The Third Sister: A Continuation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

In Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen, so long-mistaken as the model of Victorian propriety while actually the Regency’s wittiest and subtlest critic, wrote of Margaret Dashwood, the third sister: “Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humored, well-disposed girl but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.”

At the same time that she faithfully, with love and respect, evokes Jane Austen’s style and characters and ambience, Julia Barrett bids fair to show Margaret at first as vulnerable, but maturing into a young woman both shrewd and winning, a conclusion that makes for a most remarkable novel.

But of course, Jane Austen couldn’t know of Margaret’s metamorphosis. Or perhaps she did? and meant one day to say so herself: Whatever! The Third Sister is an imaginative, inventive continuation of Sense and Sensibility, a tour de force featuring a Margaret Dashwood, that under-estimated, dismissed third sister who turns out to astonish even her creator.