Sense and Sensibility

Summary

Sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood lose their family home and must navigate love and money with very different temperaments, one guided by careful restraint and the other by open emotion. Austen tests both approaches against the realities of courtship in Regency England, where a woman's security depended almost entirely on marriage. The novel's balance of wit and feeling established the voice that would carry through all of Austen's later work.