1798 Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth publish The Lyrical Ballads.
1801 Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires, and with the Napoleonic Wars looming in the background of British consciousness, he and his wife and two daughters leave the quiet country life of Steventon for the bustling, fashionable town of Bath. Many of the characters and depictions of society in Jane Austen’s subsequent novels are shaped by her experiences in Bath.
1803 Austen receives her first publication offer for her novel “Susan,” but the manuscript is subsequently returned by the publisher; it will later be revised and released as Northanger Abbey. The United States buys Louisiana from France. Ralph Waldo Emerson is born.
1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Spain de clares war on Britain.
1805 Jane’s father dies. Jane and her mother and sister sub sequently move to Southampton. Sir Walter Scott pub lishes his Lay of the Last Minstrel.
1809 After several years of traveling and short-term stays in various towns, the Austen women settle in Chawton Cot tage in Hampshire; in the parlor of this house Austen quietly composes her most famous works. Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are born.
1811 Austen begins Mansfield Park in February. In November Sense and Sensibility, the romantic misadventures of two sisters, is published with the notation “By a Lady”; all of Austen’s subsequent novels are also brought out anony mously. George III is declared insane, and the morally corrupt Prince of Wales (the future King George IV) be comes regent.
1812 Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm and the first parts of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold are published. The United States declares war on Great Britain.
1813 Pride and Prejudice is published; it describes the conflict between the high-spirited daughter of a country gentle man and a wealthy landowner. Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the Bourbons are restored to power.
1814 Mansfield Park is published; it is the story of the difficult though ultimately rewarded life of a poor relation who lives in the house of her wealthy uncle.
1815 Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo.
1816 Austen’s comic novel Emma is published, centering on the heroine’s misguided attempts at matchmaking. Char lotte Brontë is born.
1817 Austen begins the satiric novel Sanditon, but abandons it because of declining health. She dies on July 18 in Win chester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
1818 Northanger Abbey, a social satire with overtones of (paro died) terror, and Persuasion, about a reawakened love, are published under Austen’s brother Henry’s supervi sion.
Introduction
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first published novel, tells the story of the lives, loves, and longings of two sisters, the sensitive, romantic Marianne and the practical, even-tempered Elinor. With its extended cast of supporting characters, including the garrulous Mrs. Jennings, the stern Mr. Palmer, and the censorious Mrs. Ferrars, Sense and Sensibility revolves around two narratives: the possible romances of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and the day-to-day existence of everyone else. The constant anxiety that pervades the story stems from the possibility that the sisters may have to make do with the mundanity of country life, cluttered with gossip, clamor, and superficiality, instead of being swept away by the men of their dreams. In typical Austen fashion we are made aware from the outset that Marianne’s choice of suitor, the dashing and theatrical Willoughby, may be a disaster. Elinor’s more subdued love object, the shy and awkward Edward Ferrars, on the other hand, just might prove himself worthy if he could manage to articulate a full sentence.
Austen began working on Sense and Sensibility in 1795 with an epistolary fragment entitled “Elinor and Marianne” (now lost). The final version was not published until 1811, with a second edition issued in 1813 (Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, p. 8o; see “For Further Reading”). Once described as “bleak, dark, and nasty” compared with the “brightness” of Pride and Prejudice or the complexity of her more mature works Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility has recently undergone a critical renaissance. New editions, renewed scholarship, and a critically acclaimed film version have put the novel center stage.
Sense and Sensibility is a coming-of-age novel, and also a work that chronicles Austen’s own “coming of age”—her development as a writer. When she began working on “Elinor and Marianne” she was only twenty, a young woman with the possibility of courtship, marriage, and family open to her. By the time the second edition of the novel was released, Austen had moved from Hampshire to Bath, lost her adoring father, been disappointed in love,