Recommendations from our site
” It was published in 1811, but she wrote it during the 1790s and probably started writing it when she was 18 or 19. The thing about Sense and Sensibility—and anyone who’s seen the Ang Lee film will also know this—is that it doesn’t read like a Jane Austen novel. It’s incredibly passionate and overwrought and full of intensity of feeling. It’s organized around two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Theoretically, Elinor is the more restrained one. She has ‘sense’—she’s the rational, reasonable one. Marianne is the overwrought, hyper-emotional one. But actually, when you read the novel, what you realize is they both have equally intense, tortured personal lives. It’s not light and bright like Pride and Prejudice: it’s quite a dark novel.” Read more...
Sophie Gee, Literary Scholar
“Jane Austen’s purpose is to illustrate this very Aristotelian virtue of prudence: that you’ve got to look out for your interests, you mustn’t just give in to passion.” Read more...
Edward Skidelsky, Philosopher
“I started off with a sense of Sense and Sensibility as a rather stereotypical novel – very much like a lot of 18th century novels that I’ve read. There is a good sister and a bad sister, and the bad sister gets reformed and everybody lives happily ever after. But as I kept rereading it, I started to realise that it is actually a very dark novel, probably the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels.” Read more...
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar
