The writer

You're listening to a podcast from The Conversation. Of all the chemical mixtures, ink is the most dangerous, wrote Jane Austen's brother James in the first edition of The Loiterer, a humorous weekly periodical he published while at Oxford University. Had she read those words, no doubt his younger sister Jane would have been tickled. At the time, novels were thought to have a corrupting influence on the hearts and minds of young women, and it was a supposed danger Jane reveled in. No wonder, then, that a female reader became the central character of her fifth, and to my mind funniest, novel, Northanger Abbey. I'm Anna Walker, arts and culture editor at The Conversation in the UK, a platform partnering journalists with academics. You're listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail. In this podcast, experts uncover the real Jane Austen to celebrate 250 years since her birth. Book by book will take you inside her work to help you understand her life. Welcome to episode five, How did Jane Austen approach the craft of writing? Northanger Abbey is littered with clues about what kind of writer Austen was. Coming up, I'll be sitting down with two experts to unearth them. But first, my colleague Naomi Joseph heads to Jane Austen's house in Hampshire with Louise Curran. It's a lovely red brick building, isn't it? I think it would have been fairly modest by the standards of the day, although to us looking at it now, I would quite happily live here, I think. Louise is Associate Professor in Romanticism and 18th century English Literature at the University of Birmingham, and a big Jane Austen fan. It's got these lovely roses growing over the front door hasn't it and the beautiful laid out beds and it does give you a real kind of sense of what this would have meant to Austen arriving here actually after those years of moving around a bit and being quite uncertain as to what was going to happen to them as a family and finally actually she's going to have a so-called room of her own and it's really where she writes the novels for which she's famous for today. It's Certainly a place that inspires the imagination. Shall we go in? Yes, yeah. We've gone upstairs and we're walking through a hallway with incredible wooden floor. We're turning left into a room and in the far corner of this room is a series of books. And in this case, we've got our first edition of The Mysteries of Udolfo. It's very exciting to see it, isn't it? Austin was a really voracious reader. She read pretty much everything she could get her hands on, as far as I can tell. And The Mysteries of Udolpho was by one of her favourite writers, one of the most popular writers of her generation, Anne Radcliffe. There was a real vogue for Gothic novels at the end of the 18th century that she's really tapping into when she's writing Northanger Abbey. We've got the terrors going, the French Revolution. And so you get this spate of novels, really, that is thinking about Gothic writing and scaring its readers. And Austen absolutely lapped up this stuff. What else would she have been reading fiction-wise in the period? So from the generation before her, she would have been reading writers like Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela and Clarissa, Henry Fielding, his Tom Jones. Of her own generation, she was really influenced by Mariah Edgeworth, Frances Burney, a novel like Everliner about a young girl's entry into the world and finding her way in society. and she's influenced in their style, their subject matter, the way in which they're writing about young women, all of that. But I think they're also offering her a kind of sense of what a woman writer could look like and be. What does it mean to be an authoress? So she was reading all of these contemporary writers, writers who came before her, and they were incredibly influenced to her, but she had very strong opinions about what people should be reading. What has she said? I think Northanger Abbey is famous for that bit where she defends really, really strongly the novel as a respectable form of writing and something that you ought not to be embarrassed to read. And in fact, at one point she does say about her family, we're a family of novel readers and we're not embarrassed to be so, you know, or words to that effect. And at the same time, she thinks it's important to be reading other stuff as well. She reads books about war and military manoeuvres. This is the period of war with France, the Napoleonic Wars. You know, she is reading about contemporary issues. She's reading Samuel Johnson essays and learning quite a lot from his style. She's reading elegant extracts, as we can see in the cabinet in front of us. It was a popular anthology, basically. It was very much the kind of thing that she would have been brought up having to read. This is hilarious, this bit, because there's a little bit about Mary, Queen of Scots here. And she disputes the historian's negative verdict on her. And you can just see in the margins here, she's just writing a lie. No, another lie, a third. This is someone really vigorously interacting with a book that they don't agree with. and from being an incredibly voracious reader she turned herself to becoming a writer and Chawton gave her that space and we're going to go walk to the desk now where she revised and wrote many of the books that we now love her for. So we've come back downstairs and we've entered into the dining room and in the right hand corner there is quite a small writing table. It's absolutely tiny isn't it? I mean a table like this would also be portable as well so you can move it around easily. Using your imagination you can think of Austen moving the tea things in or having a visitor or getting ready for I don't know someone playing a piano or something and having to move the table out of the way. I think if you are a sort of writer of her background and class, you are probably going to be pushing that table aside quite often to be able to facilitate your writing, but also the other duties that you have to get performed during the day. This desk is out a window and this used to be an old, quite busy thoroughfare. Yeah, absolutely. This was a major road to London, just seeing all this traffic going past, thinking where people are coming from and where they're going to. And I think that sort of sense of having her own space in here at her desk writing her novels, but then also looking out onto that bigger world outside of the window, I think is actually quite a useful way of envisaging how Austen composed and what her fictional world is like, actually. These books, they were incredibly popular, but what sort of literary celebrity did she actually experience? So during her lifetime, very little really. When she dies and she's buried, the headstone doesn't even refer to her as a novel writer. And actually quite shortly after her death, her novels go out of print for a bit. It's notable that she is one of the romantic writers who was not part of a literary London coterie or a coterie anywhere. There's a sort of flurry of letters when she's in London with her brother Henry at one point and she seems to be going to a few of these more sort of literary London parties where she might meet other writers and other celebrities of the period. She seems awkward with that, I think. I don't think that she is somebody who necessarily wants to attach themselves to that sort of a world. There's a wonderful letter actually where she says what has happened to all the shyness in the world. I don't think she was sort of shy of her own talent, but I think there is definitely a sense in which she isn't a kind of thrusting, Byron-like figure. So it doesn't seem like she was in it for the fame. Was she in it for the money I think she was absolutely in it for the money She a really really interesting writer about money Money is a thread through everything she writes And actually her letters are full of references to money. She's very careful with money. So did she make much money from these books? I think it's about £700 in total if you think about the combined profits of the four novels that she published in her lifetime. this is a decent but it's not a great fortune a writer like Anne Radcliffe she was paid 800 pounds in 1797 for her novel The Italian so you know Anne Radcliffe makes with one book more than Austen makes in her combined profits. It's surprising considering she was such a popular novelist of the time why do you think that was the case? You can sort of see it in the kind of writer she is, I guess. I think there is that tension for her, really, writing the kinds of novels that she wanted to write, that took, as she famously put it, those three and four families in a country village, and are involved with those sort of little matters. I mean, she's become one of the greatest writers ever. When did she receive that sort of literary celebrity? So it gets gradually constructed in the decades and generations after her death. There's clearly something about how people recognize her characters within their own cultures. I'm from a big Irish Catholic family who have nothing to do with small little English country villages, but I absolutely can see the Mr. Collins, the Mrs. Bennet. It's an extraordinary talent to be able to do that, really, to make something so local and specific in some ways and yet so archetypal in other ways. It's extraordinary. That was my colleague Naomi Joseph there with Louise Curran from the University of Birmingham. Just like Louise, I absolutely feel like I've met some of Jane Austen's characters in my own life. When I first read Northanger Abbey as a bookish girl of 12, the protagonist Catherine Moreland felt like the kind of girl I might try and befriend at school. More on her after this short break. I'm Gemma Ware, host of the Conversation Weekly podcast. Each week I speak to an academic expert about a topic in the news to understand how we got here, from global politics to the latest scientific breakthroughs or the big dilemmas facing our planet. My guests draw on their deep research knowledge to pull out what really matters so that you can understand the context without the spin. Follow The Conversation Weekly for new episodes every Thursday wherever you listen to podcasts and read more stories on theconversation.com. Welcome back. In Northanger Abbey we meet Catherine Morland as she prepares to enter the glamorous society of Bath. Plain and tomboyish, it's not until she discovers a love for novels that she begins her real training for a heroine. Her favourites are the amazing, horrid books of the gothic genre, a taste that takes her on wild flights of fancy and threatens her budding romance with the more sensible Henry Tilney. It is a book about novels and their readers, while never taking itself too seriously. So what is Jane Austen telling us here? I'm here with two experts to find out more. Catherine Sutherland, you're a professor of English literature of the 18th century and romantic period from the University of Oxford. Welcome. Thank you. And Anthony Mandel, you're a professor of print and digital cultures at Cardiff University. Thanks for joining us. Nice to see you. So Northanger Abbey was the first novel that Jane Austen successfully sold. The publisher Crosby & Co bought the manuscript for £10 in 1803 when she was 27, but it wasn't published until after her death in 1817. And the book came with a rather curt note from the author. Anthony, what was that note about? So in the note, she says this little work was finished in the year 1803. It was advertised and why business proceeded no farther. The author has never been able to learn. So she was stumped. She'd sold it successfully. The novel was advertised for publication under the title at that point as Susan. And then nothing happens. And she waits. And then six years later, in 1809, she writes, you know, what's happened? Where's this novel? If you're not going to publish it, I'll get it published elsewhere. The publisher writes back equally firmly saying, well, you can do that. But, you know, if you don't pay for it, you're to be in trouble. And then they just leave it at that. And it's a number of years later that Austen actually has the money to buy it back. That note, it was signed from the authoress because Jane stayed anonymous throughout her lifetime. Anthony, what was the risk of putting your name to a novel in Austen's day? Well, I think the interesting thing was the time she was publishing, and particularly the decade she was publishing, was a heyday for women's fiction. It was a period when women outnumbered men as novelists. Alongside that, and I don't think it's in contrast, but probably in connection to it, the reputation of the novel was really low. It was seen as this kind of distracting form of writing, and particularly of reading. It was a waste of time. It stopped you from being a dutiful daughter or wife or mother, and it led to these imaginative flights of fancy that were irresponsible. At the same time, it was an outlet for women through which they could articulate their views on society, their reflections on the world around them, and their own thoughts about literature. And so women were in this very, very problematic position. They had this opportunity to express themselves. At the same time, by doing so, they were exposing themselves to ridicule, to criticism, to censure. Yeah. On the other hand, though, it's not totally anonymous because she links all her novels on their title pages. So Pride and Prejudice is by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park is by the author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and so on. So she is creating a textual field and she's peopling it and inhabiting it and saying it is mine. And she has an identity on the literary scene even if it's not known to everyone that it is her. Yes that's right that's right she does. Did that kind of aspect that anonymity give her a degree of creative freedom in how she was writing do you think? Personally I think the reason her name isn't on the front page is not so much to do with creative freedom, though you could say being invisible gives you enormous freedom, and undoubtedly it did. But I think it's a lot to do with the rank she occupies in society. She is lower gentry. To push herself out in that way would really sort of go against the grain of her social position, her social status. And of all Austen's works, I think Northanger Abbey is the most self-consciously aware of itself as a novel. Yeah, it's a meta fiction, which means it's a novel that engages with the whole idea of writing a novel and being inside a novel. When, for instance, Henry Tilney, the hero, is driving Catherine in his gig towards Northanger Abbey. He plays with her love of the Gothic, her fascination by it. And he says, you know, you imagine they're going to be winding subterranean passages. Your candle will blow out just as you reach a particular door and the door will be locked. You will be in the dark. And she says, oh, Mr. Tilney, it's just like a book. And then a few pages later, of course, she is actually behaving as though she is in a book, although he's been rather careful to suggest that she isn't. I mean, one of the things that goes on in the playfulness is this discussion of are we inside a novel or not, really? And what happens to people in novels? And is it the same as what happens in real life? And the answer is quite sophisticated, I think, because the answer is yes, it is. And no, it isn't at the same time. And in chapter five, we actually have Austen sort of in that narrator's voice addressing other novelists directly. I'll just read what she writes there. Let us not desert one another. We are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. What's going on in this scene? Why is she looking to speak to other novelists directly? I think this is, in some ways, a bit of resistant writing because the usual position that women writers occupied was one of apology so they would often preface their novels with a note to the reader saying I would not have presumed to publish this work I wouldn have had the arrogance to do this unless I were persuaded by family or some eager friends to do so Or circumstances prevailed upon me. So there's this kind of attempt to justify their presence in the marketplace. and Austen is aware of that. Fiction is the lifeblood of her artistic and creative life. So I think she's saying, you know, this is not on. Even at the same time, she makes fun of fiction. You know, Northanger Abbey is a parody, but we'd be wrong to think that parody means a rejection of something. Northanger Abbey plays on the Gothic. It draws its energies from the Gothic. It's that kind of ludic quality, both poking fun at it, but also validating it as well. I think it's worth saying too that the other thing she's doing in this passage when she's praising the novel is she's actually gendering it. The novels she mentions by women writers, oh, it is only Cecilia or Camilla or Belinda. So that's two novels by Fanny Burney and one novel by Mariah Edgeworth, who are the real big hitters on the novel stage at this moment. And she's saying that this is the highest literary form, the novel, because it's the form of literature in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature is displayed. And she contrasts it with a whole bunch of writings by men. She says, oh, it's only the latest essay in The Spectator, or it's only a passage of Milton or Pope. And she's saying they're pretty dry, but you're happy with those because they're moralistic and they teach us stuff. But hey, wait a minute, there's a form that teaches us even more. And that's these novels by women. So it's a political passage. This sort of rallying cry almost, it does really make it seem like she wanted to be an author of novels above any other kind of writing. Absolutely. She was hugely ambitious for her own talent. And she saw the novel as a moral force, as well as a form of entertainment. That's essentially what Northanger Abbey itself is about. the power of the novel, both to lead you into misinterpretation, but ultimately, if you become a good reader, to lead you into a wise judgment of the world around you and of society. Yes. Reading Austen today is quite a different experience from reading some of those other 18th century novelists that you've mentioned there, like our heroine Catherine Morland's favourite Anne Radcliffe, where her contemporaries can sound quite archaic still. Austen's writing is still really clean and really fresh. Catherine, where does she get that voice from? Oh, I think that's a really interesting one because you're right. You could lay a passage, say, from Fanny Burney alongside a passage from Mariah Edgeworth, alongside a passage from Walter Scott, who becomes the man who makes a fortune from writing fiction in Jane Austen's lifetime and beyond. And their writing is dense. It's highly descriptive. Jane Austen doesn't sound remotely like them. Her style is pared back. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is she shifts from improbable events and sensational plots to the everyday life of middle class women. She lowers the temperature considerably of the novel. And so she invents what we now think of as the women's novel, which is still with us today, more than 200 years later. The other thing she does is she brings in conversation in a very different way. Her style is the ordinary language of ordinary people, ordinary middle class people, one has to remember. Yes, you've really reminded me of one of her letters to her sister there. I was reading just the other day where she says, I think I have mastered the art of letter writing now in that I write exactly how I talk. And I've been talking at you nonstop this whole letter through, essentially. Yes. What seems to be a huge addition by Austen is kind of psychological. She's sort of setting the tone for the great realist novels of the Victorian period. So her social realism comes from this shuttling between the external social comedy and the interior psychology of a heroines. And she's very famously been associated with this idea of free and direct speech or free and direct discourse. And what does that mean? It's the ability of the narrative to move between two perspectives, the perspective of the narrator, fluidly into the perspective of the characters. And so we have this kind of middle ground that is sort of objectively narrated from a third person point of view, but it's influenced by the opinions and perspectives and prejudices of the characters themselves. And even in that defense of the novel that you quoted, it's one very long paragraph. It moves between telling us the friendship building up between Catherine and her new pal Isabella. And we get a sense of that kind of fizziness of their first friendship. And then it moves into the narrator's voice about defending the novel. And then as it closes, it sort of steps back into the world of Bath and these two young women meeting each other. So this is really interesting sort of zooming in and zooming out that Austen does. The coming together of the psychological independence of the heroine with the social values of the community articulates a very particular sense of moral purpose. Anthony's right. She's the first great psychological realist novelist. But before that, I think the person who's really exploring character consciousness, and particularly female consciousness, is Anne Radcliffe. But of course, she is still attaching it to these wild events. So it's the kind of character consciousness that Catherine Moreland has when she first arrives at Northanger Abbey and is imagining that General Tilney, her host, has done away with his wife. I'm glad we've come on to Anne Radcliffe there because Northanger Abbey, of course, is a parody of the heroine Catherine's favourite genre, which is the gothic novel, and she's actually reading and referring to Anne Radcliffe's Mystery of Udolfo throughout. Anthony, why is Austen so drawn to the gothic genre and is she parodying it from a place of love or scorn in this novel? I think, you know, the Gothic novel is a way of articulating at the broadest level the anxieties experienced by society in Britain in the wake of the French Revolution. And in fact, the Marquis de Sade couldn't have had the Gothic novel without the French Revolution. At the same time, it becomes an area that is initially certainly dominated by women writers. So it becomes a way of expressing anxieties that women experience in Georgian society, about being marginalised, about being treated as economic objects or as sexual conquests. Radcliffe's heroines always have to balance their imaginative capabilities, this kind of great deep sensitivity that they have to the world around them, with a sense of reason so that the heroine learns to merge the two, the imaginative, the emotional, with the reasoned and the logical. Austen sort of creates heroines who do the opposite. They often occupy a very rational, reasonable world, but there has to be a kind of aperture where a bit of emotion comes in as well. there's a bit of intuition that's there. And I think that's what we're finding in Northanger Abbey. It kind of pokes fun at Catherine's reading, some of the delusions that she's led to, that General Tilney has murdered his wife. But intuitively she's right. General Tilney is not a nice man. And Catherine is wrong about the extent to which the kind of the evil manifests itself in her society. But she's not wrong that evil exists. And I think that's the important point, that evil is there. It's just, it's very banal. Yeah, she's looking in the wrong places, isn't she? The evil is not in, you know, the dead wife that's been murdered by her husband, but it's in that same man, General Tilney, sending her away from his house in the middle of the night with no servant to accompany her. A genuinely very unsafe and scary journey for her to undertake. Exactly. She's playing upon Catherine's naive reading of sensational tales. And we have to then pull back from that. And both Henry Tilney and the narrator make the same point. Henry Tilney says, you know, how on earth could you imagine my father murdered my mother? You know, we live in England. We're surrounded by a neighbourhood of spies. There are people watching your every move. These things can't happen. In other words, we're not in Radcliffe landscape in the middle of the Swiss mountains with the nearest neighbour 40 miles away. And the narrator underscores the same point by saying, you know, this kind of behaviour is not suited to human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England. But she saying in the Midland counties of England young people are vulnerable Husbands do abuse their wives Fathers are manipulative of their children But, you know, just cool it down. Reading books will teach you that as long as you read them in the right way. Is his character something of a stand in for Jane herself, could we say then? I do think so. I think it's an unusual novel in that Henry Tilney, for much of this novel, is very close to the narrative voice. And that isn't how Jane Austen's novels normally work. It's normally the heroine who's closest to the narrative voice. And it's quite interesting that Henry Tilney is at four and or five and 20, the narrator says, the same age as Jane Austen when she first drafts this novel. He is also quite androgynous. He loves fashion, doesn't he? That's right. And he plays around with that. But also there's that wonderful early passage in chapter three, where Catherine assumes that he thinks men have a better reading range, that men have, you know, a greater understanding of the world and so on, because they're better educated, because they go out more into the world. And he makes it clear that he doesn't think that at all. He says, in every power of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes. He's a proto-feminist. He's on women's side, which is not the norm in Jane Austen's Heroes, one has to say. And he's someone who is a fan of the novel as well, and novels written by women. He loves gothic novels, yeah. He says, the person who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid, which, I mean, is a fantastic line. That's right. Although Henry Tilney has a lot of time for novels and novels written by women, there are many characters in the book who are not so open minded. In Northanger Abbey, there are certainly proper and improper novels. And Catherine is encouraged to read the proper kind by other characters. Anthony, what was deemed proper and improper when it came to novel reading in Austen's day? Writers like Frances Burney, writers like Mariah Edgeworth, they were writing novels that had a kind of educational quality or a didactic aspect to them. Radcliffe, I think, is interesting because Radcliffe writes these Gothic novels, but she's quite well respected. And I think it's because of the, again, there's a lesson there that the heroines must learn, which is to temper those kind of imaginative susceptibilities with a kind of a sense of reality. Not that many critics at the time thought highly of Anne Radcliffe's novels. They were well read and people gobbled them up. But Coleridge, the intellectual and poet of the age, he reviewed Radcliffe's Udolph and he used it as an opportunity to think about the novel more widely. And one thing that he said there is, how is the novel to set a value on itself if it leaves nothing to savour on rereading? And that's how most novels operated. Most novels in the period never went into a second edition. And Jane Austen, I think, makes clear water between herself and most other novelists, even in her own time, by being available for rereading. and you do have famous people in their diaries saying things like, read Pride and Prejudice for the third time. So she's already pushing the novel into a more serious bracket. And my goodness, does she reward a rereading? I mean, having just finished Northanger Abbey, maybe for the fourth time, perhaps, in my life, as soon as I finished it, I thought, that's my favourite Jane Austen novel. And it's the same way with each of her books. Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. I thought, gosh, yeah, I like this one best. And the other thing I thought was, oh, I've seen things I've never seen before. Yes, there's so many layers to it. Ultimately, if you had to take one thing from Northanger Abbey that sort of reveals Jane's own perspective on being a writer, what do you think that is? I think it's the self-awareness. It's that understanding the rules of the game of fiction so intuitively and yet so precisely that she's able to write a novel which, in other hands, could easily be either just a straightforward criticism, condemnation of this form of the Gothic novel. and yet in Austen's hands she's able to put it into dialogue with the qualities of the gothic that Austen sees and admires and in fact validates. She is taking very seriously the statement that she offers us in chapter five that novels are probably our best way of understanding the world in which we live, that most of the people we come across in life, you know, we can't always be quite sure whether they mean well by us or badly by us. And one of our best guides to understanding human nature is understanding fiction and understanding the kinds of moral dilemmas that fiction faces us with. And Henry Tilney actually more or less says that to Catherine when he says she has to learn to investigate her feelings. That will actually lead her into a better understanding of human nature. And I think it was a real mistake not to put out the novel under the title Catherine because Northanger Abbey kind of pushes it towards this is a spoof gothic novel and that's only part of what it is because really what it's about really is a young person growing up and how the novel might be the young person's best guide to understanding the world around them. Well, thank you both very much for joining me in this Northanger Abbey book club of sorts. It's been great to talk to you both. Thanks very much. Pleasure, Anna. You've been listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail, a podcast from The Conversation. Coming up in our next episode, was Jane happy? We head to Lime Regis to walk with Jane along her favourite coastline. Austen herself envied the wives of sailors and soldiers because of what this place offers the freedom, the liberty that you feel at the seaside. And learn about how elusive happiness can be in her final novel. That's the way in which persuasion is true to happiness, that when it comes, it's often in a blur of contradictory feeling. A big thanks to Jane Austen's House in Hampshire and its director, Lizzie Dunford. And thanks to our experts, Louise Curran, Catherine Sutherland and Anthony Mandel. Stay tuned after the credits. Catherine's got a great Jane Austen fact for you. The senior producer of this series was Eloise Stevens, who did all our mixing and sound design too. Reporting from Naomi Joseph with production help from Jane Wright. Alistair Tibbet and Alice Mason do all our socials and promotion, and our executive producer for the series is Gemma Ware. If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us directly or send a voice note at podcast at the conversation.com. we'll be featuring our favorite questions from listeners about jane austen's life and works in a special q a episode at the end of the series that email again is podcast at the conversation.com the conversation is a non-profit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts with a wide audience you can sign up for our free daily newsletter by clicking the link in our show notes if you like what we do please support us at donate.theconversation.com that's donate.theconversation.com and please do rate and review the podcast wherever you follow us and tell your friends about us too thanks for listening okay Catherine give us your favourite Jane Austen fact in 1810 the first Indian restaurant opened in London called the Hindustani Coffee House Jane Austen's teenage stories are filled with recipes for curry and later on of course the recipe book that was used in Chawton Cottage is also filled with curry. It's called Martha Lloyd's Household Book. So obviously they were making curry in Chawton Cottage, but it would be nice to think that Jane Austen might even have visited an Indian restaurant when she was in London. How delightful to think of Jane Austen's family listening to one of Jane's drafts as they were eating a curry over dinner, perhaps. Yeah, that's right. Catherine Sutherland there. I'm Anna Walker and thanks for listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail