SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, Jane Austen

'I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child.'

So wrote Jane Austen to her sister in April 1811, while the sheets of the first edition were coming off the press. Dissapointed in her first attempt to publish a novel, Jane Austen had turned to a work which she had started many years earlier,'Elinor and Marianne'. This story, renamed Sense and Sensibility, was the first of her novels to be published.

While the story centres on the personalities of the two sister, whose contrasting temperaments are examined as they undergo comparable experiences in the loss of the man they love, it rejoices also in a wealth of minor characters such as the comic Mrs Jennings and Sir John and Lady Middleton, drawn with consummate satiric skill.