Two Masterworks of English Literature will be presented by Richard Fadem in an 8 -week class beginning Wednesday, February 24, from 10:00 to 12:30 at the Parish Hall.
A fee of $20 will be collected at the first class. All are welcome!
The class will begin with the novel Mansfield Park by Jane Austen followed by Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Way We Live Now. Books will be available at Darvill’s.
The first three classes will focus on Jane Austen’s most complex and for some her finest novel, Mansfield Park (1814), in which she abandons the two and a half inch piece of ivory on which she claimed to etch her other works for a broader canvas. The novel is one of the great treatments in 19th-century fiction of the family, with the hazards of courtship, marriage, and child-rearing within a quintessential estate of the landed gentry. Inevitably the novel bears some relation to Austen’s disapproval of the Regency’s and especially the Prince Regent’s dissolute ways.
The next five weeks will be spent with Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), perhaps his greatest novel out of a staggering number and one which tells a story of financial chicanery, self-indulgence, and greed, both cunning and stupid, extending into the U.S., that may sound faintly familiar.
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