7:00pm-8:00pm on Thursday 27 March
Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).
Cambridge University Press, Bookshop and Showroom 1 Trinity Street, CB2 1SZ
Join author and internationally renowned scholar, Professor Janet Todd, for an engaging talk that unpicks Austen’s response to the 18th-century fascination with the idea of ‘nerves’.
‘Nerves’ was a buzzword in late 18th-century England and, like other women of her time and class, Jane Austen uses the idea of them to contemplate the shifting interaction of mental and physical states. The talk will discuss Austen’s portrayal of ‘nervous’ disorders: in Pride and Prejudice she famously mocks Mrs Bennet’s nerves but in her later novels she treats a range of nervous characters more lengthily and with greater complexity: think Fanny Price, Jane Fairfax and Anne Elliot, all of whom suffer from headaches and ‘low spirits’. Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and the unfinished Sanditon, will be investigated along with Jane Austen’s own ‘nervous’ private letters.
You can pre-order Janet Todd’s most recent book, Living with Jane Austen, at Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/de/universitypress/subjects/literature/english.... Find out more about Professor Janet Todd’s internationally renowned work here, https://www.lucy.cam.ac.uk/fellows/professor-janet-todd
