Jane Austen - Complete Works of Jane Austen

The Complete Works of

JANE AUSTEN

(1775-1817)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2014

Version 5

The Complete Works of

JANE AUSTEN

By Delphi Classics, 2014

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Jane Austens birthplace, Steventon Parsonage, Hampshire sadly, no longer standing

George Austen, the authors father

Steventon Church, where George Austen was rector for many years

Jane Austen as a child

Sense and Sensibility was the authors first novel to be published, although not her first to be written and completed. Thomas Egerton of the Military Library publishing house released the work in three volumes in 1811 and Austen used the pseudonym A Lady for the novel. She had taken a substantial financial risk, paying for the publication, costing more than a third of her annual household income. Fortunately, the 750 copies of the first edition sold out and she was able to make a profit. The first draft of the work, titled Elinor and Marianne , was composed in the mid 1790s when Austen was still in her teenage years. The early work was written in epistolary form and focused on the contrasting natures and attitudes of two sisters. Elinor is exceedingly restrained and reserved, while Marianne is excessively emotional and impetuous. In Sense and Sensibility the sisters dispositions remain as they were in the first draft of the novel, although Austen creates a far more complex and ambiguous portrait of the benefits and flaws of each nature.

The plot centres on the Dashwood sisters and their romantic suitors, Edward Ferrars, John Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. The novel begins with Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters being removed from their home after Mr Dashwood dies and the property is left to his son John from his first marriage. Fanny, Johns wife, a cold, calculating woman, has a brother Edward, who comes to stay with the family and develops a rapport with Elinor, before they are separated by circumstances. Meanwhile, Marianne meets the charming and dashing Willoughby and enters into a passionate relationship with him.

An interesting facet of the novel is Austens assessment of Mariannes nature and behaviour, which she renders more sympathetically than might have been the case. The author originally began composing the work during the aftermath of the French Revolution; a period of great anxiety in England at the possibility of social upheaval. During this period, novels centred on heroes of great sensibility were fashionable and widespread; most importantly they were viewed as potentially socially and politically subversive. Excessive sensibility was linked by the ruling class to the bloody and violent French Revolution, where they a perceived there was a loss of reason and control. One conservative reaction to this anxiety was to criticise and satirise this emphasis on feeling and subjective experience and portray them as dangerous and threatening. Though Austen clearly exposes what she believes to be the hazards of unrestrained emotion, she portrays Marianne in a largely attractive and sympathetic light. Conversely, Elinors extreme reserve and emotional inhibitions are shown to cause her much pain and anguish.

The first edition

The original title page

CONTENTS

The Oscar winning 1995 film adaptation

Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in the 1995 adaptation

The 2008 television adaptation

INTRODUCTION

With the title of Sense and Sensibility is connected one of those minor problems which delight the cummin-splitters of criticism. In the Cecilia of Madame DArblay the forerunner, if not the model, of Miss Austen is a sentence which at first sight suggests some relationship to the name of the book which, in the present series, inaugurated Miss Austens novels. The whole of this unfortunate business says a certain didactic Dr. Lyster, talking in capitals, towards the end of volume three of Cecilia has been the result of Pride and Prejudice, and looking to the admitted familiarity of Miss Austen with Madame DArblays work, it has been concluded that Miss Austen borrowed from Cecilia , the title of her second novel. But here comes in the little problem to which we have referred. Pride and Prejudice it is true, was written and finished before Sense and Sensibility its original title for several years being First Impressions . Then, in 1797, the author fell to work upon an older essay in letters la Richardson, called Elinor and Marianne , which she re-christened Sense and Sensibility. This, as we know, was her first published book; and whatever may be the connection between the title of Pride and Prejudice and the passage in Cecilia , there is an obvious connection between the title of Pride and Prejudice and the title of Sense and Sensibility . If Miss Austen re-christened Elinor and Marianne before she changed the title of First Impressions , as she well may have, it is extremely unlikely that the name of Pride and Prejudice has anything to do with Cecilia (which, besides, had been published at least twenty years before). Upon the whole, therefore, it is most likely that the passage in Madame DArblay is a mere coincidence; and that in Sense and Sensibility , as well as in the novel that succeeded it in publication, Miss Austen, after the fashion of the old morality plays, simply substituted the leading characteristics of her principal personages for their names. Indeed, in Sense and Sensibility the sense of Elinor, and the sensibility (or rather sensiblerie ) of Marianne, are markedly emphasised in the opening pages of the book But Miss Austen subsequently, and, as we think, wisely, discarded in her remaining efforts the cheap attraction of an alliterative title. Emma and Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park , are names far more in consonance with the quiet tone of her easy and unobtrusive art.