February 2019
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager and was immediately captivated by the rebellious spirit of Jane’s voice and her journey from downtrodden outsider to mistress of all she surveys. Jane got to have it all. Or did she? In this course you will have the opportunity to see the novel as both a liberated portrait of female desire and as a darker engagement with issues of sex, power and race. In the final two weeks of the course we will turn…
Find out more »March 2019
Uncharted Waters: Celebrating Virginia Woolf
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. This course runs over 5 weeks and…
Find out more »‘Reader, I married him’ Jane Eyre
I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager and was immediately captivated by the rebellious spirit of Jane’s voice and her journey from downtrodden outsider to mistress of all she surveys. Jane got to have it all. Or did she? In this course you will have the opportunity to see the novel as both a liberated portrait of female desire and as a darker engagement with issues of sex, power and race.
Find out more »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 »‘Reader, I married him’: Jane Eyre
I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager and was immediately captivated by the rebellious spirit of Jane’s voice and her journey from downtrodden outsider to mistress of all she surveys. Jane got to have it all. Or did she? In this one day course you will have the opportunity to see the novel as both a liberated portrait of female desire and as a darker engagement with issues of sex, power and race. Saturday, 27th April 10 am - 3…
Find out more »June 2019
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…
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