Jane Austen course 2025

Live online course, Sundays, weekly, 4 May - 25 May 2025.
With Dr Fred Parker, Clare College, University of Cambridge.

The Young Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s writing career began in her early teens, with a series of spoofs and pastiches of contemporary fiction that were written to entertain her family and herself. Before she reached her mid-twenties, she had already drafted the first three of the published novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. Those novels were revised later, but the texts we have still show the spirit of those early writings: playful, comedic, irreverent, and ironic. This is the aspect of Austen’s mind and work that we will be focusing on in this course.

To begin with, the ironies were all about books, all to do with what Austen found (or made) ridiculous in the trash fiction she evidently devoured. It was from that starting-point that the ironies expanded to take in behaviours in common life, as if life itself sometimes went like a novel, as if real people sometimes behaved like the stereotypical figures of fiction. Austen’s novels achieve a realism unequalled by any earlier novelist: yet all the while, at least in the earlier novels, she holds onto the sense that she is writing fiction, presenting her plots and characters for the amusement of her reader, rather as the teenage Austen had written her novelettes for the amusement of her family. This doubling of life and fiction will be one recurrent theme of the lectures.

Another will be to think about the function and value of such lightness and playfulness. To her sister Cassandra, she described Pride and Prejudice as ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling’ - but as part of a complex joke about the place of seriousness in fiction. When Austen makes us smile, are we getting at something fundamental to her greatness as an artist? Does her playfulness make for intimacy, or promote elusiveness? Is her delight in mimicry friendly or hostile to the common forms of language and of living? And insofar as Austen is an ironist, does it follow that her investment in the narrative of love and courtship is ironic?

Each lecture will focus on one work or group of works, while also making connections between them. Provisional order of texts:

1. The unpublished teenage writings or juvenilia. Especially: ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, ‘Jack and Alice’, ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’ from the first volume; ‘Love and Friendship’, ‘A Collection of Letters’ from the second; and ‘Kitty, or the Bower’ (‘Catherine’ in some editions) from the third. Any edition will do, but if you don’t yet have one, recommended is Teenage Writings, ed. Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnston (Oxford World’s Classics).

2. Northanger Abbey

3. Pride and Prejudice

4. Sense and Sensibility

Four sessions, weekly on Sundays, from 4 May to 25 May 2025.