Elinor Dashwood keeps her heartbreak to herself, because that is what a sensible woman does. Marianne Dashwood announces hers to the entire county, because feeling anything less would be dishonest. When both sisters fall for men who turn out to be far less reliable than they seemed, Jane Austen's first published novel asks a question she'd spend her whole career answering: is it better to protect your heart, or to risk it completely?

Funny, wrenching, and quietly radical for its time, Sense and Sensibility is a story about two ways of loving - and about what it costs a woman to survive either one in a world with very little patience for female feeling.