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.