12-1:30 p.m.

Bring your lunch and join us for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, 199 years after it was first published. Have Austen’s ideas about love and relationships held up over the years?

Books are available for checkout at Red Bank Branch Library.

From the publisher’s reading guide:

Marianne Dashwood, trusting the evidence of her senses, falls passionately in love with a man who in truth is less good than he seems. Elinor Dashwood quite sensibly "thinks very highly of, greatly esteems, and likes" a man whose worthiness in her eyes only increases when she learns why he cannot marry her. Through the sisters' stories, and the moral dilemmas they raise, Jane Austen explores in the form of a delightful and dramatically satisfying romance the limitations and pitfalls of the Romantic aesthetic in a world where money matters.

Though Northanger Abbey (originally called Lady Susan) was Austen's first novel to be accepted for publication, the publisher never issued it, and by the time Austen bought back the rights in 1816, she didn't think it was good enough to publish. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, is considerably more ambitious than Northanger Abbey, both thematically and technically, and is generally considered Austen's first major novel.

To register contact Nancy Higgs at 428-8399 or visit evpl.org