Tag Archives: Sense and Sensibility

Regency Teens, Same Issues as Today

Seldom have I enjoyed a course more than my current first year seminar on Jane Austen—specifically “Jane Austen and the Challenges of Being a Regency Teenager.” The title of the course isn’t historically accurate since young men and women in the early 19th century didn’t think of themselves as teenagers. Adolescence wasn’t as prolonged as […]

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Comparing Jane Austen and Frank Capra

Film Friday Teaching Sense and Sensibility in my Jane Austen First Year Seminar is giving me the chance to once again relish the magnificent way that the author dispenses poetic justice. This time through, I found that the ending of the novel reminds me of the ending of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Since […]

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How the Rich Cry Poverty, Austen Style

John Kenneth Galbraith, noted economist and author of The Affluent Society, used to read Jane Austen before he sat down to write. He wanted to achieve the author’s light ironic touch in his own work. Yesterday another liberal economist had me thinking of Austen. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who writes for the New York […]

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How to Film Austen Heroines Saying Yes

Amanda Root as Anne Elliott  Film Friday One must show a great deal of sensitivity in how one films a Jane Austen heroine accepting a marriage proposal. That’s because the author never shows us the acceptances directly. Although I am generally not a great fan of filmed versions of Jane Austen novels, I have to […]

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Austen’s Good Enough Match

First of all, a happy birthday to Jane Austen (thanks to my mother for pointing this out).  Jane would have been 234 today. My students have been bothered by the Marianne-Brandon marriage that concludes Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I’m inclined to agree with them.  Kat Vander Wende reasonably pointed out that the sought-after […]

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Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron

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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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