What was an educated woman with no dowry to do? Take up sewing? We know Jane Austen was gifted with the needle from what her nephew tells us in his memoir and from what she herself admits in her letters. All well and fine to make shirts for your father, brothers, or the poor, but to practice any handicraft for income was considered vulgar for a woman of her class. Jane was the daughter of a vicar. With neither land nor money, theirs was the bottom rung on the gentry ladder.
In Sense and Sensibility and throughout Jane Austen’s oeuvre, we witness a recurring theme, the dilemma yet again of women without property. The first few chapters of Sense and Sensibility are all about money, and money is mentioned throughout the novel. Who has it. Who doesn’t have it. How much someone is worth. How much someone needs to keep up appearances and not slip into penury.
Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf’s children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the “dark region of psychology”. She never found it, but we have continued her search.
Cast in an experimental mode and form, it makes the reader work, and casts our attention to different places and people at unpredictable intervals. It’s in communication with many other writers, but it is still very much its own thing. You’re rewarded with a highly stimulating set of ideas about power and discontent.
This book isn’t a directly political text, but its colourful tales from the animal world do have a point of view: biology, Lents argues here, comes down strongly against rigid categories. The story of sexual evolution is one of experimentation and constant improvisation, and that, he says, goes a long way to explaining why human sexual norms seem to be undergoing a transformation: “I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy,” he writes.
Is the form of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph Schuringa argues, with deliberate provocation, that the answer in each case is yes. His book presents itself as “ideology critique,” unmasking the hidden influence of liberal dogma on the scope and methods of “analytic philosophy.” This influence extends not just to moral and political theory but also to the study of mind and language, to metaphysics and epistemology: for Schuringa, analytic philosophy rests on a pervasive fantasy of free inquirers, justified in trusting “common sense,” which only serves to naturalize an unjust status quo.