Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility under the pseudonym, “A Lady” in 1811. It is an epistolary novel (a story told in letters) written to deepen and expand what had been a character sketch of two sisters, Elinore and Marianne Dashwood. It is significant that reviews of the novel often start with its title in various attempts to discern Austen’s view regarding the supremacy of “sense” or “sensibility” in the process of choices to be studied and decisions to be made. “Sense” and “sensibility” are other words for the age-old and on-going polar tension between one’s reason and one’s emotions—the Classical world view versus the Romantic world view. By 1811 England had already embarked upon a Romantic movement with the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. After the Age of Reason and its many failures, including the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, there was a growing desire to return to nature in its purity, youth in its innocence and the heart as governor of man’s reason. Sense and Sensibility, in the comings and goings of the Dashwood sisters as they seek their way to happiness, picks up on the transition and sets forth the field of endeavor where characters make their way under the light of reason or feelings. It is not a novel to solve a problem since there is no problem to be solved. Rather it is a novel that presents one of the most basic facts of the human condition: we are creatures of thoughts and feelings, creatures of reason and emotion, creatures of impulse and consideration. The miracle is that Austen’s novel intuits and presents all of this so thoroughly. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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