The precariousness of human life: Jane Austen, pandemic, and the coping mechanisms of nineteenth-century literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beginning with the author’s experiences teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) at the exact moment of the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, this article considers pandemic-specific changes in student reactions to Austen’s novels. Death and disease, though ever-present in Austen’s work, have been relatively unpopular as topics of discussion and – until the pandemic – have rarely been the focus of Austen studies in the undergraduate classroom. The article takes the opportunity to study how the pandemic has changed this and how it introduces new pedagogical potentials into Austen-focused classrooms, while also examining how nineteenth-century literature may contain a series of coping mechanisms in response to death and disease that are sorely needed in our pandemic and post-pandemic societies.