ENL 4122.001 Fall 2023 Roberts

“Reader, I married him,” says Jane Eyre, somewhat ambivalently, at the end of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 bestseller. Novels of the 19th century usually end with the heroine getting hitched to the appropriate man after hundreds of pages of suffering and striving. But is a wedding really the inevitable—or desired--outcome? Do some writers resist? This course looks at Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and others to examine how what may appear to be tidy drawing rooms and formal rose gardens are really sites of resistance.

This course fulfills 3 hours of the LMC requirement for genre and courses at the 4000 level.