Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
Summary
When Mr Dashwood dies, the estate passes by entail to his son, and a deathbed promise to provide for his second family is talked down, in one of the coldest comic scenes Austen ever wrote, until it amounts to nothing at all. His widow and three daughters leave Norland for a cottage in Devon on a relation's charity. The two eldest sisters carry the novel and its title: Elinor, who feels as much as anyone but governs it, and Marianne, who holds concealment of feeling to be dishonesty. Each is educated by heartbreak. Elinor's quiet attachment to Edward Ferrars runs into his secret engagement to the scheming Lucy Steele; Marianne falls headlong for the dashing Willoughby, who abandons her for money with a public brutality that nearly kills her, while the steady, unglamorous Colonel Brandon waits at the edge of the story.
This is Austen's first published novel and a slightly sterner book than the ones that followed, closer to the moral debate its title advertises, but the wit is already fully armed, and Elinor's long self command under Lucy Steele's confidences is as fine a piece of sustained irony as anything in Emma. Readers who start here meet Austen with her claws slightly more visible.
It appeared in 1811 with no author's name, only By a Lady, published on commission at Austen's own financial risk. The gamble worked: the edition of 750 copies had sold out by the summer of 1813 and earned her a profit of 140 pounds, the first money she made by writing.
Historical Context & Significance
The earliest version was an epistolary tale called Elinor and Marianne, drafted in the 1790s and rewritten into narrative over more than a decade, so Austen's debut was also her most revised book. The first reviews were favourable in a way that now reads as comic understatement, praising a well written novel with well drawn characters and a useful moral lesson for young ladies inclined to romantic excess.
It has rarely been out of print since 1811, though Austen's novels did lapse from print in England in the 1820s, and its modern standing owes a debt to Emma Thompson, whose screenplay for Ang Lee's 1995 film won an Academy Award and put the Dashwood sisters at the centre of the decade's Austen revival. The film's success also settled an old critical injustice: the novel is nobody's poor relation among Austen's six, and Elinor Dashwood is one of her strongest arguments.