Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen is one of the literary giants of the eighteenth century. A supremely comic writer and moralist, she redefines the novel as a delicate instrument.

Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, was Austen’s first published novel and the one now most scrutinized by historicist, moralists and feminist scholars, who offer new, complex readings of the work. Contemporary critics of Austen's novels tended to overlook Sense and Sensibility in favour of her later works. Mansfield Park was read for moral edification; Pride and Prejudice was read for its irony and humour; and Emma for its subtle craft as a novel. Sense and Sensibility did not fall neatly into any of these categories, and critics approached it less eagerly. However, although the novel did not attract much critical attention, it sold well, and helped to establish “the author of Pride and Prejudice” as a respected writer. Only in the twentieth century have scholars and critics come to address Sense and Sensibility's great passion, its ethics, and its social vision. In recent years, the book has been adapted into feature films. It has recently been made into an Oscar-winning film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Today, the three-volume novel by an anonymous lady has become a famed and timeless favourite.
Austen began writing Sense and Sensibility in 1797, when she was twenty-two (a very little senior to her heroine, Elinor Dashwood). It was to be a novel in the form of a series of letters, entitled Elinor and Marianne (the epistolary style), but in later drafts between 1797 and 1799 Austen abandoned this form and the novel today presents incidents and action almost entirely from a single point of view (that of Elinor Dashwood). After further revision between 1809 and 1810, financed by Austen’s brother and attributed only to “A Lady,” Sense and Sensibility finally appeared in print in 1811. It was the first of her novels to be published, and it was fourteen years in preparation.
Sense and Sensibility is therefore a novel of her girlhood (although revised in comparative maturity) and the ideas handled in it (the concept of ‘sensibility’ and the taste for ‘picturesque’ beauty are examples) are late eighteenth-century ideas. Despite this, the book enjoyed a mild success that encouraged its author to attempt further ventures. On this, her first publication, she probably bestowed great pains; she was ‘never too busy’ to think of it at proof-stage; ‘I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child’, she wrote.