Overview
So wrote Jane Austen to her sister in April 1811, while the sheets of the first edition were coming off the press. Disappointed in her first attempt to publish a novel, Jane Austen had turned to a work which she had started many years earlier, 'Elinor and Marianne'. This story, renamed Sense and Sensibility, was the first of her novels to be published.
While the story centres on the personalities of the two sisters, whose contrasting temperaments are examined as they undergo comparable experiences in the loss of the men they love, it rejoices also in a wealth of minor characters such as the comic Mrs Jennings and Sir John and Lady Middleton, drawn with consummate satiric skill.
The text is edited by James Kinsley from R.W. Chapman's Oxford edition, and Margaret Anne Doody provides a brilliant and penetrating new introductory essay.