Study in Oxford
Jane Austen in Context, with Tutor Emma Placket
Since the publication in 1811 of a novel called Sense and Sensibility “by a lady”, the works of Jane Austen have enjoyed both popularity and critical acclaim. Scholarly interest shows no sign of waning; nor does what can be described as a popular mania for all things Austen, especially in film and television. This course will examine the enduringly popular novels of Jane Austen, considering her novelistic technique and development, and her place among women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will place each novel in its literary and historical context, looking at eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, for example, when discussing Sense and Sensibility and the contemporary vogue for gothic novels when we study Austen’s burlesque of the gothic genre, Northanger Abbey. Other themes that will be covered include Austen’s treatment of class, economics, and politics, reading and education, female friendship and rivalry, and finally courtship, marriage, and the sexual double standard.
A field trip to Chawton in Hampshire to visit the Jane Austen House Museum, and Chawton House is included with the seminar.
Required advance reading:
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility, 1811.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, 1813.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, 1817.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion, 1817.
Additional suggested reading:
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park, 1814.
Austen, Jane. Emma, 1815.
Course outline
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Monday
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Introduction and historical/literary backgrounds; the disreputable eighteenth-century novel and contemporary concerns about impressionable novel readers. Jane Austen’s life and the pioneering women writers who influenced her and informed her writing. The courtship novel and the gothic novel; discussion of Northanger Abbey, Austen’s earliest novel, originally called ‘Susan’, as coming-of-age narrative and a clever, complicated, multi-layered parody of these genres of fiction. |
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Tuesday
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An introduction to the eighteenth-century ‘cult’ of sensibility, assessing the differences between Neoclassical and Romantic world views. Discussion of Sense and Sensibilityin its historical and cultural context of post-French-Revolutionary anxieties; examining the novel as Austen’s first piece of published writing. Themes for discussion including the sexual double standard, female social and economic vulnerability. |
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Wednesday
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Discussion of Pride and Prejudice as a courtship novel, a social satire, and a narrative of female self-development; examining themes including female education versus accomplishments, faulty parenting, unequal inheritance laws, and the sexual double standard. Do the many film adaptations of this book testify to the universality of Austen’s art or betray it with the addition of romantic elements that do not appear in the novel itself? Comparison of Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s most popular heroine with the eponymous heroine of Emma, whom Austen described as one “whom no-one but myself will much like”. |
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Thursday
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Field trip to Chawton, Hampshire: home to the Jane Austen House Museum and the Early Women’s Writing Centre at Chawton House. |
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Friday
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Discussion of Persuasion, Austen’s final, posthumously published novel; to assess how her writing technique developed from her earlier, more satirical novels. Looking at themes also treated in Mansfield Park, such as the navy versus landed gentry, primogeniture and inheritance, female friendship and sibling rivalry, familial duty versus personal integrity. |
Field Trip
To Chawton village, Hampshire: The Jane Austen House Museum, and Chawton House.
Websites: janeaustens.house chawtonhouse.org
About the Tutor
Dr Emma Plaskitt is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century women’s fiction. She has taught English literature 1640–1901 for various Oxford colleges as well as OUDCE programmes The Oxford Experience, MSSU, Berkeley, MSU, and Duke/UNC. Having worked for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where she was responsible for writing many articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, she now focuses on teaching for the SCIO Study Abroad Programme based at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and for Stanford University, for whom she is an Overseas Lecturer. Though a specialist in the literature of the long eighteenth century, her research interests include the Victorian novel - particularly the gothic novel and novel of sensation.