Visit our digital living room for the final event for our Jane Austen Book Club, and the third Deirdre Le Faye memorial lecture.

The Improvement of the Mind by Extensive Reading: Hester Mulso Chapone, Jane Austen, and Pride and Prejudice

Susan Allen Ford

The characters in Pride and Prejudice are readers of conduct books. Most famously, Mr. Collins picks up James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1766) with which to instruct the Bennet sisters. Less obvious is the presence in the novel of Hester Mulso Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), a conduct book very different from Fordyce's. This talk will examine Chapone's serious examination of education and the ways it informs the conversations, characters, thematic texture, and structure of Pride and Prejudice.

About the Speaker

Susan Allen Ford has been Editor of JASNA’s journals Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line since 2006 and is Professor of English Emerita at Delta State University. She is also a board member of the Jane Austen Collective, for which she is involved in the Jane Austen Summer Program, the Jane Austen and Co. virtual lecture series, and the Jane Austen’s Desk project. Susan has published essays on Austen and her contemporaries, gothic and detective fiction, and Shakespeare. Her book, What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why), which explores how Austen creates readers through shared reading experiences, was published by Bloomsbury in July 2024.

Tickets: £6 | £50 season ticket to all JABC events onsite and online.