Sense and Sensibility (Annotated)

Critical Edition with Afterword, Historical Context, and Biography | Jane Austen | Erato Press

De: Jane Austen

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The novel that invented the Austen heroine — and spent two hundred years being misread by its own title.

Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, after more than fifteen years of revision. It was her first novel to appear in print, and it sold out its first edition in twenty months. It has never gone out of print.

The title announces a binary that literary criticism has accepted ever since: Elinor is sense, Marianne is sensibility. Head and heart. Restraint and feeling. The rational sister and the romantic one. Two hundred years of readers have arrived at this novel expecting an allegory of complementary opposites — and departed satisfied that they found one.

The afterword to this edition argues that they were wrong. Sense and Sensibility is not a novel about the opposition between two modes of being. It is a novel about the impossibility of that opposition — about two women performing versions of themselves that their society demands, and the cost of each performance. Elinor is not cool. Marianne is not authentic. The novel's deepest argument operates in the space between these false categories, and Austen places it there deliberately, knowing that most of her readers would miss it.

Elinor Dashwood — who feels everything and is permitted to show nothing, and pays for that discipline with a suffering she cannot name

Marianne Dashwood — whose feelings are genuine but whose expression of them is also a performance, as carefully constructed as her sister's silence

Colonel Brandon — the man who loves without hope, and waits

Willoughby — who understood exactly what he was doing, and did it anyway

Edward Ferrars — whose only flaw is a promise made before he knew what promising meant

✦ The complete unabridged text of Jane Austen's first published novel

This edition also includes: ✦ Afterword: The False Binary — a critical essay by Henry Bugalho arguing that the novel systematically deconstructs the opposition its title announces ✦ The World of Jane Austen: England in the Age of Revolution — historical context: the Regency, the literary world, the constraints governing women's lives and choices ✦ Jane Austen: A Life in Letters and Silence — biography in six parts, from Steventon to Winchester

For readers who enjoy: ✦ Jane Austen's complete novels including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion ✦ Women's literary fiction and the great novels of manners ✦ Fiction about women navigating social constraint with intelligence and feeling ✦ Works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and the tradition of British women's fiction

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy — it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. — Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility