What can I do in COVE Groups?
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What does society demand of us—and what do we owe ourselves in return? This question anchors our reading of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)—one of the most influential British novels in the English language—and the texts that argue with it across two centuries.
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) gives voice to the colonized woman Jane Eyre wanted to forget. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) explores how secrets and silenced stories haunt glamorous country estates. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair (2001) treats Jane Eyre as cultural myth, and asks us to pay attention to which version of the story gets canonized and which ones get buried.
These are novels about power: who has it, who is denied it, and what it costs everyone (men and women alike) when whole categories of human experience are locked away and silenced. Together they illuminate the social, political, and imperial contexts of nineteenth-century British literature, with particular attention to gender, class, and colonialism.
In an era of generated content and algorithmic storytelling, this course asks what only novels can do: give us full, particular, irreducible human lives and demand that we pay attention to them.