All Program Dates
April 22, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
April 29, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
May 6, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
May 13, 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm 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.
A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, March 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, March 21, and for the general public on Friday, March 28. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
“Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”
Persuasion is often considered Austen’s autumnal novel, her most mature work, and a farewell to her life as a fiction writer (a misconception belied by the writing of the fragment “Sanditon,” which is a return to her satirical roots). It is, however, Austen’s most emotionally raw novel, with heartbreak and complex family relationships powerfully depicted and explored. Austen’s critique of the upper ranks of society is as biting and funny as ever. In this course, we will examine the many ways in which she deploys her satire, and we will explore the novel’s themes of heartbreak, hope, personal growth, and second-chance love.
The preferred text for the course is the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Persuasion, by which we will take a deep dive into the impeccable prose and inimitable wit of Jane Austen.
Instructor
Paula Byrne is the author of seven highly acclaimed works of criticism and biography, most recently The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, which was named a “Book of the Year” in four national newspapers. She is also the author of The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood, (a New York Times Editors’ Pick); Kick: The True Story of Kick Kennedy, JFK’s Forgotten Sister, and the Heir to Chatsworth; Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle; The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things; Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead; and Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, for which she was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Her novels are Look to your Wife and Blonde Venus, the latter a novelization of the life of Marlene Dietrich. She is now writing a book about Thomas Hardy’s women and contributing the introduction to a new Penguin Classics edition of Brideshead Revisited.