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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Emily in the Castle of Udolpho In yesterday’s post I discussed anxious parents and proposed Northanger Abbey as a sane approach to teenage reading (and movie watching and internet using). I elaborate here. I start first with the reading material in question. Heroine Catherine Moreland and her best friend Isabella Thorpe are enthralled with the […]
“Before,” by William Hogarth (1736) What can happen to your daughters if they read novels? According to William Hogarth, something like the above. Check out the lower left hand corner where a side table is falling over. The drawer has been left casually but deliberately open so that one can see the book that is […]
