Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

JANE AUSTEN was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809 they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until May 1817, when she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on 18 July 1817.

Jane Austen was extremely modest about her own genius, describing her work to her nephew, Edward, as the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour. As a girl she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were published only after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 181516. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

ROS BALLASTER is Fellow in English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University. She has also edited Delarivier Manleys New Atalantis for Penguin Classics. Her book Seductive Forms: Womens Amatory Fiction 16841740 was published by Oxford University Press in 1992. She is currently being funded by the Leverhulme Trust to prepare her latest book, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in Eighteenth-Century England.

CLAIRE LAMONT is Textual Adviser for the works of Jane Austen in Penguin Classics.

TONY TANNER was a Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Cambridge. He taught and travelled extensively in America and Europe. Among his many books are The Reign of Wonder (1965); City of Words (1970); Contract and Transgression: Adultery and the Novel (1980); Jane Austen (1986); Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987); Venice Desired (1992); Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction (1995); and The American Mystery (2000). Tony Tanner died in December 1998.

JANE AUSTEN

Edited with an Introduction by ROS BALLASTER
With the original Penguin Classics Introduction by TONY TANNER

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First published 1811

Published in Penguin Classics 1995

Reissued with new Chronology, updated Further Reading and

1969 Penguin Classics Introduction by Tony Tanner 2003
1

Introduction and Notes copyright Ros Ballaster, 1995

Textual Advisers Note and Chronology copyright Claire Lamont, 1995, 2003

Appendix: Original Penguin Classics Introduction copyright Tony Tanner, 1969

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9780141908229

The texts of Austens novels in the Penguin Edition are based on the first editions and have been edited afresh. The texts of four of the novels are necessarily based on the first edition: in the case of Pride and Prejudice Austen sold the copyright to the publisher of the first edition and was not involved with the preparation of the two further editions in her lifetime; Emma did not reach a second edition in Britain in Austens lifetime; and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, however, both appeared in second editions in which Austen took some part. Hitherto all reprints of these novels have been based on the second editions. The Penguin Edition returns to the first-edition texts of both novels, and includes a list of the substantive variants between the two editions so that readers can see clearly for the first time the alterations made between the first and second editions.

The editors have worked from copies of the first editions kindly supplied by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The editorial policy is one of minimum intervention: no attempt has been made to modernize spelling or punctuation, or to render spellings consistent so long as the variant spellings were acceptable in the period. Where any of these might cause difficulty to the modern reader the editor has offered help and explanation in a note.

The editors have amended the text in the following circumstances: errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Where, after all allowance has been made for historical usage, the text seems faulty the editors have cautiously emended it. They have been assisted by the fact that there is a tradition of Austen scholarship. The first edition of Austens novels to examine the texts thoroughly was The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (Clarendon, 1923). This pioneering edition was itself revised in later reprints, and all recent editions have been either based on Chapmans text or acknowledge debts to it. The editors of the Penguin Edition have edited Austens texts anew from the first editions, but in making decisions about obscurities and cruxes they have borne in mind the work of previous commentators on the Austen texts. The greatest of these is R. W. Chapman, but there have been others, including critics and general readers who have from time to time queried passages in Austens texts and suggested emendations. Where the Penguin editors are indebted to a previous scholar for a particular emendation they acknowledge it, and where a crux has provoked controversy they indicate it in a brief note. All corrections to the text other than any which are purely typographical are recorded in the Emendations to the Text.

Austens novels originally appeared in three volumes (with the exception of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which appeared together in four volumes). To make the original volume arrangements visible in a one-volume format the Penguin Edition has headlines at the top of each page so that in any opening the headline on the left will give the volume and chapter number in the first edition and the headline on the right will give the chapter number in a continuously numbered sequence.