There are few novelists as famous and enduringly popular as Jane Austen. Characters from her six major works have spilled out from the page onto stage and screen - both TV and film - again and again. Her protagonists have been portrayed by big screen names such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor and even Lawrence Olivier. The sheer bulk of literary scholarship on Austen’s work is beyond impressive. Sequels and homages to her work continue and In the year in which we celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, she is more conspicuous than ever. A TV adaptation of Gill Hornby’s bestselling Miss Austen (2020) was screened earlier this year and Austen is also the subject of a major new BBC Arts documentary in the Life of a Genius series.
Yet she lived quietly and fairly comfortably with her family and wrote four of her famous works in an intense period of just five years. She was proud of her status as a professional author especially since money was tight after the death of her father, and financial instability was a feature of her family life. She enjoyed a small measure of celebrity – enough for the Prince Regent to request (via his librarian) that she dedicate her novel, Emma to him in glorification of his name. But it would be hard to predict the scale of her cultural impact over time from this moderate level of success during her life. What did she do with the new literary form of the novel that was so groundbreaking? What was it about Jane Austen’s writing that distinguished her from her predecessors?
In this course we study her six major novels and consider the relationship between Jane Austen and her world, which far from being confined or limited was astoundingly intellectually expansive. We investigate how she engaged with key social, cultural and philosophical ideas and issues of the age in an exploratory and acutely responsive way. Examples include the changing social order, power relations in the domestic sphere, the acquisition and deployment of knowledge, and the cultural and philosophical shift from rationalist (Enlightenment) tenets to Romanticism during the period. In the process we explore how she so innovatively developed the new literary form of the novel building on a practice of authorial experimentation exhibited by preceding eighteenth-century novelists.
During the 10 weeks of the course, we focus especially on Northanger Abbey (1817), Emma (1815) and Persuasion (1817) and analyse extracts from the texts using emerging characteristics of the novel form such as narrative technique, characterisation and the referencing of other literary genres. To further bring to life some of Austen’s views and experiences, this course also includes a special visit to St John’s College library to view some original materials including letters in which the author gives literary advice to her young niece.