Sense & Sensibility : Penguin Classics (Penguin Clothbound Classics)

Part of Penguins beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinors warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor always sensitive to social convention is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love. Review As nearly flawless as any fiction could be.-Eudora Welty About the Author Jane Austen the daughter of a clergyman was born in Hampshire in 1775 and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her familys amusement as well as a novellaLady Susan. Her first published novel wasSense and Sensibility which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed byPride and PrejudiceMansfield Park andEmma. Austen died in 1817 andPersuasion andNorthanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sense and Sensibility the first of those metaphorical bits of ivory on which Jane Austen said she worked with so fine a brush jackhammers away at the idea that to conjecture is a vain and hopeless reflex of the mind. But Ill venture this much: If shed done nothing else wed still be in awe of her.Wuthering Heights alone put Emily Brontë in the pantheon and her sister Charlotte and their older contemporary Mary Shelley might as well have saved themselves the trouble of writing anything butJane Eyre andFrankenstein.Sense and Sensibility published in 1811 is at least as mighty a work as any of these and smarter than all three put together. And it would surely impress us even more withoutPride and Prejudice (1813)Mansfield Park (1814) andEmma (1815) towering just up ahead. Austen wrote its ur-versionElinor and Marianne when she was nineteen a year beforeFirst Impressions which becamePride and Prejudice; she reconceived it asSense and Sensibility when she was twenty-two and she was thirty-six when it finally appeared. Like most first novels it lays out what will be its authors lasting preoccupations: the three or four families in a country village (which Austen told her niece in an often-quoted letter was the very thing to work on). The interlocking anxieties over marriages estates and ecclesiastical livings. The secrets deceptions and self-deceptions that take several hundred pages to straighten out-to the extent that they get straightened out. The radical skepticism about human knowledge human communication and human possibility that informs almost every scene right up to the sort-of-happy ending. And the distinctive characters-the negligent or overindulgent parents the bifurcating siblings (smart sister beautiful sister; serious brother coxcomb brother) the charming corrupted young libertines. Unlike most first novels though Sense and Sensibility doesnt need our indulgence. Its good to go.In the novels to come Elinor Dashwood will morph into Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet (who will morph into Emma Woodhouse); Edward Ferrars into Edmund Bertram Mr. Knightley Henry Tilney and Captain Wentworth; Willoughby into George Wickham and Henry Crawford. But the characters in Sense and Sensibility stand convincingly on their own every bit as memorable as their later avatars. If Austen doesnt have quite the Caliban-to-Ariel range of a Shakespeare she can still