Sense and Sensibility
- Written By Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
- Jane Austen
Two ways of feeling. One world to feel it in.
The Dashwood sisters arrive at Barton Cottage with little money, uncertain prospects, and the full weight of genteel society pressing down on them. Elinor, the elder, has learned to hold her feelings close, a silence that passes, in their world, for virtue. Marianne has learned nothing of the sort. She loves as she reads: passionately and completely, with no reservations.
When Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby enter their lives, the novel’s true tensions surface. The two sisters must navigate very different modes of living, and the consequences of each, within a social landscape that punishes excess while quietly rewarding restraint.
Austenโs first novel is, in many ways, her most unsparing. Neither sense nor sensibility escapes scrutiny, and both demand a price. What the novel keeps asking, and never quite answers, is which price a woman can actually afford to pay.
“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy โ it is disposition alone.โ
About the Author
- Jane Austen
Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman. In her teens she began drafting sharp, satirical pieces exploring themes of self-deception and social performance. She spent much of her adult life revising and circulating manuscripts that would not reach print until her thirties.
Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811 under the designation “By a Lady,” was the first. Austen paid for its publication herself, on a commission arrangement, and stood to lose money if it failed. The gamble paid off. Her debut sold out within two years, and Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813. Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion completed a body of work produced almost entirely on small sheets of paper in the margins of domestic life.ย
Austen died in 1817, at age 41, long before her reputation settled into canon. Her novels have never gone out of print, continuing to challenge, and deftly outmaneuver, the very social worlds that once constrained her.
