ENG 430 - Jane Austen

Semester Hours: 4

The report of the accident had spread among the workmen and boatmen about the Cobb, and many were collected near them, to be useful if wanted, at any rate, to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report.–Jane Austen, Persuasion Who said Jane Austen was a stuffy old maid with no sense of humor? Her novels are infused with her laser-sharp wit and dead-on portraits of human nature. Today, she’d be a favorite on Comedy Central. Take the passage above from her novel, Persuasion. A party of friends heads to Lyme, where Louisa Musgrove sustains a bad fall off the Cobb while trying to get Captain Wentworth to catch her. Austen’s description is dark comedy at its best-laugh-out-loud funny. As George Saintsbury put it, “In Miss Austen there is, though restrained and well-nuanced, an insatiable and ruthless delight in roasting and cutting up a fool.” We’ll spend our entire semester getting to know “Miss Austen” and her works. Make no mistake; she can be subtle and slippery, but I’m hoping you’ll come to appreciate her style, which Sir Walter Scott called that “exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment.” She was E. M. Forster’s favorite author. Virginia Woolf felt her influence. And Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) wrote: “At first sight, Jane Austen’s manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs.” We’ll read Claire Tomalin’s biography of Austen, Austen’s novels, some of her surviving letters, and the major Austen critics. For context, we’ll study the period in which she lived and wrote and get to know a few of the other literary figures of her day. We may also take a look at one or two of the film adaptations of Austen’s novels.