“My idea of good company,” says Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, “is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation.” To which her cousin replies, “That is not good company, that is the best.” I feel that I have emerged from the best of company as my Jane Austen […]
Tag Archives: Mansfield Park
Ask Jane: Expert Relationship Advice
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Education, Emma, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Relationships, Sense and Sensibility Comments closed
Austen for Progressive Church Reform
Spiritual Sunday I have come to admire, a great deal, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Under unbelievable social and family pressure, the modest and overlooked Fanny Price sticks to her moral principles as she resists a marriage proposal from an eligible bachelor, the wealthy and dashing Henry Crawford. I have learned only recently […]
Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines
Film Friday I’ve been amazed at the success of the Jane Austen industry in recent years. Fan though I am, I never could have predicted the hunger for movie and television versions of her novels, movie biographies of the author, sequels to Pride and Prejudice, horror versions of her novels, novels where characters from different […]
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 […]
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, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, reading, Sense and Sensibility Comments closed
