Austen Project Books in Order

Joanna Trollope’s contribution to the Austen Project is her contemporary reimagining of Sense & Sensibility, the opening title in a series of modern takes on Jane Austen’s novels. Rather than simply updating the dialogue and changing the clothes, she asks what the Dashwood family’s problems would look like in twenty‑first‑century Britain.

The basic set‑up is familiar. A father dies leaving most of his estate to a son from his first marriage, and his second wife and three daughters suddenly find themselves squeezed out of the comfortable home they took for granted. In Trollope’s version, that means a sharp drop in lifestyle, an unwelcome dependence on relatives and friends, and a new intimacy with credit cards, job applications and cramped rental property.

The sisters map loosely onto Austen’s originals: one more controlled and pragmatic, one romantic and impulsive, and a younger teenager watching everything. Suitors appear in recognisable modern guises – a shy professional man with complicated family loyalties, a charming but unreliable figure involved in property and media – and the book explores what “falling” for someone looks like in an age of smartphones, gossip sites and instant messages.

Money, always a quiet engine in Austen, becomes explicitly about salaries, housing markets and the pressure to keep up appearances in a culture that prizes showy success. Trollope uses contemporary details – social media, celebrity scandals, commuter trains – but keeps the emotional spine of the story: how sisters negotiate duty and resentment, how mothers learn to let go, and how people decide between short‑term excitement and long‑term steadiness.

For readers who know the original, part of the pleasure lies in spotting how familiar scenes have been re‑planted in coffee shops, television studios or cramped suburban streets. For those coming to the story fresh, it stands as a self‑contained family drama very much in line with Trollope’s other novels about inheritance, blended families and the cost of keeping secrets.

Taken on its own, this Austen Project installment offers a bridge between classic and contemporary storytelling. It shows how the social comedy and moral questions that drove Austen’s work still resonate when translated into the speech patterns, work pressures and relationship dilemmas of today’s Britain.