Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen is the novel in which Austen first perfected her great subject: the gap between what we feel and what society allows us to express, and the wisdom required to navigate it. The Dashwood sisters — the passionate, impulsive Marianne and the restrained, sensible Elinor — embody two approaches to feeling and the two faces of vulnerability. Austen’s genius is to show both sisters as both right and wrong: passion without judgment courts disaster, but the suppression of feeling comes at its own cost. Published in a beautiful new edition, Sense and Sensibility is the work of a writer who already understood everything about human nature and the social constraints that shape it — a novel as sharp and funny as it is emotionally true.