Jane Austen's Rise: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park

Jane Austen’s novels remain cultural touchstones, endlessly adapted and debated.

But Austen faced many setbacks before seeing her work published.

This course revisits Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Mansfield Park (1814) in the order her contemporaries encountered them.

Published in quick succession, these novels nonetheless mark distinct stages in Austen’s artistic development.

Sense and Sensibility , reworked from an earlier manuscript, dramatizes debates about the relative value of reason and emotion, self-restraint and self-expression.

Pride and Prejudice is Austen at her most "light and bright and sparkling." Mansfield Park , the first novel Austen wrote knowing herself to be a published author, marks a shift in emotion and style, as one of Austen’s quietest protagonists probes the ethical implications of the world around her.

Read together, these works reveal how Austen established her reputation—and why her insight and narrative craft have endured while shaping literary history.

Each session combines lecture, breakout rooms, and full-class discussion.