What Matters in Jane Austen?
John Mullan

• Thursday 8 June 2017, 6.00PM to 6.50pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul Building, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

Which important Jane Austen characters never speak? What do the characters call one another, and why? What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? Join John Mullan of University College London (UCL) for the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies Patron’s Lecture as he shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness.

Come along and discover when Austen's characters had their meals and what shops they went to; how vicars got good livings; and how wealth was inherited. John illuminates the rituals and conventions of Austen’s fictional world in order to reveal her technical virtuosity and daring as a novelist. He uses telling passages from Austen's letters and details from her own life to explain episodes in her novels.

About the speaker

Professor John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at University College London (UCL). He writes the regular Guardian Book Club column on fiction in the Guardian and frequently appears on the BBC's Review Show. He was a judge of the Best of the Booker Prize in 2008 and a judge of the Man Booker Prize itself in 2009. He has lectured widely on Jane Austen in the UK and also in the USA. In 2012 he published his book What Matters in Jane Austen?

Waterstones

Books will be available to buy from the Waterstones' stall at this event.

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