When was sense and sensibility by jane austen published

Late in her father offered it to a London publisher, who sent it straight back by return post without bothering to read it. She drastically altered Elinor and Marianne in To Cassandra she compared her feelings about seeing her work in print with those of a mother with a suckling child. Miss Austen took care to conceal her identity. The story charts their experiences in love, loss and a growing understanding of the world, themselves and each other, playing in particular on the internal conflicts between the qualities of sense and sensibility that each sister displays.

By some accounts it was first written as a novel-in-letters, but no evidence of this survives. Jane revised the text in Steventon in , and again in Chawton in Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. We have over 5, members of all ages and from diverse walks of life. Although most live in the United States or Canada, we also have members in more than a dozen other countries.

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Only Austen's immediate family knew of her authorship of these novels. And although publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when entering the public sphere was associated with a reprehensible loss of femininity.

Indeed, Austen used to write at Chawton behind a door that creaked when visitors approached; she would avail herself of this warning to hide her manuscript before they entered. Austen may have wanted anonymity not only because of her gender and a desire for privacy, but because of the more general atmosphere of repression pervading her era: her early writing of Sense and Sensibility coincided with the treason trial of Thomas Hardy and the proliferation of government censors as the Napoleonic War progressed.

Whatever the reasons behind it, Austen's anonymity would persist until her death until Contemporary critics of Austen's novels tended to overlook Sense and Sensibility in favor of the author's later works. Mansfield Park was read for moral edification; Pride and Prejudice was read for its irony and humor; and Emma was read for its subtle craft as a novel.