austens-short-lexicon-of-fine-names/

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journal articles
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Margie Burns, Jane Austen’s Short Lexicon of Fine Names, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, No. 36 2014, http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions/no36/jane-austens-short-lexicon-of-fine-names/

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©2014 The Jane Austen Society of North America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Abstract

LIKE MR. WESTON AND EMMA, Jane Austen plays games with first names. She plays an especially tricky game with given names in Sense and Sensibility. of the five most prominent male characters, three are named John without the reader's feeling the sameness, and to heighten the challenge, the three are the men mentioned most often throughout the text--John Dashwood, Sir John Middleton, and Willoughby. The reader does not register that these characters are mentioned more often than the successful romantic leads, Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, or that the name John is used on more than one hundred pages; no one reels away from Sense and Sensibility overwhelmed by all the Johns. Austen seems to have challenged herself to see how many times she could assign the same first name to different characters without its becoming obtrusive, or to see how effectively she could prevent the multiplied name from becoming obtrusive, in a game played against herself, for herself, and probably for family, since neither Austen's father nor any of her six brothers was named John.