The course that got cancelled

We had an alert scheduled for a couple of days ago but unfortunately when we were about to post it, we realised the thing in question had sadly been cancelled for unknown reasons. It was a summer course given by York University and this was the description:

Course Title:Voices from the Moors: The Brontës in Context - CANCELLED
Tutor: Sheila Wright BA MPhil PGCE

In 1820 Patrick Brontë moved his family from Thornton, near Bradford, to Haworth which, although only five miles away, was a very different place. Nothing in their previous comfortable life at Thornton could have prepared the Brontës for the dramatic changes in their new social and natural environment. The situation of the Parsonage where the family lived did nothing to lift the all-pervading sense of gloom, surrounded as it was by a church graveyard and, in the Brontës' time, the windswept, open expanse of the moors.

This foreboding, seemingly uninspiring environment was to produce three of the most important female novelists of the 19th century. It is hard today to conceive of the shock and moral outrage caused by the novels by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, originally published under their pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

In this course we will consider several key novels of the three Brontë sisters while exploring the role that Yorkshire and Victorian culture played in moulding their writing. We will attempt to place the Brontës in the context of their period by attending to the physical landscape as well as the 19th-century social 'landscape' which influenced so much of their work. During the course we will study four specific novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and Jane Eyre. Besides discussing each novel from a literary perspective, we will also look at them from a historical perspective, with lectures illustrating how Victorian, and specifically Yorkshire culture and society shaped the Brontës' imaginative works.

In addition, the course will include several visits which are intended to complement our study of the Brontës, such as a walk around 19th-century York and trips to Haworth to see the Parsonage and the Red House (home of Mary Taylor, Charlotte Brontë's close friend). Although we will not be able to cover all of the Brontë sisters' writings, we hope to place these three unique Victorian novelists within their surroundings in order to recognise the environmental, social, economic and cultural factors which were so instrumental in affecting the development of their writing and their lives.

The description makes it sound really attractive so it makes it all the more depressing that it didn't come to happen. We simply had to post about it - pointless as it is now - to let the world (ahem) hear our disappointment.
Categories: Scholar