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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
