This course is entirely dedicated to one of the greatest literary works of the nineteenth-century and my own personal favourite: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Written in 1871, the novel deals with such important contemporary issues as political change, education for women, identity, marriage and the changing social structure. It is still deeply meaningful today and this is partly why it has stood the test of time: it is, amongst other things, a series of love stories, an exploration of life in the…

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…

Written 100 years apart, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and E.M. Forster’s Howards End are both novels about the state of England, uneasy class relations, social conformity and social rebellion. In this course, we will explore the rich social comedy of both texts, their exploration of the English country house as symbol and the authors’ presentations of a range of heroines from the quiet endurance of Austen’s Fanny Price to the bold rebellion of Mary Crawford and Forster’s Helen Schlegel. Date: Tuesdays 4th September…

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…

In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s experiments with narrative technique and multiple perspectives take the novel into uncharted waters, exploring individual consciousness, interweaving lives and unspoken memories and desires in ways that are at once challengingly innovative and refreshingly direct. Yet these are not mere technical experiments: both novels are moving explorations of family relationships and conflicts, of the shattering effects of the First World War and the very nature of artistic creation. Date: Thursdays 10th Jan  – 14th Feb…

In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s experiments with narrative technique and multiple perspectives take the novel into uncharted waters, exploring individual consciousness, interweaving lives and unspoken memories and desires in ways that are at once challengingly innovative and refreshingly direct. Yet these are not mere technical experiments: both novels are moving explorations of family relationships and conflicts, of the shattering effects of the First World War and the very nature of artistic creation. Date: Thursdays 10th Jan  – 14th Feb…