We will study the full range of Jane Austen’s work, reading not just her novels, but her earlier hilarious juvenilia, several unfinished fragments of novels, and her wonderful letters over her lifetime to her sister Cassandra. This great writer’s work will be examined in relation to both biography and history. We will learn to analyze Austen’s characteristic style and techniques, thereby gaining an enhanced appreciation of her writing—its intelligence, its wit, its themes—as well as her values and moral code. We will also become more familiar with the culture of eighteenth-century England and the place of women, and art, in it.
