Introduction

Summary

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility was at least fifteen years in the making: first conceived and written as Elinor and Marianne in 1795 (a date from family tradition), converted into Sense and Sensibility beginning inNovember 1797 fromits previous epistolary form (also family memory), revised twelve years later in 1809 and 1810 with a view to publication, accepted by the publisher Thomas Egerton in the winter of 1810, and published, finally, on 30 October 1811. This lengthy gestation period is of some significance. For one thing, the ideas and opinions of a twenty-year-old woman writing for family readings and family scrutiny get mixed up with the seasoned thoughts of a mature writer preparing a manuscript for publication. Moreover, traces of its conception years, the turbulent 1790s, coexist in the novel with traces of the years that divide it from its final revision for publication in 1809–10. Revision dates that can be verified are drawn from Marianne's recourse to the two-penny post in London, increased from one penny to two pennies in 1801, and the mention of Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805. By inference, other revisions were made in the last years before publication. During this long period there were major shifts in Austen's life: the break-up of the Steventon home in 1801 for Mr Austen's retirement to Bath, a retreat into confirmed spinsterhood in the following years, the sudden death of Mr Austen in 1805, a period of financial uncertainty and moving about for the three surviving Austen women, the expedient of sharing lodgings in Southampton with Francis’ family in 1806, punctuated by visits to Edward's grand estate in Kent, and, finally, the move to Chawton cottage, arranged by Edward in 1809, the event that enabled the completion of the novel.

Unstable and shifting in its sympathies and issues, Sense and Sensibility has long been treated as disappointing and odd, the redheaded stepchild of the Austen canon. Lady Bessborough in its year of first publication confessed that although Sense and Sensibility had amused her, ‘it ends stupidly’; Henry Crabb Robinson noted on rereading it in 1839, ‘I still think it one of the poorest of Miss Austen's novels’; and Reginald Farrer remarked in 1917, ‘nobody will choose this as his favourite Jane Austen’.