Prof. Françoise Coulont-Henderson Published in Jane Austen's Regency World

March 28, 2005

March 28, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - The latest edition of Jane Austen's Regency World, a publication of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, UK, includes an essay by Françoise M. Coulont-Henderson, professor of modern languages (French) at DePauw University. In the article, "Fanny Price: Too much of a good thing?," Coulont-Henderson "appraises Fanny Price, perhaps Jane's most difficult heroine for the twenty-first century reader," states an introduction to the text. 

"We always know she is going to do the 'virtuous' thing and this diminishes the human complexity so necessary in a novelistic character," Dr. Coulont-Henderson writes of Price. "Unfortunately, the weak, sickly Fanny does not speak to our intellect and the exemplary virtuous woman does not speak to our emotions. It might have to do with modern sensibilities and expectations of a novel: to the modern reader the concept of the Christian life -- humble, principled, contemplative, serviceable -- realized in Fanny, though admirable in life, is ill suited to the genre of the novel."

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