In Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen, that so long mistaken avatar of Victorian propriety while actually its 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 so faithfully, with love and respect, evokes Jane Austen's style and characters and ambience, Julia Barrett bids fair to show Margaret's creator happily wrong in her estimation of Margaret's at first vulnerable, then shrewd and winning potential, the exercise of which makes for the substance of this remarkable novel on its own.

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, creative continuation of Sense and Sensibility, featuring a Margaret Dashwood, the third sister, once so underestimated, who turns out to fool even her creator.