[SOLD OUT!] Reading Austen’s Emma with Juliette Wells | Virtual Course

Registration

• Tuition for this course is $200. 10% off for Rosenbach members and the Delancey Society. Not a member? Learn more.
• This course is limited to participants who are 18 years of age or older.
• Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [email protected].
• Registration opens for Delancey Society members on March 2, for members on March 9, and for the general public on March 16.

Register for the Waitlist

Description 

Emma and the Woman Artist 

What is to become of a talented woman in a society that believes that her abilities are best spent amusing herself, entertaining her family, and educating her children? 

Jane Austen took up this question most directly in Emma, which focuses on a heroine who is an “imaginist” and which also features a supporting character whose musical gifts greatly exceed what is expected of an accomplished woman. Austen, an inventive writer beginning in her teenage years, knew well what it was like to aspire to more than women were supposed to and to face hard choices about balancing creative work and family obligations. We will read and discuss Emma in relation to Austen’s life and career, her involvement in the publication of her novels, and the critical praise her works received during and after her lifetime. 

Recommended text
Please purchase the special 200th anniversary edition of Emma, introduced and edited by Juliette Wells (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition ISBN 9780143107712)

Reading Emma syllabus

About the Instructor

Juliette Wells is Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of three histories of Austen’s readers, all published by Bloomsbury Academic: Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011), Reading Austen in America (2017), and A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist (forthcoming 2023). For Penguin Classics, she created reader-friendly 200th-anniversary editions of Austen’s novels Emma (2015) and Persuasion (2017). All these books highlight Goucher’s world-renowned Jane Austen Collection and its creator, alumna Alberta H. Burke.