Join us for the Harewood Jane Austen Book Club! Whether you're a first time Austen reader or coming back to her, come along for a relaxed conversation about Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

This book club will be led by Chloe Wigston Smith, Professor of English and Director of the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.

We recommend that you have read Sense and Sensibility in advance so that you can get the most out of this informal and lively chat led by one of the curators of Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter.

Sense and Sensibility, 1811

Jane Austen’s debut novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published anonymously in 1811. Its original print run of 750 copies sold for 15 shillings – about a week’s wages for a skilled tradesman –‘in boards’.

Henry Lascelles, 2nd Earl of Harewood, had his edition of Austen’s novel rebound in calf leather and ornamented with his crest. The pages are trimmed and embellished by marbled edges. It is on display in the Spanish Library next to Jane Austen’s handwritten manuscript, Sanditon.

About Chloe Wigston Smith

Chloe Wigston Smith, Professor of English and Director of the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, is a specialist in women’s writing, material culture, and the history of fashion in the eighteenth century.

She has written and edited several books, including Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel(Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Novels, Needlework, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2024).