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.
- 1Buy
Pride 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.
- 2Buy
Emma
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.
- 3Buy
Persuasion
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.
- 4Buy
Jane 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.
- 5Buy
Middlemarch
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.
- 6Buy
North 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.
- 7Buy
Longbourn
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.
- 8Buy
The 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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