Sense and Sensibility: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Jane Austen, Devoney Looser (Editor), Devoney Looser (Introduction)

Overview

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the timeless story of Marianne and Elinor Dashwood

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 Elinor's 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. This edition includes an introduction, original essays, and suggestions for further exploration by Devoney Looser.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143106524
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/25/2011
Series:	Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Series
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	218,687
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of eight of the rector of the parish and his wife. As a girl, Austen wrote stories, including burlesques of popular fiction. She lived with her family at Steventon until her father retired to Bath in 1801. After he died in 1805, she moved around with her mother and sister, without a permanent home. In 1809, they settled in Chawton Cottage, near Alton, Hampshire, on the estate of a wealthy brother. She published four novels, each after much revision, without signing her name to them: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). She died in Winchester on July 18, 1817. Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), were published posthumously in December 1817, with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen. He publicly revealed her as the author of all six novels. She also left unpublished compositions, including a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan; two unfinished novels, The Watsons and Sanditon; and three volumes of juvenilia. Her fiction is among the most respected and oft-quoted in the English language.

Devoney Looser is Professor of English at Arizona State Univer-sity and the author, most recently, of The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press), a Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book (Nonfiction). Her recent writing on Austen has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, The TLS, and Entertainment Weekly, and she’s had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. Looser is one of the quirky weirdos featured in Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom and has played roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen.

Date of Birth:

December 16, 1775

Date of Death:

July 18, 1817

Place of Birth:

Village of Steventon in Hampshire, England

Place of Death:

Winchester, Hampshire, England

Education:

Taught at home by her father

Read an Excerpt

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 I'll venture this much: If she'd done nothing else, we'd 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 but Jane Eyre and Frankenstein. 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 without Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815) towering just up ahead. Austen wrote its ur-version, Elinor and Marianne, when she was nineteen, a year before First Impressions, which became Pride and Prejudice; she reconceived it as Sense 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 author's 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 doesn't need our indulgence. It's good to go.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Sense and Sensibility"
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Copyright © 2011 Jane Austen.
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