Sense and Sensibility

When Mr Dashwood dies, his son John, persuaded by his grasping wife Fanny, gives almost nothing to his stepmother and half-sisters, and they move to a small cottage in Devon. The two eldest daughters are very different: Elinor, the elder, hides her feelings behind good sense, even when she learns that Edward Ferrars, the man she loves, has long been secretly engaged to the scheming Lucy Steele; Marianne gives herself completely to her passion for the dashing John Willoughby, who abandons her for an heiress. Her grief nearly kills her, and both sisters must learn something from each other.

Jane Austen began the story in the 1790s as 'Elinor and Marianne', told in letters, and published it in 1811 at her own risk, 'By a Lady'; it was her first novel in print. Its title sets 'sense', meaning judgement, against 'sensibility', the cult of feeling fashionable in her youth. Austen readers usually go on to Pride and Prejudice, published two years later.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.

Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.