English Literature: Discovering Jane Austen

Discover who Jane Austen was, from a romantic heroine to a realist, through 160 surviving letters and her six completed novels.

Explore how the gorgeous georgians staged wealth and style through hair, corsets, large hoops, makeup rituals, and public display, shaping social status, satire, and fashion across the era.

Explore Jane Austen as a groundbreaking intellectual in women's writing, weaving social realism with moral insight, and trace her influence from 18th‑century constraints to modern adaptations.

Examine Jane Austen's juvenilia: early notebooks by a gifted teen, with confident heroines, comic imitations, and moral fragments that foreshadow later novels, shaped by family and Cassandra.

Explore Lady Susan, Austen's epistolary novella of manipulation and deception, where a beautiful widow exerts influence and control within a male dominated society, challenging notions of virtue.

Explore Jane Austen's early parody Leslie Castle, an epistolary juvenilia about Margaret Leslie and Charlotte Luttrell, satirizing appearance, marriage, and women's independence through comic letters.

Explore Austen's best known novels, tracing her mature works and shift to realism. Analyze her use of free indirect speech, omniscient narration, dialogue, and themes of female independence.

Explore Jane Austen's sense and sensibility through the Dashwood sisters, Eleanor and Marianne, as they navigate love, money, social expectations, and moral choices within a tale of sense and sensibility.

Northanger Abbey blends satire of gothic novels with a coming-of-age bildungsroman as Catherine Morland navigates Bath, social hierarchies, and the lure of reading.

Examine Emma's self-deluded matchmaking, social class, and female empowerment in a revolutionary novel told through her perspective, with Knightley's moral guidance revealing growth.

Jane Austen's unfinished Sanditon follows Charlotte Hayward in a seaside resort built on ambition, marriage, and wealth. Its fragments inspire a 2019 ITV adaptation and raise colonialism and race themes.

This lecture analyzes Jane Austen's unfinished fragment The Watsons, focusing on Emma, the youngest Watson raised by a wealthy aunt, who returns home amid family rivalries and outsider status.

Complete this course with a renewed appreciation for Jane Austen, continue reading her works, and join the book club on the first Friday via Zoom or private messaging.