Jane Austen and her Age

Course Description

There are different Austens for different readers. Some are charmed by her wit, by her heroes and heroines, and by her capacity to write some of the greatest love stories of all time. Others view Austen as the reactionary or at least conservative voice of early nineteenth-century Tory Britain. And still others see her as dangerously subversive of the politics, manners, and mores she depicts. This course will not promote any one Austen, but, through a close exploration of each of her six major novels, we will attempt, like Elizabeth Bennet, to suspend our prejudices and sift the textual evidence, before coming to an opinion.
During your six weeks in Oxford, we will explore key Austen themes, such as love, marriage, money, morality, and sense and sensibility, relating them to their contexts within Regency Britain, and also within Enlightenment and Romantic literary traditions. More importantly, perhaps, we will scrutinize closely the linguistic texture of the novels, discussing how Austen’s famous irony works and focusing on her subtle use of free indirect speech. Since Austen is often discussed in terms of a history of ‘women's writing’, we will take some time to consider feminist readings of Austen's work, and relate her novels to the issues facing women in early nineteenth-century England.

Primary Texts

You should obtain physical copies of all of the novels; do not use digital editions of the primary texts: use the Oxford World’s Classics editions or the Cambridge edition. Our focus will be on the following:

Sense and Sensibility

Northanger Abbey

Pride and Prejudice

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

You should try to read all of these novels before the start of the course.

You should also be aware of the Juvenilia, including particularly Lady Susan, the late incomplete Sanditon and the Letters.

Biography and criticism

A very large number of biographies is available: those by David Cecil, David Nokes and Claire Tomalin are probably the best.

Much of the best criticism of Austen is in the form of essays (eg. D. W. Harding’s ‘Regulated

Hatred’). The various Casebooks, the two Critical Heritage volumes, and the 20th Century Views volume are a good starting-point.

Other important books include:

Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation

Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen: Her mind and art

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas 

Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, Secret Radical

Tony Tanner, Jane Austen

Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen

Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: The World of her Novels

Janet Todd, Jane Austen in Context

Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives

It is important that you read several of these books, either before or during the course.

Other texts

To put Austen in context, we will be comparing her to some of her contemporaries: in particular you should read Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.