Books Like Sense and Sensibility: 20 Regency Romances to Read Next (2026)

Books like Sense and Sensibility are having a moment. Georgia Oakley’s new film, with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne, opened in U.S. theaters on October 16, 2026, Austen’s 250th birthday was celebrated last December, and Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice lands in December. If the Dashwood sisters sent you looking for more, this list is built around what actually makes the novel work: two sisters with no money, a quiet older man who loves without asking for anything, a charming rake who ruins everything and a secret engagement that keeps the right couple apart for 300 pages. Regency romance, queer Regency, modern retellings and more Austen, with heat levels on every pick, and a sapphic Regency from our own shelf that keeps the candlelight and opens the bedroom door.

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What Makes Sense and Sensibility Different From the Other Austens

Pride and Prejudice is about one couple. Sense and Sensibility (1811) is about two sisters, and money. When Mr. Dashwood dies, Norland Park goes to their half-brother, his wife Fanny talks him out of helping, and Elinor, Marianne, their mother and little Margaret are moved to a cottage in Devonshire on five hundred a year. Elinor falls quietly for Edward Ferrars, who turns out to be secretly engaged to someone else. Marianne falls loudly for Willoughby, who turns out to be a cad, while the thirty-five-year-old Colonel Brandon stands in the rain and waits. The book’s engine is restraint against passion, and the best readalikes keep that tension: sisters who have to be practical, a steady man who is more romantic than the dashing one, and a heroine who learns that feeling everything out loud is not the same thing as being loved.

Books Like Sense and Sensibility: The Sisters

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting by Sophie Irwin

The closest thing to a modern Dashwood novel. Kitty Talbot’s parents are dead, the debts come due in twelve weeks and she has four younger sisters to keep out of the workhouse, so she goes to London for the Season to marry money, with no illusions about it. Her target is the sweet, rich Archie de Lacy; the obstacle is his older brother Lord Radcliffe, who sees exactly what she is and sets out to stop her. Irwin writes with Austen’s dryness and a heroine who is Elinor’s practicality without Elinor’s patience. Kisses only, closed door, and one of the best Regency debuts of the decade.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting on Amazon →

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

Mary Bennet, the plain, pious middle sister everyone laughs at in Pride and Prejudice, gets her own novel and her own slow, hard-won happiness. Hadlow gives her the Dashwood treatment: a woman with no fortune and no beauty, dependent on relations, who has to decide what a good life looks like when nobody is going to hand her one. The romance is gentle, the self-discovery is the point, and the last hundred pages are quietly devastating. Closed door.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See The Other Bennet Sister on Amazon →

Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

The real Austen sisters. In 1840 Cassandra Austen goes to Kintbury to find, and burn, the letters Jane wrote that the world should never read, and the novel moves between the aging Cassandra and the young one who gave up her own happiness so the two sisters could stay together. If the Elinor-and-Marianne relationship is the part of Sense and Sensibility you love most, this is the book, and the 2025 Masterpiece adaptation with Keeley Hawes is the companion piece.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Miss Austen on Amazon →

Longbourn by Jo Baker

Pride and Prejudice from below stairs. Sarah the housemaid scrubs the Bennet girls’ petticoats, a new footman with a secret arrives, and the Austen plot plays out in the background while the people who do the work fall in love. It’s the Regency with mud on it, and it makes the Dashwoods’ “poverty” look like what it was: genteel. Open door but brief.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See Longbourn on Amazon →

If You Fell for Colonel Brandon

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

Heyer invented the Regency romance as a genre, and this is her Sense and Sensibility: Adam Deveril comes home from the Peninsula to a title, a mortgaged estate and no money, and marries Jenny Chawleigh, a plain, sensible merchant’s daughter, for her father’s fortune, while still in love with the beautiful Julia. What follows is a marriage that grows into something real, written with the restraint Austen would recognize. No big declarations, no door at all, and one of the most moving romances in the genre.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See A Civil Contract on Amazon →

The Belle of Belgrave Square by Mimi Matthews

Julia Wychwood is an anxious heiress who would rather read than be looked at. Captain Jasper Blunt is a scarred, reserved war hero with a crumbling estate, three children and a reputation London has decided is villainous. He needs her money; she needs to get out of her parents’ house; neither expects the marriage to turn into the thing it becomes. Victorian rather than Regency, but Blunt is the purest Colonel Brandon in modern romance: steady, honorable and more romantic than any rake. Closed door, swoony, perfect for the Austen reader who wants more.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See The Belle of Belgrave Square on Amazon →

When He Was Wicked by Julia Quinn

Michael Stirling fell in love with Francesca Bridgerton the night before she married his cousin, and spent years loving her silently while she was happily married to someone else. When she’s widowed, he still won’t say it. The sixth Bridgerton novel is Quinn’s most grown-up book, a grief-and-guilt slow burn where the devoted man has to decide whether wanting her is a betrayal. Brandon energy with the door open.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See When He Was Wicked on Amazon →

If You Wanted Willoughby to Be Redeemable

Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas

Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, is Willoughby with the mask off: a beautiful, broke rake who tried to abduct an heiress in the previous book. Then stammering wallflower Evie Jenner walks into his house and offers to marry him for her inheritance, and the rest of the novel is him discovering he would burn London down for her. The third Wallflowers book and the one people mean when they say “Kleypas.” Open door, mid-heat.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Devil in Winter on Amazon →

Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase

Jessica Trent comes to Paris to pry her idiot brother out of the clutches of the Marquess of Dain, the most dangerous man in Europe, and shoots him instead. The dialogue is the best in historical romance, the hero is a wounded monster who turns out to be a wounded boy, and the heroine is Elinor with a pistol. Thirty years old and still the book everyone recommends first.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Lord of Scoundrels on Amazon →

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean

Lady Calpurnia Hartwell, twenty-eight and on the shelf, writes a list of everything a proper lady is never allowed to do and starts with kissing the Marquess of Ralston. The Marianne book: a heroine who decides she is done being sensible, and a rake who is undone by being chosen. Funny, hot and the start of MacLean’s Love by Numbers series.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake on Amazon →

Regency and Gilded Age Romance With the Heat Turned Up

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

Annabelle Archer, a vicar’s daughter on an Oxford scholarship in 1879, is assigned to recruit powerful men to the suffrage cause and picks the coldest duke in England. He has every reason to marry for position. She has nothing but a brain and a backbone. The class gap is the whole Dashwood problem, written a generation later and with the bedroom door open.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Bringing Down the Duke on Amazon →

Romancing the Duke by Tessa Dare

Izzy Goodnight, penniless daughter of a famous author, inherits a ruined castle that already has a duke living in it, blind, furious and refusing to leave. The Dashwood premise (a gentlewoman with no money and a house she can’t afford) played as a romp. Dare is the funniest writer in Regency romance and her love scenes are the warmest.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Romancing the Duke on Amazon →

A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera

Luz Alana Heith-Benzan arrives at the 1889 Paris Exposition to sell her family’s rum and finds a trust she can’t touch until she marries. Evan Sinclair, Earl of Darnick, needs a wife to spite his father. A marriage of convenience that starts as a contract and ends as the most romantic book in Herrera’s catalog, with real history, real heat and a heroine who never once apologizes for wanting her own money.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See A Caribbean Heiress in Paris on Amazon →

Queer Regency Romance Like Sense and Sensibility

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

1816. Lucy Muchelney, an astronomer’s daughter with no prospects now that her father is dead and her lover has married a man, goes to London to translate a French astronomy text and ends up in the house of the widowed Countess of Moth. Two women, one roof, a lot of embroidery and the slowest, most satisfying sapphic Regency on the shelf. Elinor’s quiet competence, Marianne’s hunger, with the door wide open.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics on Amazon →

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley

Thomasina Wynchester is a master of disguise from the most chaotic found family in Regency London; Philippa York is a bluestocking expected to marry well. Tommy courts her in a borrowed identity, and the book is a sapphic Regency rom-com with a heart the size of Mayfair. Second in the Wild Wynchesters series, reads fine alone.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See The Perks of Loving a Wallflower on Amazon →

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Viola Carroll was presumed dead at Waterloo, and used it to finally live as herself. Years later she comes face to face with the Duke of Gracewood, her oldest friend, who has been grieving her ever since and does not recognize her. A trans Regency romance with the emotional scale of a Brontë and the manners of an Austen, and the most moving second-chance romance of 2022.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See A Lady for a Duke on Amazon →

Band Sinister by KJ Charles

Guy Frisby and his sister Amanda live in genteel poverty next door to the scandalous Sir Philip Rookwood and his hellfire club. When Amanda breaks her leg on Rookwood’s land, Guy has to stay in the house of the man he’s been raised to despise. A deliberate Heyer homage with an MM romance at its center, a sister who writes gothic novels and a found family of rakes who turn out to be the kindest people in the county.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Band Sinister on Amazon →

Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian

Charity Church has been living as Robert Selby for years, first to get her late employer’s son into school, now to get his sister a Season. The starchy Marquess of Pembroke sees through the disguise and falls anyway. Sebastian writes Regency romance for readers who like their manners strict and their heroes undone, and this one has a nonbinary lead decades before the genre caught up.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Unmasked by the Marquess on Amazon →

Modern Retellings of Sense and Sensibility

Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev

Yash Raje is running for governor of California when an attempt on his life leaves him unable to function in public, and the only person who can help is India Dashwood, the yoga and stress-management expert he shared one perfect night with ten years ago. Third in Dev’s Rajes series, which retells an Austen novel per book, and the most emotionally complex of the set. Open door, mid-heat.

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Incense and Sensibility on Amazon →

Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope

The Austen Project’s first book moves the Dashwoods to present-day England: Norland goes to the half-brother, the sisters end up in a cottage, Marianne’s Willoughby drives a sports car and Elinor is the one who reads the bank statements. A faithful, readable update that shows how little the money problem has changed.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope on Amazon →

Sense and Second-Degree Murder by Tirzah Price

Elinor is an aspiring chemist, Marianne wants to be a detective, and their father has just been murdered. A YA Regency mystery that keeps the sisters, the cottage and Colonel Brandon and adds a body. Light, clever and closed door, for the Austen reader who also loves Enola Holmes.

Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Sense and Second-Degree Murder on Amazon →

Which Sense and Sensibility Adaptation to Watch

The 2026 film from director Georgia Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid (Focus Features) stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor, Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne, George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon, Frank Dillane as Willoughby, Caitríona Balfe as Mrs. Dashwood and Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings. It opened in the U.K. on September 25 and in the U.S. on October 16, 2026. Early reviews praised the sisters’ chemistry and the photography and called the tone muted and earthier than the 1995 film. Ang Lee’s 1995 version, written by and starring Emma Thompson with Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant, won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and is still the benchmark. The 2008 BBC miniseries, adapted by Andrew Davies with Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield, Dan Stevens and David Morrissey, is the most complete version of the book and the one with the famous seduction-in-the-rain opening.

See Sense and Sensibility on Amazon →

FAQ: Books Like Sense and Sensibility

Is Sense and Sensibility a romance novel?

By modern genre rules, yes: both sisters end the book married to the right man. It’s also a novel about money, inheritance and what women without either were allowed to want, which is why the best readalikes are the ones that keep the class and cash problem in the plot.

Is there a new Sense and Sensibility movie in 2026?

Yes. Georgia Oakley’s adaptation starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles was released by Focus Features on October 16, 2026 in the U.S., after a September 25 U.K. opening.

Which Austen novel should I read after Sense and Sensibility?

Persuasion if you loved Colonel Brandon, Pride and Prejudice if you wanted more sparring, Emma if you wanted more jokes.

What’s the spiciest book like Sense and Sensibility?

On the traditional shelf, Band Sinister, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics and A Caribbean Heiress in Paris run hottest. For full Inferno heat in a Regency setting, Evelyn Ashcombe’s The Lady in the Next Room and The Duke’s Indecent Bargain are explicit on the page. Our romance spice levels guide explains the chili scale used above.

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