It's been Jane Austen all the way this week -- Emma with the 3rd years on Monday, Sense and Sensibility with the 2nd years yesterday. Different context, different group, but another lively discussion. This 2nd year group have been working their way forward chronologically since the beginning of the academic year -- last semester it was the 18th century, this semester it's the Romantic period, roughly 1789-1836. They've been doing mostly poetry and fiction, with a little drama and non-fiction thrown in. So they've read a few 18th century novels -- Robinson Crusoe, Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Fanny Burney's Evelina, to be exact. They struggled a bit with all of them -- the language and style seemed to them very archaic. Everyone agreed yesterday that Austen was so much easier to read, and seemed so modern in comparison. Interesting, and obviously true, even though S&S was probably written in the mid-1790s and so more or less contemporary with Fanny Burney's novel. It was the first novel Austen published, though it didn't appear till 1811.
It was interesting to hear everyone's responses to the two sisters in the novel. Nobody was all that keen on Elinor, who they thought was too cold and repressed. And indeed, though Austen does make it clear that Elinor has strong feelings -- she is privately in agony when Lucy Steele tells her that she is secretly engaged to Edward Ferrars, who Elinor is in love with and has supposed, or hoped, loves her in return -- she never shows them. My students thought that anyone who could keep their suffering so firmly under wraps probably wasn't suffering all that much anyway. I was quite surprised, though, to find that many of them did not really like Marianne all that much either! I have always been very fond of Marianne -- I know she has to learn to be a bit more self controlled, but she is so warm and sweet and responsive to the world around her. But quite a few of my students seemed rather shocked by her public displays of emotion.
I must admit that though I have trouble deciding what is my favourite Austen novel, I know for sure that it isn't this one. Though it has many great things in it, it doesn't quite work for me for some reason.
