by Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Hampshire County; she was the seventh of eight children of George Austen, a clergyman of the Church of England. Austen family tradition holds that an early version of Sense and Sensibility (called “Elinor and Marianne”) may have been written in 1795 when Austen was 20. At her own expense, Austen published the final, substantially revised Sense and Sensibility in London in 1811. The novel makes no reference to notable historical events but portrays social life in a period that seems contemporary with the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Sense and Sensibility was the first of four novels—the others being Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816)—published in Austen’s lifetime; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818, the year after Austen died. Austen herself never married, but, like...