Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
50 chapters
4.09from 1,334,729 ratingson Goodreads
Their father's death leaves the Dashwood sisters and their mother on five hundred a year and dependent on the kindness of a cousin. Elinor keeps her feelings to herself and Marianne broadcasts hers, and both of them are in love with men they have reason to doubt. Austen's first published novel, and her most exacting about what money does to affection.
About the book
Published in 1811 as by A Lady, Austen’s first novel begins with a death and an arithmetic problem. Norland passes entire to the Dashwoods’ half-brother, whose wife talks him out of the allowance he promised his dying father, and Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters leave for a cottage in Devon on five hundred a year. Elinor, who keeps her feelings to herself, has left behind an attachment to Edward Ferrars; Marianne, who does not, meets John Willoughby in the rain and considers reserve a kind of dishonesty. Both sisters are then disappointed, and the novel sets their two ways of bearing it against each other without simply preferring one. Underneath the courtship is a clear-eyed account of money: who has it, who can be cut off, what a second son is worth on the marriage market, and what happens to unmarried women when an estate goes to somebody else.
Characters
Elinor Dashwood — Protagonist
Nineteen and the family’s only prudent member, keeping her own disappointment entirely to herself.
Marianne Dashwood — Elinor’s sister
Seventeen, musical and romantic, who regards concealment of feeling as a form of falsehood.
Edward Ferrars — Suitor
Elinor’s quiet, awkward attachment, bound by a promise made at nineteen that he will not break.
John Willoughby — Suitor
Handsome, charming and everything Marianne has read about, with a history in the next county.
Colonel Brandon — Suitor
Thirty-five, silent and wearing a flannel waistcoat, with the one story in the book nobody guesses.
Mrs Jennings — Neighbour
Vulgar, teasing and relentlessly matchmaking, and in the event the kindest person in the novel.
Lucy Steele — Rival
Who confides a secret engagement to Elinor precisely because she knows what it will cost her to hear.
Fanny Dashwood — Sister-in-law
Who reasons her husband down from three thousand pounds to occasional presents of fish.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose six completed books turned the ordinary business of courtship, money and family into some of the most exacting social comedy in the language. She wrote about a narrow world — the minor landed gentry of southern England — with an irony precise enough that readers still argue about where her sympathies lie. Her handling of a character's thoughts in the narrator's own voice shaped how novels have reported an inner life ever since. Her novels appeared anonymously in her lifetime, credited only to "A Lady"; they include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion.