Age
Margaret is 13 when the novel begins.
Family and Situation
Margaret is the youngest daughter of Henry Dashwood by his second wife. She is sister to Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and half-sister to John Dashwood, making her sister-in-law to his wife Fanny.
As a toddler, Margaret would have moved with her family from Stanhill to Norland Park when her great uncle invited her father to come live at the estate he would one day inherit.
Margaret has ￡1,000 from her Uncle Dashwood, as a concession for being so entirely cut out of the Norland estate. Though her father had intended to provide for her, he had “only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal” and died before he could save more from the earnings of Norland Park.
Character
Margaret seldom speaks in the course of the novel, so we have little opportunity to know her character. The narrator says that she “was a good-humored, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.”
