Sense and Sensibility

Austen’s first published novel. The Dashwood sisters are turned out of their family home by the workings of inheritance, and the book sets Elinor’s restraint against Marianne’s candour without letting either win outright — the argument is that judgment and feeling are both required and that neither is sufficient.

The opening chapters, in which a brother talks himself step by step out of the provision he promised his dying father, are one of the sharpest things in English fiction about how people rationalise.

Context: Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote an early epistolary version titled Elinor and Marianne; the revised novel appeared in 1811 under the byline “By a Lady.”

Connections

• Jane Austen — the author.
• Pride and Prejudice — the novel that followed, also on this list.
• Marriage
• Literature