Posted on Aug. 22: Winning essay adds up for commerce student

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Jan_Mullally.jpg” caption=”Jan Mullally”]When the news came that she had won a prestigious undergraduate Jane Austen essay competition, Jan Mullally was shocked.

“I forgot that I had even entered,” she said.

Competing against more than 300 English students from around the world, the third-year commerce student entered the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) competition at the advice of her teaching assistant.

The bigger surprise came a few weeks later. “When I found out that I won, I was absolutely shocked. Really, the whole thing blew my mind, and then I heard it might be taken away from me.”

Another entrant read Mullally's essay and counted the number of words, noticing it was five words over the 2,000-word limit. JASNA asked Mullally to rewrite the essay, which she did, bringing down the number of words to 1,905. Mullally was allowed to keep the certificate and $500 US prize.

While English was her minor, it played a major role in her quest toward a B.Com. degree, which she graduated with last spring. Of the 30 credits she obtained, 21 were in English.

Some of her fellow business students questioned her decision to take English as a minor. But she feels there is no better fit. “I find that my analytical and communication skills are a lot better because of the English courses I have taken,” she says.

Improving her writing skills also helped her in her commerce classes. “You learn the things that you use in commerce that you're not taught in commerce,” she says. “When you write business papers, you're really writing about the research and you're being more analytical. When you're writing a humanities paper you write with more flair and creativity.”

Mullally has always enjoyed writing and has read all six of Austen's novels, her one unfinished novel, Sanditon, and several of her short stories. She chose to write an essay on her favourite novel Persuasion for her course Topics in Prose: Jane Austen, taught by Anne Milne.

“The essay is interesting,” says Milne. “Its starting point lies beyond the obvious and it tells us something new and significant.”

And while the essay is ambitious, Milne says her writing and analytic skills allow her to remain in control. “The essay takes a clear position and sets out a clear plan for presenting that position. The scope of the essay is appropriate for its length. It neither runs out of steam nor leaves us with a rushed or incomplete picture.”

Her TA agrees. “It's intellectually ambitious, but it achieves its aims through the clarity and care of its thinking, organization, literary analysis, and writing,” says Michael Sinding, who, after reading Mullally's essay, drew it to Milne's attention. “It argues well for its points, attending to nuance in small but telling narrative details, while covering a great deal of the larger ground of character and story. And the author manages to couch this multi-leveled operation in concise, fluid writing.”

Mullally will be attending teacher's college at The University of Western Ontario this fall.

Mullally's essay is titled “Join the Navy! Mrs. Croft's Subversion of Class and Gender Roles in Jane Austen's Persuasion” and is published on the JASNA Web site.