ONLINE: This course will compare George Sand and George Eliot, two eminent 19th-century female novelists. It will examine their concepts of the novel but will also study their ideas on religion, social change and politics, and their understanding of the role of women, all of which will be in the context of their time. The course will also investigate the various influences that Sand exercised on other Victorian female novelists and especially on Eliot. In 1906, an unknown 24-year-old woman named Virginia Woolf declared in a letter to her friend Madge Vaughan that Sand’s autobiography had been written by “an immense, lucid kind of mind, something like a natural force, with no effort or consciousness about it ... I sink into her and I am engulphed.” The first three lectures will be devoted to Sand and the following three to Eliot. The lectures will investigate the following points: their lives, the art of the novel, and their ideas concerning education, love, politics and the role of women. | Lecture + Q&A.
Max enrollment: 24.
