The Dark Side of Jane Austen

Click HERE for our final project gallery. Thanks to everyone who was willing to share their work!

Here’s a Dropbox link to the video of our live session yesterday. To view the whole thing, you’ll need to download it or add it to your Dropbox. You can, of course, delete after viewing. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the video, and we can come up with another arrangement that works for you.

(I’m sorry that those of you not using video show up nameless here; I could see names live but they seem not to record. If you’d like to change this for future sessions, try adding an image to your Zoom profile.)

Thanks to those who were able to make it! If you weren’t able to join, and would still like to be present for this session, please watch the video and leave a comment below this post with your contribution. 

Here’s a Dropbox link to the video of our live session yesterday. To view the whole thing, you’ll need to download it or add it to your Dropbox. You can, of course, delete after viewing. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the video, and we can come up with another arrangement that works for you.

(I’m sorry that those of you not using video show up nameless here; I could see names live but they seem not to record. If you’d like to change this for future sessions, try adding an image to your Zoom profile.)

Thanks to those who were able to make it! If you weren’t able to join, and would still like to be present for this session, please watch the video and leave a comment below this post with your contribution. 

For your final blog assignment of the semester, first finish reading Austen’s last, abandoned novel “Sanditon.” As I mentioned last week, Austen had to put the novel aside as her illness worsened, and she was never able to return to it, dying at the age of 41 in 1817.

Above, you’ll see the trailer for a very recent adaptation of the novel. (The full thing is available from PBS; a week-long free trial is available if you want to binge it!) One of the useful things about seeing this adaptation is that you can picture what a seaside resort town like Sanditon might have looked like (especially one that is so clearly “in progress” like this one). But the challenge (and potential) of an adaptation of an unfinished work is also, of course, the need to finish the story.

By Monday evening, write a comment on this post speculating about how “Sanditon” might end. You can take this from a number of different angles: you can write about what you think Austen would have done, you can write about what you would do, you can focus on a single character trajectory, you can think more about plot holistically, etc. Whatever approach you take, be sure to say a little about your reasoning. Even if you propose a somewhat fantastical ending, you should say how it might follow from the chapters available to us.

We’ll finish our discussion of “Sanditon” in next Wednesday’s Zoom session. I’ll post a short secondary reading here shortly, which I will also email out to everyone.

UPDATE: The secondary reading on “Sanditon” is now posted under the “Syllabus” tab above.

Here’s a Dropbox link to the video of our live session yesterday. To view the whole thing, you’ll need to download it or add it to your Dropbox. You can, of course, delete after viewing. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the video, and we can come up with another arrangement that works for you.

(I’m sorry that those of you not using video show up nameless here; I could see names live but they seem not to record. If you’d like to change this for future sessions, try adding an image to your Zoom profile.)

Thanks to those who were able to make it! If you weren’t able to join, and would still like to be present for this session, please watch the video and leave a comment below this post with your contribution. 

The second example of Austen’s manuscript fiction we’ll be looking at in this last unit of our course is “The Watsons.” (Austen didn’t give it that title; it’s more of a convenient handle given to the fragment later.) Unlike “Lady Susan,” you’ll see that “The Watsons” is clearly unfinished—not only does it not have a completed ending, it also clearly lacks the polish of Austen’s published novels. I told you in our last Zoom session about some of the speculation about why Austen didn’t complete the book—her clergyman father died during its composition, and she was faced with particularly urgent financial concerns. She may also have been unwilling to continue a novel about an ailing clergyman when her own father had just succumbed to illness.

Like “Lady Susan” part of “The Watsons”manuscript is housed in the Morgan Library, just up the road from Baruch

For this assignment, I want you to think about some of the stylistic and formal choices that go into this fragment. We talked a lot about epistolarity, both in earlier classes and in our discussion of “Lady Susan.” We know Austen started several of her novels as epistolary novels before switching to a third-person account. What would “The Watsons” look like as an epistolary novel? How would our understanding of its character relationships change? In a comment on this post, write a short letter from one of the characters in “The Watsons” to another. You should draw on the context the fragment gives us, as well as the sense of each character’s style we get from the fragment’s heavy use of dialogue. Feel free to be creative! But use this exercise to think more about the stakes of Austen’s formal choices. BONUS: If you happen to be writing after some of your classmates have posted, you should feel free to use your comment to write a letter in response to a letter that has already been posted.

We’ll discuss these in our Wednesday Zoom session and will also start our discussion of Austen’s final, unfinished novel, “Sanditon.”

Austen lived in Bath while she worked on “The Watsons,” and by all accounts she didn’t like it there much.

Here’s a Dropbox link to the video of our live session today. To view the whole thing, you’ll need to download it or add it to your Dropbox. You can, of course, delete after viewing. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the video, and we can come up with another arrangement that works for you.

(I’m sorry that those of you not using video show up nameless here; I could see names live but they seem not to record. If you’d like to change this for future sessions, try adding an image to your Zoom profile.)

Thanks to those who were able to make it! If you weren’t able to join, and would still like to be present for this session, please watch the video and leave a comment below this post with your contribution. 

For the remainder of the semester, we’ll be reading some of Austen’s lesser-known (but still, I think, really interesting) writings. First up is Lady Susan, probably written around 1794 (that is, before Northanger Abbey) but not published until long after her death, near the end of the nineteenth century. Like Love and Freindship and the earliest versions of some of her other novels, Lady Susan  is an epistolary novel, written in letters. The original manuscript is located at the Morgan Library, just a few blocks from our campus. You can look over the pages (but probably not read Austen’s handwriting) here.

First page of the manuscript of Lady Susan

As you read, one of the first things you’ll notice is that Lady Susan isn’t anything like the other protagonists we’ve encountered so far. She’s significantly older (with a grown daughter), a widow, and, well, she’s a bad person! Austen has no interest in hiding her faults, which are displayed even in the first couple of pages of the short novel. I’ve said a few times over the semester that Austen experiments with who a heroine might be; Lady Susan might be the most extreme example of this. She may also appeal to those of us who were longing for a deviation from the typical marriage plot (though she’s also very much interested in using courtship to achieve her own ends).

The novel is very quick, and it’s easy to get lost in all of the proper names at first. To help you get your bearings (and just in case you’re interested), I recommend this short trailer for a recent adaptation of the novel (confusingly named not Lady Susan but Love and Friendship):

(The whole film is included with Amazon Prime streaming if you’re interested. I think it’s worth it.)

For Monday, write a comment on this post focusing on a single passage of the novel. Refresh those close reading skills I know you have and really try to focus on the details of the passage, explaining how you read it and how Austen’s choices matter for its meaning. We know from these manuscripts that Austen had quite an attention to detail, refining her sentences and her word choice repeatedly. Think, in your post, about the effects of those choices on the reader (even if the novel likely had very few contemporary readers at all). You might also say a bit about why you’ve chosen the passage you focus on.

Looking ahead: in Wednesday’s Zoom session, we’ll discuss Lady Susan but also get started on an abandoned manuscipt, The Watsons.

Here’s a Dropbox link to the video of our live session today. To view the whole thing, you’ll need to download it or add it to your Dropbox. You can, of course, delete after viewing. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the video, and we can come up with another arrangement that works for you.

(I’m sorry that those of you not using video show up nameless here; I could see names live but they seem not to record. If you’d like to change this for future sessions, try adding an image to your Zoom profile.)

Thanks to those who were able to make it! If you weren’t able to join, and would still like to be present for this session, please watch the video and leave a comment below this post with your contribution. 

If you were able to join the Zoom session on Tuesday, you’ll know that we ended by talking about the centrality of marriage both to The Woman of Colour and to Austen’s novels. While there are a lot of similarities across the novels (including an interest in both the legal and economic significance of marriage, especially for women), I pointed out one key difference we might pay closer attention to: the central marriage in The Woman of Colour takes place not at the end (as Austen leads us to expect) but in the middle, just before the end of volume I.

Next week, we’ll focus our attention on the second volume of The Woman of Colour and the aftermath of that mid-plot marriage. Because the second half of the novel contains a number of surprises, I’ll urge you to finish reading before our Wednesday (4/15) discussion. Some other advice to prepare:

1. If you didn’t get a change to listen when we talked about Emma, or if you’ve forgotten, listen to this fascinating history podcast on marriage law. (You can also read the transcript on the post.)
   

   Coverture: Married Women and Legal Personhood in Britain

   2. If you find the time, think back to some of the other marriage or proposal scenes we’ve read so far this semester.

For Monday, April 13, write a response to this post that in some way thinks through the questions raised by marriage in these novels, especially The Woman of Colour. Your response should refer to at least one passage from the novel. I’ll synthesize these so that we can focus on those passages in our Wednesday discussion.