And what about Jane? A rationale for the teaching of Jane Austen in secondary English classrooms

This thesis is an historical analysis of the presence of the fiction of Jane Austen within the New South Wales secondary curriculum. Jane Austen is a well-known English author who is generally regarded to be one of the greatest authors of all time. Her principal works Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persuasion have been in the popular imagination for an extended period of time, and studied by students around the world. Making the decision to teach Austen’s literary works within a secondary classroom involves a process of text selection. Through opting to incorporate or exclude her works, teachers, head teachers, syllabus writers and other school stakeholders are making a value judgement regarding the literary worth of her works. As a widely-acknowledged member of the western literary canon, these decisions can also be considered to represent the prevailing attitudes of the decision makers towards canonical literature as a whole. My study begins in 1880, the year that the Public Instruction Act was implemented within New South Wales, and ends in 2021, the year that the thesis was completed. Data were collected for this thesis from a number of sources within these dates and included syllabus documents, examinations, school newsletters, reports on education, teaching journals, and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. Through these documents, I was able to account for the presence of Austen’s works within post-1880 secondary school settings and help illuminate the institutional practices and cultural discourses which were evidence in the research corpus. Contemporary syllabus documents require the study of a range of different texts including prose fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, media, multimedia and film, the junior syllabus documents do not prescribe specific titles for use in the classroom, and teachers of senior students have extensive prescriptions lists to select from. Teachers of English in the past have not had the same flexibility extended to them, and my historical investigation revealed that the documents of the past relied on far more prescriptive lists which only included essays, Shakespearean drama, poetry, and prose fiction. This meant that the authors of the curriculum wielded far greater power than would be expected today. Although the findings of this research are not generalisable, they serve to document the ways in which literature has been addressed and valued within the secondary curriculum documents across a wide historical period. My study also provides a historical examination of the teaching of subject English to secondary age students in the state over a period which is perhaps the largest ever researched. My study concludes that the literary works of Jane Austen have had a demonstrable presence within secondary classrooms since the end of the 19th century. The length of this study demonstrates that her works are regarded favourably and worthy of student attention. In addition, the written discourses which prescribe, discuss and examine Austen’s fiction reflect prevailing attitudes towards the study of canonical literature. These attitudes form part of a hidden curriculum and manifest different philosophies of English teaching and reader-response theories.