No other novelist in late 18th and early 19th Century England wrote with Jane Austen’s clarity or acuity. While the down-to-earth Georgians appreciated her pithy, realistic portraits of gentry life, the straitlaced Victorians discovered a moral weightiness in her writing and cast a veneer of respectability over the novelist’s life and character. Two hundred years on, her plots and characters intrigue and delight a modern audience of readers, film-goers and television viewers. So, was the real Jane Austen a moralist or a satirist? A shy spinster or a husband-hunting butterfly? A sinner or a saint? Discover the woman behind the writing on this weekend course.