Daily schedule
Seminars meet each weekday morning after breakfast.
After lunch, afternoons are free for individual study or exploring the many places of interest in and around the city. Optional plenary excursions and social activities including walking tours will also be available.
The course fee includes breakfasts Monday-Saturday (residential guests only), lunches Sunday-Friday, and three-course dinners Sunday-Thursday. All meals are taken in Christ Church’s spectacular dining hall.
On Friday, there will be a special four-course gala dinner to celebrate the closing of the week.
Seminars and field trip
Monday seminars
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.
Tuesday seminars
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, the sexual double standard, and familial duty versus personal integrity. 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?
Wednesday seminars
Mansfield Park: Austen’s darkest novel, featuring a protagonist who has divided readers and critics and concluding in an ambivalent, even disappointing manner. Placement of the novel in the context of religious vocation in the eighteenth-century, landlords and the so-called improvement of the estate, slavery and abolition, the navy, and primogeniture. In the context of the latter we will also touch on the treatment of these themes in Persuasion, Austen’s final completed novel, published posthumously in December 1817.
Thursday seminars
Field trip to Chawton, Hampshire: home to the Jane Austen House Museum and the Early Women’s Writing Centre at Chawton House.
Friday seminars
Discussion of Emma, described by Austen as a heroine 'whom no-one but myself will much like'; discussion of the novel’s treatment of the ‘pupil-mentor’ convention and its engagement with conduct manual dictates on marriage, female friendship and rivalry and social duty. Do we agree with a twentieth-century critical assessment that of all her novels, Emma 'most perfectly executes its design'? Conclusion and overview; Austen for today’s reader.
Field Trip
Destination: Chawton village, Hampshire: The Jane Austen House Museum, and Chawton House.
Duration: All day
Excursion Rating: Moderate: up to two hours' walk on even ground or up to an hour's walk on rough and/or steep ground or up lots of stairs and steps.
