By Arpan Josan
Students who enrolled in this semester’s second offering of the course S/T: Race, Sex and Class in Jane Austen (Eng-290), may not have known that 2025 is the author’s 250th birthday. Kelly Swartz, an associate professor of English, said the class was popular the last time she offered it in the fall of 2021 when the Netflix show “Bridgerton” had just been released. She said that this semester she can only guess that it filled up quickly due to students being intrigued by Austen’s novels centering around marriage and romance. The course fulfills the humanities requirement and is designed to examine Jane Austen’s novels and how race, sex and class connect to the 21st century.
Jane Austen was a British English novelist who wrote during the Regency era in
England. She has written six completed novels: “Sense & Sensibility” (1811), “Pride & Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815), “Persuasion” (1817), and “Northanger Abbey” (1817). Her novels tend to explore women's dependence on marriage as a source of financial security or a way to gain social status and the limits placed on women during this time period. These limits can include employment, marriage and property ownership.
Swartz said she started the class because people often misunderstand Austen's role in these histories.
“When she is discussed, it is usually as the prim, marriage-obsessed, `great-aunt Jane’ canonical figure,” she said. “Yet, she is a hilarious and at times viciously sarcastic writer, and she was deeply engaged in the political debates of her time.”
Swartz said Austen’s novels look closely into the building of race, sex and class that went on and is still ongoing under the British Empire. Jane Austen, a middle-class white woman who earned a living through her career as a writer and decided not to wed or have children, symbolizes the aspects of social hierarchies, she said.
Regarding the modern connection, Swartz mentioned how she had read written works from scholars in her field on account of race-blind casting and the unhistorical storytelling of the racial differences in the “Bridgerton” series. The series, based on Julia Quinn’s eight romance novels, is centered around eight siblings from noble families searching for love and is set in England roughly around 1795-1837 during the Regency era. This is around the same period when Austen was writing her novels. Students in this class will discuss these topics, leading to conversations regarding race, sex and class in Austen’s writing.
Swartz also touched on the fact that students usually have a difficult time comprehending the language in Austen’s novels due to the fact they were written in a different era.
“Jane Austen is a well-known name (and signifier), but I've found that students still find the language of her novels unfamiliar and difficult upon an initial read,” she said. “That can lead classes to focus predominantly on comprehension rather than the complex relation between Austen's novelistic representations and their historical context. I thought that pairing the novels with modern adaptations would help us get to those important discussions about the novels themselves.”
As for the future of this class Swartz hopes that it will become a permanent course.
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