3Thu-2B-8a: Jane Austen: First and Last

Class | Registration opens 1/19/26 10:00 AM

In-person: 8 weeks
Feb 26-Apr 30, 2026
11:30 AM-1:00 PM on Th
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$80.00

3Thu-2B-8a: Jane Austen: First and Last

Class | Registration opens 1/19/26 10:00 AM

This class will focus on the first and last books that Jane Austen wrote, one when she was quite young and still practicing the literary satire that made up the bulk of her juvenalia, one when she was middle-aged and quite aware of her approaching death.  Both were published posthumously in a single volume.  They are the two shortest books she wrote–good news for those put off by doorstop-sized books!–and, I think, can teach us a lot when read together: about Austen’s development as a writer, of course, but also about how her society, including its literature, and her own social and political views were evolving.

Over the mere seventeen or eighteen years that separate the composition of these two works, British society increasingly changed from a land-based economy to a money-based one where earned wealth began to compete with family name as a source of social status.  The middle classes rose in number and importance, ideas about the role of women became more contested, and the revolutions of the period (and shortly before) taught everyone that life as they had known it was not immutable.

While Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are mainly worth reading for their incomparable writing, delightful humor, and depth of insight into human nature, I hope that considering together these first and last finished offerings of Austen’s brilliant brain will also showcase the rapidly changing period in which she lived and the way her own thought developed in response.

The class will involve some brief introductory lectures but will rely largely on discussion.  Expect to read around 50-60 pages per week, with preparation time dependent on reading speed.

 

Please note that the last class is April 30, 2026, and there are no classes on April 2 and 9, 2026.



  • Books and Other Resources:

     

    Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, edited by Marilyn Butler, Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN  978-0-141-43979-2

    Jane Austen, Persuasion, edited by Gillian Beer, Penguin Classics, 2015, ISBN 978-0-141-43968-6


Sally Jordan

I have a Ph.D. in Literature from Brandeis University and spent 6 years of my graduate study there also teaching and assisting in teaching classes.  From graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a tenure-track job at Albion College, a small liberal-arts college in Michigan, where I spent 21 years teaching classes in literature and writing as an assistant, associate, and full professor.  My specific field is British literature of “the long eighteenth century” and British Romanticism.  Jane Austen is one of my very favorite authors, and I was able to work each of her six completed novels into at least one of the classes I taught regularly–a British Literature survey course, one in the early British novel, a class on satire, one on race, class and gender in British literature, and so on.  I also was privileged to teach an upper-level seminar on Austen, where I taught all of her novels and some of her (hilarious) juvenalia.