This class is a continuation of the complementary course ‘Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice’, but may also be taken by those wishing to study only these later masterpieces. To link both parts, we will trace how certain motifs, characters, and themes reappear in different forms, and yet how each receives distinctively fresh treatment with each new novel.
If Emma seems to mark a return to an earlier vein, it is with significant differences and emphases. The heroine may resemble Elizabeth Bennet in wit and in having an ineffectual father, but enjoys an unusual financial independence; and in Mr Knightley the theme of the future husband as protector of the heroine from her own follies reappears from Northanger Abbey. The novelist’s technique is here most fully developed; and through allowing entry into Emma’s consciousness, yet assuring readers of her own trustworthiness as narrator, the novelist is able to retain our sympathy and respect for Emma’s intelligence, despite the latter’s misapprehensions and minor snobbisms.
In Persuasion we encounter one of the most socially and financially vulnerable of the heroines, and an apparent shift in the source of Jane Austen’s values from the country gentry, whose decline is exemplified in the vain and feckless Sir Walter Elliot, to the service professions, in particular the Royal Navy. Meeting years after a broken engagement, the feelings of Anne Elliott and Captain Harwood are mysterious to each other, until a discussion whether men’s or women’s love is the most enduring breaks their emotional deadlock.
If time allows, the course will conclude with some account of the unfinished Sanditon.
What our students say
"The course was lively and enjoyable. Dr Lindsay provided great perspective, balanced with class discussion."
