Sarah Antony: Autumn 2026 Historic Art and Literature Courses
Sarah Antony is again providing a range of historic Art and Literature courses for autumn 2026.
Booking courses
To contact Sarah and book on any of these courses please use the contact form at the bottom of this page’s listings. Please include the reference of any courses you are interested in the Comments field.
Bruegel the Elder (ART LECTURE),
Date and time: Thursday 15 October, 2-4pm
Reference: Bruegel
Cost: £10
Course Description
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1530 – 1569) was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. A painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so-called genre painting); he was a pioneer in presenting both types of subject as large paintings. This lecture looks at the life and some of the major works of this important painter. Paintings studied will be limited in number in order to allow a detailed examination of his intricately created worlds.
Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies
Dates and Times: Mondays, 10.30 – 12.30, November 2, 9, 16
Reference: Hardy
Cost: £25)
Course Description
After Hardy had trouble publishing his first novel, he was advised to attempt a story with a more complicated plot. The publication of Desperate Remedies was his breakthrough, and the first of a long string of novels that propelled him to the forefront of Victorian letters.
The novel is considered a ‘sensation’ novel, containing, as it does, themes of bigamy, murder, illegitimacy, blackmail, and impersonation. Yet this compelling story also raises the great questions underlying Hardy’s major novels, which relate to the injustice of the class system, the treatment of women, probability and causality.
Vanity Fair
Dates and Time: Wednesdays 10.30-12.30, November 4, 11, 18, 25
Reference: Vanity
Cost: £34
Course Description
When Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley leave school, their feet are set on very different paths. Kind, foolish Amelia returns to her comfortable home and wealthy family, to await a suitable marriage, while Becky must look out for herself, earning her own living in a hard world. But Becky is neither kind nor foolish, and with her quick brain and keen eye for a chance, her fortunes soon rise, while Amelia’s fall. Subtitled “A Novel without a Hero,” this satirical work deconstructs traditional ideas of heroism while exposing the vanities and pretensions of early 19th-century British society through an unreliable narrator who frames the story as a puppet show.
Greed, ambition, loyalty, folly, wisdom… this famous novel gives us a witty and satirical picture of English society during the Napoleonic wars. This four-week course examines the novel in detail, exploring the ways in which it engages with nineteenth century discourses surrounding war, imperialism, inheritance, gender, class and social issues.
Full Text:
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray | Project Gutenberg
Audiobook:
(1) VANITY FAIR: William Makepeace Thackeray – FULL AudioBook: Part 1/4 – YouTube
(1) VANITY FAIR: William Makepeace Thackeray – FULL AudioBook: Part 2/4 – YouTube
VANITY FAIR: William Makepeace Thackeray – FULL AudioBook: Part 3/4
(1) VANITY FAIR: William Makepeace Thackeray – FULL AudioBook: Part 4/4 – YouTube
Surprised! (ART LECTURE),
Date and Time: Thursday 5 November, 2-4pm
Reference: Rousseau
Cost £10
Course Description
This lecture looks at the life and works of Henri Rousseau, a French painter who is considered the archetype of the modern naive artist. After exhibiting with the Fauves in 1905, he gained the admiration of avant-garde artists, celebrated by his modernist contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and the surrealists René Magritte and Max Ernst, who saw his work as opening up new realms of artistic possibility.
Rousseau is celebrated for his visionary jungle paintings which captivate the viewer with the lushness of their plant and animal life painted with incredible detail and precision. Extraordinarily the artist never saw the tropical scenes he brought so much to life, as he never left France. His exotic jungle paintings are the fantasies of a city dweller, constructed from visits to the zoo and botanical gardens, from postcards, books and from Rousseau’s vivid imagination.
Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter
Dates and Time: Mondays 10.30-12.30 November 23 and 30
Reference: Jezebel
Cost: £16
Course Description
How far is a mother prepared to go to secure her daughter’s future? Madame Fontaine, widow of an eminent chemist, has both the determination and the cunning to bring young Minna’s marriage plans to fruition, with dangerous consequences for anyone who dares to stand in her way. But has she met her match in Jack Straw, one-time inmate of Bedlam lunatic asylum? It will take a visit to the morgue to find out who triumphs – and who comes out alive.
Reminiscent of Collins’s blockbusters The Woman in White and Armadale, this suspenseful case study in villainy is set against the financial world of 1820s Frankfurt and tells the story of two widows, one of them devoted to realizing her husband’s social reforms, the other equally devoted to the pursuit of her daughter’s happiness.
Jezebel’s Daughter by Wilkie Collins | Project Gutenberg
The Eustace Diamonds
Dates and Time: Wednesdays 10.30-12.30, December 2, 9, 16,
Reference: Diamonds
Cost £25
Course Description
Anthony Trollope stated that in writing The Eustace Diamonds he was inspired by the sensation novel genre, particularly the work of Wilkie Collins. The specific point of comparison comes with Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), which had been recently published. Both books are tightly plotted, featuring a criminal investigation of the theft of a precious stone. Part sensation fiction, part detective novel, part political satire and part romance, this hugely entertaining novel is also a highly revealing study of Victorian Britain. Although part of the Palliser sequence, it stands somewhat separately, focusing primarily on a new set of characters.
This three week course will explore the novel in the context of the political, imperialist and legal concerns of the period, considering the ways in which diamonds can be seen as a metaphor for the willingness of society to accept the lure and seduction of surface appearances.
Full Text:
The Eustace Diamonds | Project Gutenberg
Audiobook:
The Eustace Diamonds Audiobook – YouTube
(1) The Eustace Diamonds Audiobook Part 2 – YouTube
The House of the Seven Gables
Dates: December 7, 14, 21
Day and Time: Mondays 10.30-12.30
Reference: Hawthorne
Cost £25
Course Description
The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Hawthorne’s cousin Susanna Ingersoll, as well as ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
The novel, set in mid-19th-century Salem, Massachusetts, is a sombre study in hereditary sin and a profound exploration of the human condition. This course explores Hawthorne’s themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, in the context of the Puritanism of early America, the misappropriation of American land, and the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century.
Resources
Resources
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Project Gutenberg
(5) The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Full Audiobook – YouTube
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Project Gutenberg
The Adoration of the Magi (ART LECTURE),
Date and Time: Thursday 17 December, 2-4pm
Reference: Magi
Cost: £10
Course Description
The Adoration of the Magi was a popular religious subject showing the Magi bringing gifts to the newborn Jesus. The Magi, also referred to as the three Kings, or the three wise men, are named Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior, and were usually symbolic of the three known continents of the world: Africa, Asia and Europe.
This lecture looks at the representation of the Adoration of the Magi in Western art, exploring paintings by artists including Botticelli, Bruegel the Elder and Edward Burne-Jones.
Contacting Sarah and booking courses
To contact Sarah and book on any of these courses please use the contact form below. Please include the reference of any courses you are interested in the Comments field.