Book Bearings
Sense and Sensibility
- 352 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1811
- 2,090 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
On the death of Henry Dashwood, his estate passes to the son of his first marriage, and his widow and three daughters are left with a small income and no home. They move to a cottage in Devon offered by a distant relation. Elinor, the eldest, is prudent and reserved, and keeps her feelings for the diffident Edward Ferrars to herself; Marianne, the second, is impulsive and romantic, and falls openly in love with the dashing John Willoughby, while the steady Colonel Brandon looks on. Both sisters meet disappointment, and each has something to learn from the other's way of bearing it. Sense and Sensibility, published anonymously in 1811, was Jane Austen's first novel.
- Romance, historical
- Family life
- Classics
- Humor
- Marriage
- Courtship
- Domestic fiction
- English Satire
2 What to expect
Jane Austen's first novel: two sisters left with little money, one guided by good sense and the other by feeling, each fall in love and are each disappointed. It is a comedy of manners with a sharp eye for money, inheritance and the weak position of women without them, and for snobs and gossips. The irony is drier and the plot more melodramatic than in her later books, and the pace is leisurely.
Good for readers who want: a Jane Austen romance, two contrasting sisters, and social comedy about money and marriage.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Jane Austen
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by Jane Austen
6 Similar books
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- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
- Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde