April 2019
Property and Propriety: Mansfield Park and Howards End
Mansfield Park is Austen’s least-loved novel but it happens to be one of my favourites. Of all her novels, it is the one written on the widest canvas and the only one to be named after a house (Northanger Abbey was given its name posthumously by Austen’s brother – she in fact called it, Susan). Austen does nothing accidentally so we should take this as a clue. Written 100 years apart, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and E.M. Forster’s Howards End are both novels about the state of England,…
Find out more »Property and Propriety: Mansfield Park and Howards End
Mansfield Park is Austen’s least-loved novel but it happens to be one of my favourites. Of all her novels, it is the one written on the widest canvas and the only one to be named after a house (Northanger Abbey was given its name posthumously by Austen’s brother – she in fact called it, Susan). Austen does nothing accidentally so we should take this as a clue. Written 100 years apart, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and E.M. Forster’s Howards End are both novels about the…
Find out more »June 2019
Tender is the Night
This course is devoted to Fitzgerald’s novel, Tender is the Night, a disillusioned chronicle of a doomed marriage and a lost generation. If you like your cocktails with a sour twist, this one is for you. This course runs over 4 weeks on Thursdays 10 am - 12.15; bought as a package at £200 (this includes tea and cake in the break and resource material)
Find out more »House of Fiction: Henry James and Edith Wharton
In The Portrait of a Lady and The House of Mirth, two of America’s greatest novelists, create two of the most enduringly attractive and tragic heroines in modern literature: Isabel Archer and Lily Bart. Both are independent, both are beautiful and both know that they must marry one of their many suitors. Yet there are no happy endings here and the consequences of their decisions test them to breaking point. In this course we will explore the novel’s exploration of female sexuality, the…
Find out more »North and South
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England. Initially repulsed by the griminess of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man John…
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