JANE AUSTEN WAS just twenty-­one years old when she wrote her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Today, we understand her works as more than domestic comedies – they’re also acute reflections on her times. By 1811, when Sense and Sensibility was published, the many radical excesses and violent upheavals of the French Revolution had revealed just how badly things go wrong in politics, society and even everyday life when self-­oriented romantic sensibility is allowed to overwhelm Enlightenment sense.

Austen’s novel considers this problem through a tale of two sisters: commonsense, upright Elinor and her younger, more passionate and imaginative sister, Marianne, who is making some poor choices in the romance department. At stake for both women are conservative interests such as security, status and duty, but also the prospect of marital trust and long-­term contentment. The novel weighs up the proper balance between head and heart, judgement and spontaneity, reason and feeling. When Marianne protests against the crude insensitivity of those around her with her own spontaneous acts of rudeness, Elinor, Jane Austen’s literary proxy, quietly steps in to restore civility. Sensibility loves drama, but sense requires negotiating an accommodation between all parties that allows their small corner of society to go on.