All Program Dates
November 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm ET
November 25, 2025 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm ET
December 2, 2025 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm ET
December 9, 2025 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm 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.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, August 22, for Rosenbach members on Friday, August 29, and for the general public on Friday, September 5. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
Capping off our year of Jane Austen seminars to commemorate the author’s 250th birthday, we’ll finish with her most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice,led by Louise Curran from the University of Birmingham, UK. In 1813 Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra about her recently published novel, Pride and Prejudice:
“Upon the whole…I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough.—The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn, specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté—or anything that could form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.—I doubt your quite agreeing with me here—I know your starched Notions.”
Austen was having fun with ideas about what novels should be (very serious and grand, she jokes), whilst pointing to how her own writing style is economical with words and scenes rather than panoramic. She also slyly teases her sister about the idea that Cassandra would ever prefer a solemn novel to an entertaining one. The subject matter of Pride and Prejudice is, at first sight, very trivial indeed, yet the classic romance plot of two pairs of couples who fall in love is played out against a world where England is at war. We will read and discuss Pride and Prejudice in all its simple and complicated glory, thinking about its depiction of courtship and marriage, its structure as the archetypal romantic comedy, and its place within Austen’s literary career.
Note the special afternoon ET time.
Instructor
Louise Curran is Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is co-editor of Correspondence Primarily on Pamela and Clarissa (1732-1749), a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (2024), and a monograph on the author, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (2016). She is also part of the editorial team for a new version of Pope’s correspondence for the Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope and currently writing a book about The Making of Letters as Literature: 1735-1817, which traces the influence of the publication of Pope’s letters from his lifetime authorized editions to the death of Austen. She recently appeared as an academic expert in the BBC documentary, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius (2025).