Austen wrote the first draft of Sense and Sensibility in epistolary form (a narrative told in the form of letters from various characters to one another), beginning when she was nineteen, with the original title of Elinor and Marianne. She would later revise the novel to take on a more traditional narrative structure, at which point she renamed it to Sense and Sensibility.
The novel was inspired by other novels of the late-18th-century, including Adam Stevenson's Life and Love and Jane West's A Gossip Story. The former deals with Stevenson himself being involved in a doomed romantic relationship, while the latter tells the story of two very different sisters (one more rational, the...
