All Program Dates

• July 16, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• July 23 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• July 30, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

• August 6, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET

Registration

• Tuition for this course is $200. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.

• Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.

• A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting. 

• This program is for those 18 and older.

This course is now sold out. You may register to receive the recordings only for $150. Additional member discounts will apply.

Description

Mansfield Park: A Portrait of Resilience   

Published in 1814, just a year after Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park is the most psychologically complex of Austen’s novels. The subject matter is challenging: the wealth of the central family, the Bertrams, derives, in part, from the labor of enslaved people, and oppression by the powerful is a pervasive theme. Yet Austen’s heroine, Fanny Price, demonstrates profound resilience and self-determination, qualities that continue to inspire readers today. We will read and discuss Mansfield Park in relation to key artifacts and documents that shed light on its place in Austen’s literary career.  

Reading Schedule

week 1: Volume I, chapters 1 - 12 

week 2: Volume I, chapter 13 - Volume II, chapter 5 (= chapters 13 - 23 if continuously numbered)

week 3: Volume II, chapter 6 - Volume III, chapter 6 (= chapters 24 - 37 if continuously numbered)

week 4: Volume III, chapter 7 - Volume III, chapter 17 (= chapters 38 - 48 if continuously numbered)

Instructor

Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College, is the author of three acclaimed books about Jane Austen’s historic readers and fans, most recently, A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist. Her reader-friendly edition of Mansfield Park for Penguin Classics Deluxe will be released on September 9, 2025, joining her editions of Persuasion and Emma. She is guest co-curator of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, which runs from June 6 to September 14, 2025. Dr. Wells previously led Rosenbach courses on Emma and on the 21st-century afterlives of David Copperfield.