Reading Order
AustenJane Austen Reading Order
Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) is Austen's first published novel — a comic novel of manners about the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, whose contrasting temperaments (sense vs. sensibility, reason vs. feeling) are tested by love, loss, and the economic precarity of genteel women without independent fortune in Regency England.
Where to start
Sense and Sensibility
Complete Austen Book List
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Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen·1811·Austen's first published novel and the best entry point if you haven't read her before — the contrast between the two sisters makes both characters vivid immediately. - Buy
Pride and Prejudice
OptionalJane Austen·1813·Austen's most beloved novel and the most immediately witty — the sparring between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Read second if you want her most entertaining book. - Buy
Emma
OptionalJane Austen·1815·Austen's most technically ambitious novel — a protagonist the author feared 'no one but myself will much like,' whose misreadings of the people around her are both comic and quietly devastating. Often considered her masterpiece. - Buy
Persuasion
OptionalJane Austen·1817·Austen's final completed novel — the most autumnal and emotionally direct of her books, about a woman given a second chance with the man she was persuaded to refuse years before. The choice for readers who want Austen's most moving work.
Austen — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'sense and sensibility' mean?
In Austen's usage, 'sense' means reasonableness, self-command, judgment, and prudence — the capacity to manage one's feelings and behavior in accordance with social and practical realities. 'Sensibility' means emotional responsiveness, susceptibility to feeling, and the Romantic valorization of intense experience — what we might now call emotional expressiveness or sensitivity. The contrast between the two was a live philosophical and cultural debate in Austen's time: the 18th-century cult of Sensibility (associated with writers like Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson) had valorized intense emotional response as a sign of moral and spiritual depth, while the opposing camp (associated with Johnson and Austen's own rationalist inheritance) argued that unchecked sensibility was self-indulgent and ultimately destructive. Austen does not simply endorse 'sense' over 'sensibility' — the novel shows that Elinor's self-command sometimes amounts to emotional suppression, while Marianne's sensibility, though initially self-dramatizing, eventually matures into genuine feeling. The novel is a dialogue between the two positions, not a verdict for one.
What is the economic situation of the Dashwood women in Sense and Sensibility?
The novel opens with the death of Mr. Henry Dashwood, whose estate Norland Park passes by entail to his son John Dashwood (from his first marriage), leaving his second wife Mrs. Dashwood and their three daughters — Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret — essentially dependent on John Dashwood's goodwill. John Dashwood, persuaded by his selfish wife Fanny (née Ferrars), reduces the provision he had promised to make for his stepmother and half-sisters from £3,000 each to nothing, leaving them only Mrs. Dashwood's income of £500 a year. This economic situation — genteel women without fortune, dependent on the kindness of male relatives and the marriages they can make — is the structural condition of the novel's plot, as it is of all Austen's novels. The marriage plots in Austen are not merely romantic but economic: for women like the Dashwoods, marrying well is not a preference but a material necessity, and the 'sense' vs. 'sensibility' debate is partly a debate about how to navigate that necessity.
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