Sense and Sensibility

About Sense and Sensibility

The sisters offer contrasting habits of expression without dividing neatly into one correct and one mistaken way to feel. Silence may protect others while also concealing suffering; emotional candor can be sincere without being perceptive. Compare the assurances given in conversation with the choices people make when income, inheritance, and social advantage become involved.

Reading focus

Compare Elinor’s restraint and Marianne’s openness while tracking the economic pressures and incomplete information behind apparently straightforward romantic choices.

This reading edition contains 119,481 words in 50 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Jane Austen. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of…

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