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Sense and Sensibility (Modern Library Classics)
by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility (Modern Library Classics) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support. But unscrupulous cads, meddlesome matriarchs, and various guileless and artful women impinge on their chances for love and happiness. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "The technique of (Jane Austen's novels) is beyond praise....Her mastery of the art she chose, or that chose her, is complete."<br><br>This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition to new explanatory notes.

Review:

"As nearly flawless as any fiction could be."

—Eudora Welty

Synopsis:

Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood.
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About the Author

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector of Steventon, where she spent her first twenty-five years, along with her six brothers (two of them later naval officers in the Napoleonic wars) and her adored sister, Cassandra. She read voraciously from an early age, counting among her favorites the novels of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Fanny Burney, and the poetry of William Cowper and George Crabbe. Her family was lively and affectionate and they encouraged her precocious literary efforts, the earliest dating from age twelve, which already displayed the beginnings of her comic style. Her first novels, Elinor and Marianne (1796) and First Impressions (1797), were not published. The gothic parody Northanger Abbey was accepted for publication in 1803 but was ultimately withheld by the publisher.

In 1801 the family moved to Bath, where for four years Austen was able to observe the fashionable watering place that would later figure prominently in her fiction. Austen was sociable in her youth, and was briefly engaged in 1802. Two years later she began work on The Watsons a novel that remained unfinished. After the death of her father in 1805, she lived with her mother and sister in Southampton for a few years before moving with them to a cottage at Chawton in Hampshire. This would be her home for the rest of her life, and she wrote many of her novels in its parlor. She continued to revise her earlier unpublished work, and in 1811 a version of Elinor and Marianne was published as Sense and Sensibility followed two years later by Pride and Prejudice a reworking of First Impressions. In the next few years she published Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816).

Austen became ill in 1815, perhaps with Addison's disease, and she died on July 18, 1817. Persuasion her last novel, and the earlier Northanger Abbey appeared the following year. Of her last days her brother wrote: 'She wrote whilst she could hold a pen, and with a pencil when a pen was become too laborious. The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour.' Although Austen received some praise from her contemporaries—notably Sir Walter Scott, who discerned in her work 'the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment'—her detractors included Charlotte Bronte ('very incomplete and rather insensible') and Ralph Waldo Emerson ('vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention'), and her books did not immediately find a wide readership. The turn in her reputation came late in the nineteenth century, and has been succeeded by an enduring popularity and widespread critical praise in the twentieth.

From the eBook edition.

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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
brunettegal418, December 30, 2007 (view all comments by brunettegal418)
Even though this was Jane Austen's first novel, she writes it with such smart sensibility that you feel as though you are actually in the character's position and and enveloped within the plot. The witty storyline of how different women cope with the same problems that come with love, loss, and hope makes this delightfully wonderful novel timeless for any reader.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780375756733
Introduction:
Gates, David
Author:
Gates, David
Introduction:
Gates, David
Author:
Austen, Jane
Publisher:
Modern Library
Location:
New York
Subject:
Classics
Subject:
England
Subject:
Young women
Subject:
Sisters
Subject:
Love stories
Subject:
Domestic fiction
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Modern Library Classics
Series Volume:
105-846
Publication Date:
January 2001
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
304
Dimensions:
8.03x5.17x.65 in. .53 lbs.
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