Sense and Sensibility

First published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility follows the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, whose lives are unsettled when their father’s death leaves them with little fortune and forces them to leave their family home at Norland Park. As they enter a world governed by money, inheritance and marriage, the sisters encounter affection and disappointment in very different ways: Elinor meets uncertainty with restraint, while Marianne gives herself wholly to the intensity of feeling. Their contrasting temperaments shape a story of love, loyalty and the difficult art of understanding both oneself and others.

Austen’s first published novel is at once a subtle comedy of manners and a searching study of emotional life, questioning whether reason and sensibility are truly opposing forces. With her characteristic irony, she exposes the financial precariousness of women and the social conventions that govern their choices, while giving her characters a complexity that reaches beyond their apparent roles. Sense and Sensibility established many of the concerns that would define Austen’s fiction, and remains a richly observed portrait of the negotiations between feeling, judgement and social expectation.

From the book

“I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem and love.”

— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

On Sense and Sensibility

“The characters are happily delineated and admirably sustained.”

— The British Critic, 1812