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Title: Sense & Sensibility (Everyman's Poetry Series) by Jane Austin, Janet Todd, Jane Austen ISBN: 0-460-87914-6 Publisher: Everymans Library Pub. Date: November, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.03 (80 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Sense and Sensibility
Comment: Sense and Sensibility is an excellent book. When I started it I really did not know what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. I will say though that this book is hard to get through at times, due to the old language used. But if you stay with the book, it will be worth it. The characters are wonderful, and you will find yourself wanting them to be happy. The Dashwood family gives a "girl power" message that makes it even easier to enjoy. Also, this book is easy to relate to, for everyone has known a Maryanne or Elinor before, maybe you are like one of them. I could identify with Maryanne, because I am involved in everything (and love it all) and I know I share my feelings too much. Although this book will be enjoyed more by young females, anyone would like it, for it also has a lot of humor in it used to display the dramatic situations the Dashwood sisters keep finding themselves in. The book became even more enjoyable when I saw the movie, seeing this amazing book acted out was great. I believe all of Jane Austen's books are worth reading, this one especially!
Rating: 3
Summary: Not good enough for Austen
Comment: Jane Austen is definitely one of the greatest novelists of the world. I've read Pride and Prejudice &Emma and loved them both. However, I was disappointed with Sense and Sensibility. The story of two sisters altogether different from each other could be an interesting plot ... if it had Austen's usual style. Austen is famous for her keeping her balance between too romantic and too realistic. This time her style is much too romantic and by no means both feet on the ground. The sensible sister Elinor is really a charachter to fall in love with ,but the incredibly romantic sister Marienne has driven me nuts by talking foolishly throughout the book. Still , a good experience and worth reading.
Rating: 1
Summary: Mark Twain was right, I'm afraid
Comment: I so much wanted to like Jane Austen and, specifically, this book. That's because I dearly loved the movie "Sense and Sensibility" directed by Ang Lee with an amazingly good screenplay by Emma Thompson. Now that I've attempted to read the book on which it was based, I'm all the more impressed by Emma Thompson because she extracted the story from this novel and told it via dialog and made it interesting, engaging and charming.
So I have to credit Jane Austen, at least, with having invented the characters and their situation. I've heard she was an astute observer of human beings and apparently she was.
But her style! Reading Jane Austen was for me like swimming through half-set concrete.
Mark Twain made two obsevations about Jane Austen.
First, he wrote in "Remembered Yesterdays": "Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book."
Second, in a letter to his good friend William Howells, he wrote in response to remarks Howells had made about Edgar Allan Poe:
"To me his [Poe's] prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No -- there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
I find Twain's prose eminently readable and agree with him about Jane Austen. I can't read her prose and I couldn't even do it if I were paid to do it.
I greatly admire those who can read Jane Austen. You are credited with great patience and intelligence. I'm not stupid, but my patience is utterly insufficient to the rigors of Jane's verbiage.
I simply have to have sentences of prose that hold my interest and make me want to read the next sentence and the next and the next until the book is done. If after reading several sentences, I feel as though I've just endured a lengthy session of reconstructive dentistry, I simply have to put the book down. There are thousands of authors whose storytelling style is as engaging as the story itself.
It's probably not Jane's fault -- she was a product of her time and place and that's how they wrote back then. But I understand completely Twain's hyperbole that she shouldn't have been allowed to die a natural death.
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Title: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ISBN: 0553213105 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: December, 1983 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Emma by Jane Austen ISBN: 0553212737 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 January, 1984 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Persuasion by Jane Austen, Margaret Drabble ISBN: 0451526384 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, Margaret Drabble ISBN: 0451526295 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen, Marilyn Butler ISBN: 0140434135 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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