Jane Austen: from early works to Mansfield Park

Aims

This course aims to:

• extend your knowledge and understanding of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park in the wider contexts of Austen studies
• develop your skills of close reading and literary analysis
• encourage you to employ critical vocabulary and approaches in order to develop informed responses to Austen’s work

Course content

This course invites you to spend two weeks within the company of some of Jane Austen’s most beloved characters. Over two weeks, the course will introduce you to the literary, social, and cultural context from which Austen’s novels emerged, helping you understand how the world in which she lived shaped her writing. The Regency period through which Austen lived was structured by class prejudices, gender expectations and economic pressures. As you study her work, you will explore how Austen both reflects and critiques the social conventions of her time, particularly in relation to women’s roles, family dynamics and the importance of financial security. In her Mansfield Park, Austen says ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest…’ This typical laughing-off of ‘odious’ subjects has sometimes meant that Austen’s seriousness and depth has been veiled by the romance and the comedy of her work.

We will begin by considering Austen’s juvenilia and then go on to focus on three of her novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park. Through close reading and discussion, you will examine how these novels explore themes such as morality, marriage and money, and how these concerns shape the choices and lives of Austen’s characters. By comparing these works, you will also consider how Austen develops and complicates these themes across different narratives.

Austen wrote Northanger Abbey at the beginning of her writing career in the 1790s but it was not published until 1817, after Austen’s death. It shows Austen developing her skills and attitudes as a novelist, particularly in her satirical engagement with the popular Gothic fiction of her time. The novel playfully critiques exaggerated imagination while also examining the social experiences of young women entering society. It’s also one of the best depictions of the pitfalls of toxic friendship in English Literature!

These themes are explored with a greater degree of seriousness in Sense and Sensibility, which examines the contrasting outlooks of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Their differing approaches to emotion and judgement present an implicit argument about the necessary balance between feeling and reason. The novel also encourages you to consider how economic vulnerability affects women’s independence and how marriage is often shaped by financial as well as emotional considerations. 

Finally, in Mansfield Park, Austen’s most serious and morally complex narrative. Through the (very unpopular) character of Fanny Price, you will reflect on questions of virtue, responsibility and moral authority within family and society. The novel invites you to think critically about power, privilege and the ethical values that underpin polite society, and to notice the importance of the idea of the well-run ‘great house’ and estate.

Across the course, you will also develop your understanding of Austen’s narrative style, including her use of irony, social observation and free indirect discourse. 

What to expect on this course

The course will be taught through a series of short talks each day, with introductions to key ideas and critical approaches to the reading. We will then move into a seminar structure where contributions and discussions will be encouraged. Your enjoyment of the course will be enhanced if you have read the stories in advance and come ready to discuss them.

Course sessions

1. Introduction: Austen’s life and juvenilia
   What did Jane Austen read as a child and how did it influence her writing? This first session will look at Austen’s earliest writings to understand how she created her voice and style.
2. Money and Marriage: Contexts for reading Austen
   In this session we’ll think about the different contexts - political, economic and social – in which we might place Austen’s works.
3. Northanger Abbey 1: How to make a heroine
   Beginning with Austen’s parodying of the stock heroines, heroes and villains of the Gothic novel, we’ll discuss Northanger Abbey’s commentary on what makes for a good read.
4. Northanger Abbey 2: Real threats
   Northanger Abbey contains elements of real peril for its heroine. In this session we’ll examine the seriousness of the novel’s commentary on what constitutes good behaviour and discuss the nature of its ending.
5. Sense and Sensibility 1: Melancholy and morality
   We’ll finish our discussion of Northanger Abbey and turn to Sense and Sensibility via consideration of the late 18th century/early 19th century interest in romanticism, feeling and ‘sensibility’. 
6. Sense and Sensibility 2: Morality and money
   Does anyone have a job in Jane Austen’s novels? Where does everyone’s money come from? We’ll analyse the predicament of the Dashwood family and think about how Austen carefully plots the journeys of Elinor and Marianne through the novel.
7. Religion and Nature
   We’ll continue our study of Sense and Sensibility by thinking about the role of religion, justice and virtue (and lack of virtue) in all three novels. Mansfield Park is the most explicitly religious of all Austen’s novels, so we’ll ask how the novel refers to religious and political contexts of the day.
8. Mansfield Park 1: Fanny vs Mary
   “… a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat […] who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!” (Screwtape the Demon, in CS Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.) This session will focus on Fanny (and her rival, Mary Crawford). Readers may not despise Fanny as much as Lewis’ character Screwtape does, but she is often described as Austen’s least engaging heroine. Why did Austen write Fanny as she did? What does the novel say about her motivations and desires and how is Fanny contrasted with its other female characters?
9. Mansfield Park 2: A tour of Mansfield Park, its inhabitants, notable sights and principle features
   We’ll look at the description of Mansfield Park itself, and the idea of the well-run estate, connecting with pastoral traditions in English literature. 
10. Endings, Conclusions and Afterlives
    Summing up, reviewing, and thinking again about endings, happy and otherwise. What uses have made of Austen’s novels and how have our three particular texts been adapted and responded to since their publication?

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject, and you should be able to:

• demonstrate your knowledge of Austen’s novels
• connect the style, themes and details of Austen’s novels with the political and social contexts of the early nineteenth century 
• analyse Austen’s writing using appropriate theoretical and critical vocabulary

Required reading

Please read the three featured novels in full before the course and bring a copy to class - e-reader form is fine. We recommend using the Oxford World’s Classics editions of the novels.

*Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, editor Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) 

*Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility, editor John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 

*Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park, editor James Kinsley, with an introduction and notes by Jane Stabler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)