Course Leader:  Dr Danielle Grover

Course Date:  Monday 7 - Thursday 10 April

Course Options:  Residential £ 599 .00, Non-Residential £ 388 .00 (Early Bird R, £ 569 .00 NR £ 368 .00 - Deadline: 07/01/25 )

Course Timings:  Course starts and ends with lunch

Course Code:  R0625

Course Information:

Celebrate Jane Austen with a course on celebrations! Join Dr Danielle Grover to celebrate 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth with an exciting course that delves into the role of celebrations in three of Jane Austen’s iconic novels: Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility. Presented through Jane Austen’s characteristically ironic lens, these celebrations help to further the plot and illuminate important aspects of gender, courtship and female education. 

Jane Austen herself was a keen pianist who had access to over 300 pieces of music in the Jane Austen Family’s Music Collection and we will consider this background and comments in her letters when analysing the role of music in the novels. Dancing is also integral to the plots with many formative meetings of characters occurring during this social entertainment. As novels that are driven by courtship, engagements and weddings are the final goals for women and we will analyse precisely how Jane Austen represents them.

Through a mixture of lectures, stimulating seminar-style discussions and close readings of these canonical novels, we will celebrate Jane Austen by exploring the role of music, dance, balls, engagements and weddings, closely analysing famous passages in Jane Austen’s fiction to explore how her presentation of celebrations illuminate aspects of eighteenth-century history and uncover ideas related to her characterisation, plot and themes.  If you are now curious about eighteenth-century leisure activities and celebrations and if you would like to analyse Jane Austen’s fiction in a unique and exciting way, this is the course for you. All keen readers and Jane Austen enthusiasts are most welcome.

Course Leader:

As a Jane Austen enthusiast, Dr Danielle Grover has delivered 21 courses on Jane Austen since 2014, including one for Times + (a division of ‘The Sunday Times’). After completing her doctoral thesis on Jane Austen and other eighteenth-century novelists, Danielle has been a Teaching Fellow in Romanticism at University College Dublin, taught at the University of Surrey and she has held a number of teaching positions in sixth-form colleges and universities. To date, Danielle has had ten articles published on eighteenth-century writers, including an essay in the book, ‘Women and Music in the Age of Austen’ (published by Bucknell University Press). These publications include four articles written for ‘Jane Austen’s Regency Magazine’. Danielle has lectured on music’s role in the eighteenth-century novel at over ten international conferences in Australia, Ireland, the U.K and the U.S. In 2008, Danielle spent two months as a visiting fellow at Chawton House, which was the village where Jane Austen worked on her major novels. In her spare time, Danielle enjoys piano-playing, reading and ballet.