Pembroke College Cambridge

Reading Jane Austen

Dr Rebecca Varley-Winter

Focusing on the relationship between Austen and her readers, this course uses a series of close readings from the six major novels to explore Austen’s work in the context of her life and times, including subjects such as: Austen’s portrayal of gender and power; the influence of war and colonialism in her work; her humour and wit; her sense of theatre and performance; her use of free indirect style; her subversion of the Gothic; and the many adaptations and afterlives of her fiction.

We will read excerpts from Austen’s major novels alongside her teenage writings, her letters, and other works unpublished in her lifetime, paying special attention to Austen’s prose style, which challenges her reader to decipher fact from fiction, opinion from objectivity. The course invites us to read again, defamiliarizing favourite texts and characters, moving from page to screen and back again, and uncovering the comedic energy of Austen’s novels at the level of the individual word and sentence.

The activity of reading is thematically important to Austen and her characters, as well as having implications for her literal readers. Austen’s novels teach us to read everything from the behaviours, social codes, appearances, dress, landscape, architecture and bodies of the minutely observed worlds of her novels. Reading well is a skill which Austen cultivates and rewards, and one which this course seeks to develop.

Our reading will be cumulative: we will place her different texts alongside each other as we encounter them, and add into the mix the ‘Austenalia’ which has become an essential element of her contemporary reception. This will include contemporary film adaptations and spin-offs, and allow us to investigate the rich intertextual relationship between Austen’s core published oeuvre and the revisionary readings it has inspired.

Course Objectives 

We will become familiar with both the major works of Austen and their historical and literary contexts, including the literary-critical conversations surrounding women’s authorship and readership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alongside these encounters, we will develop skills in close reading, and acquire a clear vocabulary for describing narrative and textual effects. We will also extend and enhance our analysis of Austen’s writing through engagement with a selection of significant critical responses to her work.

Intended Audience

This course is suited both to ardent fans and to first-time readers of Austen. All that is required is your own love of reading. The course’s emphasis on close reading mirrors the influential ‘Practical Criticism’ school of literary criticism taught at Cambridge’s Faculty of English, which seeks to explore texts in detail rather than in abstract terms. Our close readings will also, of course, be balanced with material on the social and historical context of Austen’s work, as broader contexts reveal themselves, inevitably, in the texts. The skill of close reading is essential not only to students of literature, but in any text-focused discipline – religion, language, history, law, classics, philosophy – all of whom are welcome to join us.

Previous Knowledge

No previous knowledge of Austen is required, but please familiarise yourself with Pride and Prejudice in preparation for our first class. While film adaptations will also be relevant to this course, it should go without saying that you must read her work. Visual adaptations are not a substitute for textual familiarity.

Transferable Knowledge and Skills

This course offers an insight into a politically and socially significant period in the history of England and the British Empire, the rise of the novel, and the flourishing of the Romantic movement. It would serve as an excellent introduction to English literature and cultural history. The skills of careful close reading and the evaluation and comparison of sources are portable across all arts and humanities subjects and beyond.

Dr Rebecca Varley-Winter

Dr Rebecca Varley-Winter completed her doctorate in English Literature at Cambridge, then took up a one-year lectureship at Keble College, Oxford. She currently teaches English Literature, primarily from the eighteenth century to the present, for the University of Cambridge and Middlebury-CMRS Oxford Humanities Programme, and Creative Writing for The Poetry School and Morley College.

Her academic book, Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature, is published by Sussex Academic Press. (2018); her collections of poetry and short fiction are Dangerous Enough (Salt, 2023), BLOOM (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) and Heroines (V. Press, 2019).

Before her PhD, she completed an MA at King’s College London, and her BA at Clare College, Cambridge, both in English Literature. She has ongoing research interests in wildness and domesticity in women’s writing.