Episode
Sunday, May 24, 2026 @ 07:00 PM EDT
Acerbity Tempered: Emma, Part 2
This salon will read the second half of Jane Austen's Emma.
Full text of the novel may be found here: Project Gutenberg
Jane Austen's novels have been endlessly adapted into films, TV series, and even viral memes—often reducing her work to fluffy romances filled with bonnets, ballrooms, and brooding heroes. But what is it like to actually read her novels? Join us for a captivating four-week reading series dedicated to exploring her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), and her last completed and published work, Emma (1815).
Our series begins with Sense and Sensibility, Austen's debut that introduced the world to her incisive voice. We'll delve into the contrasting Dashwood sisters—Elinor, the epitome of restraint and reason, and Marianne, the passionate romantic—and examine how Austen uses their stories not just as tales of love and loss, but as a commentary on the precarious position of women in a patriarchal world reliant on inheritance and marriage. We'll unpack the novel's subtle ironies, economic realism, and the ways it subverts expectations of "sensibility" as a virtue, revealing Austen's early mastery of narrative irony and moral complexity.
Transitioning to Emma, Austen's crowning achievement and a novel she famously described as featuring a heroine "whom no one but myself will much like," we'll explore the eponymous character's matchmaking misadventures in the quaint village of Highbury. Here, Austen reaches the height of her comedic prowess, crafting a story that's as much about self-deception and class snobbery as it is about romance. Through close analysis, we'll strip away the charming facade to highlight the novel's innovative free indirect discourse, its critique of social hierarchies, and its exploration of personal growth amid folly and error. By comparing these bookends of her career, we'll trace Austen's evolution as a writer, from the youthful energy of her first work to the sophisticated maturity of her last.
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Literature
$25
14 public tickets available
11 free member spaces available
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About the Series
Salon Series
4 Episodes
Book Club: Two Masterpieces by Jane Austen
Host:
Paul Franz
Paul Franz has published poems and stories in the New York Review of Books, Hobart, Berfrois, Prelude, and AGNI, among others. His essays and criticism appear in journals including The Atlantic, London Review of Books, TLS, The Nation, TANK, The Hedgehog Review, RealClearBooks, and on his Substack newsletter, ashesandsparks.substack.com, which also features fiction and poems. He is the editor of the journal Literary Imagination, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and, with Matthew Gasda, of Serpent Club: New Writing (new issue out April 16).
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Acerbity Tempered: Emma, Part 2
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$25
14 public tickets available
11 free member spaces available