Answer the question below in response to either a), b) or c). Only choose one for the essay, do not try to answer more than one question in your essay. Your essay should be about 2000 words in length, to which you should add a bibliography of sources used. You should make close reference to the language of the text and include some discussion of technique as well as theme.
The word limit does not include references (footnotes / endnotes) or your bibliography of primary and secondary sources used. You may follow your own preferred stylesheet (see http://guides.library.utoronto.ca/citing), but be consistent as well as precise. Leave yourself plenty of time to proofread your text and refine your wording.
Your essay should involve substantial discussion of two of the following three novels: Emma; The Wrongs of Woman; Sanditon. You may also refer to other work by Austen, whether or not included in the course readings. You should show awareness of critical debates about Austen’s writing, but extensive secondary referencing is not required.
How far would you defend Austen’s fiction, and on what grounds, against one of the following objections?
a) “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores” (Charlotte Brontë).
b) “[V]ulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow” (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
c) “It makes me most uncomfortable to see | An English spinster of the middle-class | Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’, | Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety | The economic basis of society” (W. H. Auden).
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