Jane Austen: Myth, Reality and Global Celebrity

Discover the life and impact of Jane Austen

Jane Austen went from being a moderately successful anonymous novelist in her own time to a global celebrity in ours. On this course you will explore how that happened, exploring Austen’s own literary influences, and her reputation over time.

You will learn about her origins in Hampshire, uncovering her formative years, and the society she lived in, asking how Austen’s location, background and reading influenced her novels. You will also consider the ways her own contemporaries read and responded to her, and her place in the modern canon of world literature today, 200 years after she died.

This course is for anyone with an interest in Jane Austen, who is looking to deepen their knowledge of the author, her influences and her celebrity. This includes the members of Jane Austen Societies in North America, Japan, Brazil and many European countries but also those who simply love her writing or with to know more.

This course is for anyone with an interest in Jane Austen, who is looking to deepen their knowledge of the author, her influences and her celebrity. This includes the members of Jane Austen Societies in North America, Japan, Brazil and many European countries but also those who simply love her writing or with to know more.

• Develop knowledge and understanding of the historical and literary contexts in which Jane Austen was writing
• Investigate virtually the important locations associated with Jane Austen and their impact on her writing
• Assess and discuss the impact of Austen’s society on the depiction of arts and reading in her novels
• Explore some of the myths surrounding women writers of the long eighteenth century
• Identify the challenges of adapting, translating and interpreting Jane Austen’s works and how this affects global understanding of her work
• Evaluate the marketing of Jane Austen in her own time and now