Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility is the first published novel of the English writer Jane Austen, appearing in 1811 with the words By A Lady on the title page instead of her name. She had begun it years earlier under the working title Elinor and Marianne.

The novel follows the Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother after the death of Henry Dashwood, who asks his son John to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters out of the estate. John's wife, Fanny, persuades him against it, and the family is left with an income small enough to make their social position precarious. They move to a cottage in Devon on the property of a distant relative, and the story turns on the two eldest sisters. Elinor is steady and keeps her own feelings to herself; Marianne is ardent, open and convinced that a person who cannot feel strongly cannot feel at all. The book sets their courtships side by side, and the contrast between the two temperaments is the argument the novel is making about how a woman should conduct herself with her own heart.

The story is probably set in the 1790s, and it draws on the world Austen knew: a propertied society in which inheritance, the opinion of relatives and the size of a man's fortune decide almost everything that happens to a young woman.