I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today. I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the scandalous poetry of the licentious […]
Tag Archives: Jane Austen
Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 18th Century Novel, Laughter, Restoration comedy, Romantic Comedy, Sense and Sensibility, teaching Comments closed
True Love and a Steady Income
Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson as Edward, Elinor I’ve been reading essays on Sense and Sensibility and thinking of all the useful lessons it teaches, including about the influence of money on people’s dating decisions. One of my students focused on the figure of Lucy Steele, whom she compared to a woman in the reality […]
The Jane Austen Punishments List
It’s the last day of the semester (except for exams) and I’m swamped by term papers from my three courses. As a break from writing my own post on Jane Austen, therefore, I share with you a very funny item that I picked up from the Jane Austen Information Page. In addition to more serious […]
Jane Austen’s Subtle Stiletto
I’m teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility at the moment and, once again, recalling what a masterpiece it is. The interactions between the sisters never fail to elicit sibling stories from my students. Some of us see ourselves as the elder sister Elinor, others as the younger sister Marianne. As the oldest in my family, […]
On the Logic of Having Babies
In a recent post on her website, my wonderful daughter-in-law reflects on whether she and Darien will have children. The reflection was occasioned by our Iowa Thanksgiving where she saw all of her husband’s cousins having children (and I mean all, the only exceptions being those who are in college or younger). So Betsy compiles […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Children, Dashiell Hammett, Maltese Falcon, Marriage, Persuasion Comments closed
Austen, Not Byron or Scott, for Strength
My final post in this four-part series shows how my student Mary used Persuasion in her Jane Austen senior project to validate her growing self-confidence. She focused in that novel on the reading scenes involving the sensitive Captain Benwick, who is shattered by the death of his fiancé Fanny Harville. To console himself, Benwick plunges […]
Heroic Reading When All Are against You
While it made sense that my student Mary would be drawn to Northanger Abbey (see my Thursday and Friday posts), Mansfield Park was the Jane Austen novel that brought out her best. She identified with the heroine Fanny Price for very understandable reasons. With her speech impairment, Mary, like Fanny, grew up feeling marginalized as […]
Moving beyond Gothics to Reality
For a student who had spent her life hiding out in literature (see yesterday’s post), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey struck a chord. Although it’s the most lightweight of Austen’s six great novels, Mary learned a lot about herself when she studied it. Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age novel about young Catherine Morland. In a visit […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Coming of age novel, Maturation, Northanger Abbey Comments closed
Reading Austen to Handle Adversity
In recent posts I have been writing about how young people in the 18th century found moral guidance in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, even though the novel was attacked for corrupting them. Over the next four posts I will tell an inspirational story about one of my students who found guidance in the novels of […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Adversity, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, reading, Sense and Sensibility Comments closed
