Recommendations
Books Like Sense and Sensibility
Best books to read after Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility introduced Austen's world and set the terms for the entire English marriage-plot tradition. These books extend the conversation — into Austen's own canon, the Victorian women's novel, and the contemporary novels that have most fully inherited Austen's comic intelligence and psychological precision.
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Buy on AmazonPride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Austen's most immediately pleasurable novel — Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy's sparring is the most brilliant courtship in the language. Read next if you haven't already.
- 2
Buy on AmazonEmma
by Jane Austen
Austen's most technically ambitious novel — a protagonist who is wrong about everything and the reader's growing awareness of how wrong she is, which is itself the novel's comedy and its moral argument.
- 3
Buy on AmazonPersuasion
by Jane Austen
Austen's final completed novel and her most emotionally direct — the autumn of a woman who regrets the engagement she was persuaded to break and gets a second chance. The most moving of her books.
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Buy on AmazonJane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The Victorian successor to Austen — a passionate, Gothic first-person bildungsroman about a woman who refuses to be less than herself in love and work. The counterpoint to Austen's comic irony.
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Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
George Eliot's panoramic masterpiece, often called the greatest English novel — Austen's psychological precision combined with a much wider social and philosophical canvas, featuring the best portrait of a bad marriage in the language.
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Buy on AmazonNorth and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's novel of a southern woman who relocates to an industrial northern town and is transformed by the encounter — the Victorian social novel with Austen's romantic structure and a much wider class perspective.
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Buy on AmazonLongbourn
by Jo Baker
A retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective — Austen's world reimagined from below, which gives new meaning to everything the Bennet sisters take for granted.
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Buy on AmazonThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
The most radical of the Brontë novels — a woman who leaves her alcoholic, abusive husband at a time when this was socially and legally nearly impossible. The dark side of the Austen romance that Austen's comedy kept offstage.
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