The course discusses Austen’s novels in the sociopolitical context of early nineteenth-century England by focusing on the cracks in the moral aristocratic hegemony. Without losing sight of Austen’s political conservativism my reading concentrates on the contradictions and ambiguities inscribed in gender representations. I treat them as telling instances of a kind of narrative which cannot always contain the oppositional voices that the author herself has constructed in order to control them. Austen’s language, therefore, is thoroughly analysed as an imprint of her embarrassment in the face of female desire, while, at the same time, plot manipulations are emphasised as the means to which she resorts in order to contain it. The “happy end” which closes the narrative, for all its didacticism, or rather because of it, betrays precisely this kind of embarrassment.