This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to th...

11. Jane Austen and Grandparents

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

When Jane Austen was born in 1775, she had no grandparents living, her father having been orphaned young and her mother left parentless by 1768. From her teens, though, she lived with parents who were also grandparents, and her own talents as an aunt are testified to most convincingly in her nephew’...

6. In Sickness and in Health: Courting and Nursing in Some Jane Austen Novels

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I’m going to be talking about the role of illness in Jane Austen’s novels, but I want to begin with her own last illness: not so much the controversy about what exactly the illness was (though I will touch on that) as what her experience of illness, and its treatment, was. Her letters rarely complai...

12. Jane Austen and Burns

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

The immediate stimulus for my discussion today, of Jane Austen and Robert Burns, two writers whose lives overlapped but who are seldom brought together by literary critics, is a passage in a novel which Jane Austen sadly did not live to finish, Sanditon, which survived in manuscript and was first pu...

13. Sanditon and Suspense

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I will be talking to you today about Sanditon, the novel which Jane Austen started in the last year of her life but was unable to finish because she was too ill. Sanditon was read by very few people before 1925 when the great Jane Austen scholar R. W. Chapman edited it for publication and gave it it...

8. Emma and Harriet: Walking Companions

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

The aspect of Emma which has always disturbed me, and made me keep company with those readers whom Jane Austen imagined would not like a heroine whom she herself liked very much, is Emma’s friendship with Harriet, which involves her from the start in unwarranted intrusion into the life of another wo...

7. Food in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

All of Jane Austen’s novels end with weddings, sometimes with multiple weddings. Each of her heroines becomes, in the end, a bride. The road that leads to marriage is always so full of suspense that even when we are reading for the tenth time we reach the denouement with relief: she has landed him a...

1. Reading Pride and Prejudice over Fifty Years

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I gave another talk about Pride and Prejudice earlier this year to the student literary society we have at St Andrews, and in the discussion that followed one student said something very memorable; we were talking about the Keira Knightley film version and, as seems to be usual, almost everyone in t...

2. Sense and Sensibility

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

It is a special pleasure to be talking to you today about Sense and Sensibility, because it is my own particular favourite among Jane Austen’s novels— for a number of reasons, I think. One is that, like Pride and Prejudice, it treats love between sisters, and, unlike Pride and Prejudice, it also tre...

9. Emma in the Snow

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Those who wrongly categorize Jane Austen as a writer with a narrow compass—‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’, as she teasingly said of herself—must have failed to notice the significance in her novels of the global phenomenon that is the weather. What reader has not shuddered over the prospect...

4. Mrs. Jennings

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Books within Books Before Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Jane Austen was an unpublished author; afterwards she was not. This seems a simple and obvious truth, but we shouldn’t rush to think that we understand everything that is implied in the statement. Once she had published this nove...

5. Lady Susan

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Lady Susan is about the adventures of a wicked aristocrat. That, even more than its epistolary form, makes it unique among Jane Austen’s completed novels. There are bad women in other novels—Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility is pretty bad, Mrs. Clay in Persuasion must be quite a schemer really, M...

10. What’s Wrong with Mansfield Park

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

I have been thinking about this moment with trepidation ever since it became apparent that I was not going to be allowed to get away with just talking to you about Pride and Prejudice. I find Mansfield Park the most troubling, the most complicated of Jane Austen’s novels, and I am not alone. R. W. C...

3. Mothers and Daughters in Jane Austen

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

None of Jane Austen’s heroines becomes a mother in the course of the novels, which take them, usually, only to the altar and not beyond, but all are daughters, with at least one parent. And all of them, even Anne Elliot of Persuasion, at twenty-seven the eldest heroine, are, at the beginning of the...

Nora Bartlett, Jane Austen: Reflections of A Reader

Recensions

Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou (29 oct. 2021)

Recensions

In the preface to Jane Austen: Reflections of A Reader, Jane Stabler emphasizes the exceptional and original nature of Nora Bartlett’s book, which consists of a collection of insightful talks and essays on Jane Austen selected by the historian Robert Bartlett after his wife’s death at the age of onl...

Preface

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Jane Stabler (8 juin 2021)

Livres et chapitres d'ouvrages

Nora Bartlett (1949–2016) was an inspirational teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction at the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews. Among her many areas of expertise, she was a superlative reader of Jane Austen, whose novels she first enjoyed at the age of six and carried on reading an...