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I have completed the Austen oeuvre!

Well, technically I probably haven't satisfied the requirements of a true purist, as I haven't read her juvenilia, such as Lady Susan, or the unfinished Sanditon. But when I began my Austen journey some years ago by reading Pride and Prejudice and being surprised to find that it was good, I resolved that I would read the rest of her works.

Jane Austen wrote six novels - in rough order of publication: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.

So anyway, I can now rank them in order of my favorites:

David's totally personal and unanalytical list of Austen novels in order of preference:


Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Mansfield Park
Sense and Sensibility


I'm going to say up front that I was feeling a little guilty that Sense and Sensibility ranked so low, until I realized that it was in fact her first published novel. (Though Northanger Abbey was actually written first, but only published posthumously.)

Elinor Dashwood is "sense" � the sensible, even-tempered sister who is mindful of propriety and the necessities of life. Marianne Dashwood, the younger sister, is "sensibility," which in the Austenian sense means something more like "sensitivity" � Marianne is the passionate, feeling sister who wears her heart on her sleeve.

"Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!—but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke MY heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward's virtues, and his person and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm."

(There's a third Dashwood sister, Margaret, but she's thirteen and barely enters the plot.)

We can see here the "formula" Austen was working on. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion... each book examines a particular set of character traits and their effects on the person marked by them. (Her other books did the same thing, if not in the titles.) Elinor is the protagonist of Sense and Sensibility; she initially falls for a man named Edward Ferrars, the eldest son of a rich family, whose problem is that he wants to become a humble clergyman while his mother, who controls the family fortune, has great ambitions for him and certainly doesn't want to see him marrying some poor girl from an impoverished no-account family of minor gentry. (Shades of Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice.)

Marianne, meanwhile, falls for the rake who always wreaks romantic havoc in Austen novels. In this one, his name is Mr. Willoughby. Initially set up as a true scoundrel who leads Marianne on, even forms an "attachment" to her (i.e., an engagement in all but name), only to later break it (which in Regency times was a very grave moral offense if not a legal one), and then turns out to have left one of his other conquests ruined and with child. Austen does a clever job of making Willoughby out to be a villain, only to somewhat redeem him later by revealing that, while he is no saint, his conduct wasn't quite as bad as it appeared to the uninformed Dashwood sisters.

Waiting in the wings is the other Austen prototype, Colonel Brandon, the very serious old bachelor who'd be a fine catch for the right girl who doesn't mind marrying someone twenty years her senior. (Colonel Brandon is unmarried and in his early thirties � for a woman that would be beyond hope, and even for a man, in Regency times, that was getting well past prime marrying years.)

To repeat something I said in my review of Emma:

I have heard some people say that if you've read one Austen novel, you've read them all. I can see that viewpoint � Austen always chose the same general setting: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." Her comedies of manners have very similar character archetypes in each, and of course, you can read every Austen novel with the assurance that the heroine will get her HEA in the end.

In that review, I argued against this viewpoint, but with Sense and Sensibility, I'm afraid too much felt too similar, even some of the exact same plot twists and lines of dialog. As this was the earlier novel, this indicates, of course, that Austen was refining her tools, which she employed with greater effect in later novels. But having read them somewhat out of order, Sense and Sensibility did suffer a bit from being yet another story about two sisters with contrasting temperaments, living in reduced circumstances thanks to the ungenerosity of their more affluent relatives, facing spinsterhood due to their lack of prospects before happy engagements with men who fortuitously turn out to be well-heeled, not without first surmounting a number of misunderstandings and existing engagements as obstacles.

Did I enjoy this book? Yes, certainly. Every Austen is worth reading. But I finished it for completeness' sake. I would recommend that everyone read something by Austen, and if you like the first one, read some more. But I don't think anyone but the true Austen fan needs to read all of her works, and I'd really only recommend Sense and Sensibility as either your first Austen (in which case all the tropes and devices will be fresh, and you'll see them used more skillfully in later books) or if you are a true fan wanting to read her complete works.

A very regretful 3 stars, but consider this a statement that even after five books, a sixth Austen was still pretty good.