Welcome back to Jane Austen's Paper Trail for our bonus Q&A episode. We were delighted that so many of you tuned into the podcast and even happier to receive so many emails with your Jane Austen questions. You'll be pleased to hear that, unlike Cassandra Austen, we won't be burning your letters. Instead, in this episode, I'll be presenting them to our expert panel and demanding some answers. Our first panellist is Emma-Claire Sweeney, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University and author of The Secret Sisterhood, The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Elliot and Wolfe. Welcome to the podcast, Emma. Thank you. I'm also joined by John Mullen, Professor of Literature at University College London and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen. Hello, John. Hello. And completing our trio is the director of Jane Austen's House in Hampshire, Lizzie Dunford. Thanks so much for joining us, Lizzie. Thank you for having me. So to kick us off, I'm rummaging around in my sort of virtual bag of letters for Jane Austen. And we have an email from a listener called Sarah Hoxbergen. Sarah writes, I'm curious to know what we know about Jane Austen and faith, and also Jane Austen and religion. How did Austen's personal faith influence her? And how did she view the institution of the church in her day? Lizzie, can you shed some light on that one? It's a fascinating question, but also one that with So Often Austen is really hard to answer. She doesn't really talk about this herself. And the only way to understand her faith is to look at her acts and look at what she did. She presents the institutions of the church, interestingly, within her novels, with a broad spectrum of critique and praise and understanding. But she also presents her clergymen as people rather than necessarily representatives. And I'd be really interested to hear what everybody else on the panel thinks. It's a very difficult question to answer, actually. One of my favourite documents relating to Jane Austen are the entries that she made in the parish register of her father's church in Steventon when she was probably about 15. And she imagines marrying three different men. And they sound quite different. I think it's Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam of London, Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool, and then the much more ordinary sounding Jack Smith. And so I think there's a lovely sense of playfulness there, being able to mess around with an ecclesiastical document, I suppose. I mean, I think if you're the daughter of a clergyman, several of your brothers become clergymen, you have a fairly pragmatic and worldly sense of what the church is about. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that in her private heart of hearts, Jane Austen was a sort of sceptic about religion. But I think it's unimaginable that somebody who wrote some of the passages of Mansfield Park could have been an unbeliever, actually, because although I think Fanny Price is not necessarily exemplary in the exchanges between her and Mary Crawford about what it's like to have a chapel in a big house and why you go to chapel and why you listen to sermons and what you're doing when you're writing a sermon. I think somebody couldn't have written that if they didn't themselves have a fairly firm religious faith themselves. But equally, arguably, the most ridiculous and the nastiest men in all her fiction are both clergymen. The most ridiculous is Mr. Collins. And I think the nastiest is Mr. Elton, who is downright horrible. I mean, he's extremely nasty, but he's got to be accepted as the man who is the incarnation of religion in that village or town and who eventually, of course, will preside at the wedding of Emma and Mr. Knightley. You know, there's literally no getting away from him. So I think she was very clear eyed about what kind of people might actually go into the church. I think that makes the distinction really clear there actually between, as the question asks, Austen's faith perhaps and then her thoughts on the institution of the church. From what you've said John they seem to be quite different. Lizzie or Emma can you think of any other examples from Austen's books that are particularly interesting for understanding the faith aspect of that question? What we do have is Cassandra's account of Jane Austen's last moments of consciousness and Cassandra claimed that austin said god grant me patience pray for me oh pray for me so if we're to take that as read then it would seem that in the last hours of her life she was drawing on her faith yes yes and jane austin wrote prayers and i'm sorry you don't write prayers if you think it's all mumbo jumbo those prayers are eloquent and sincere and i don't doubt that what cassandra says about our last moments at Eloquent and so it's inconceivable I think that Cassandra would sort of lie about that. Agreed. So next up we have a question from Tara Murphy. Tara asks how much did Jane Austen know about science? Do we know which scientific books of the time she might have read? John can you shed some light on that? Here we go. No I am remarkably ignorant about this because I think everybody is. You know, Jane Austen will have got what knowledge she had, if any, from her father's book collection. He probably would have owned some at least books of popular science, but who knows what they were and what she might have read, you know. And, of course, when they moved from Steventon, one of the many sort of disruptive aspects of it was all his books went. So I don't think there's any evidence that beyond sort of, you know, common knowledge of roughly what Newtonian science involved, she would have had anything other than practical knowledge, of course, of the kind of things that could be grown in the garden, harvested, cooked, but making a popular medicinal concoctions. She could have got that from almanacs and so on. But I don't think there's any evidence that she had anything even approaching GCSE level scientific knowledge. Well, I've forgotten most of what I learned at GCSE Science. So I'd say Austen and I are in a similar boat. Moving on to a question from Clementine Burney. Clementine would like to know, would Jane Austen have considered herself a feminist? Emma, what do you think on that one? Well, it wouldn't be a term that she would have recognised. I think the notion of the importance of equality between the sexes is one that we can read into a lot of her novels. So if you take Sense and Sensibility and the exploration of women's economic dependence on men and the way in which the inheritance system wreaks an injustice on women. So we have the Dashwood sisters who, on the death of their father, are reliant on the generosity or otherwise of their half-brother. And I think these kinds of themes about female agency or lack of it within wider systems are ones that Austen comes back to time and again in her novels A scene that I been thinking a lot about recently is from Emma Mr Elton who John mentioned earlier as the really horrendous vicar in Highbury the setting of Emma. He's in a carriage alone with Emma, and he professes his love for her, and he makes really unwelcome advances. And in rereading the scene, I was struck by how many times he attempts to seize her, to take hold of her. And the way in which she resists, perhaps partly down to having a certain amount of privilege from her class status, she has the confidence to turn down his advances. And I think she plays in her novels with these different levels of power, whether that be to do with gender or whether that be to do with wealth or class. I'm thinking of a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra about a friend of Austen's, Anne Sharp. And Anne Sharp, it appears, has reported to Jane Austen about some kind of harassment that she has received at the hands of a more powerful man. Austen, one appears to believe her, reports it to Cassandra without questioning it. But what she then claims in a very playful way is that she really hopes that Anne Sharp is going to get to marry a more powerful and wealthy man, and that sort of marriage might protect her from these kinds of advancements. And I guess her novels generally are marriage plots too. So it's marriage that saves these women from the precarious economic circumstances. One of the ways I think we can read it is to think that by having this quite conservative marriage plot it allows austin to get away with exploring things that might have been quite subversive at the time so whilst i don't necessarily think we could say yes jane austin would consider herself a feminist certainly not in the terms we might conceive it today i think what we can say is that she had a persistent interest in what happens when women make choices and speak up izzy and john do either of you want to come in on that one as well yeah i mean it's in The word that Emma used right at the beginning, equal, is quite an important word, I think, in Austen novel. It's particularly important in Pride and Prejudice, actually. And thus far, we are equals, says Elizabeth, I believe, to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She's talking about her sort of social background. And I think quite a lot of confusion when people argue about this question now comes from what that word might mean. I think we mean something really different by it. which just wasn't really available to Jane Austen. Equal means you have your own bank accounts. You equally have the vote. Equal means you get the same educational opportunity. All this is just anachronistic. And Jane Austen's not really thinking about it because it's just what's the point in thinking about it? She's a novelist. She's not a political activist. The thing which makes her perhaps not very feminist, but in a way that I think we'll find it easy to forgive, is what she invites us to laugh at. If you read Pride and Prejudice, you get Charlotte Lucas marrying Mr Collins, that absolute absurd idiot, purely for convenience. And when Elizabeth goes to visit her in Kent and she looks around the house and she wonders why Charlotte's arranged the rooms as she has. And then she realises with some admiration that Charlotte's arranged the house so that she has to encounter her husband as infrequently as possible in the course of the average day. And you're all laughing because it's really funny. It's an obstacle course. You know, think of Mr Wickham being bribed to marry Lydia. Mr Bennett says, if he takes less than £10,000, I shall lose all respect for him. And it's quite funny, but it's not funny. It's terrible. I think we see in her letters as well, there's really nothing Austin won't find a way to make funny. There's some really black humour, as we've talked about in the podcast, in those letters. It's true. But her humour, I think, is always fair. I don't think she gets you to laugh at a little sort of scintilla of truth about these things. You know, the Charlotte Lucas thing, we laugh at it, not, I think, cruelly, but sympathetically. I wonder if this is something that the novel is really well equipped to do. We can hold more than one idea equally and at the same time. Yes, yes. So that we can laugh at these terrible marriages at the same time as, you know, inwardly crying for the entrapment as well. tiffany adams asks as modern readers we don't always fully understand the context of living in austin's day whether that's the marriage dynamics the local places traditions global issues and yet we still really enjoy her stories how much more or less do people appreciate austin's stories in her own time period did austin have a good following for her books while she was alive lizzie could you take this one please again it's one of those things it's all about context one of the things we hear a lot about austin is that she wasn't particularly well read during her lifetime. When you look at the exact numbers of books that were published and were out there, that is true. But when you also think about literary book buying public and people who could afford it, that was also really small. But Pride and Prejudice in particular at the time seems to have really captured people's attention. We actually own Lady Caroline Lamb's copy of Pride and Prejudice. Lady Caroline Lamb was an amazing novelist in her own right. She happened to be mistress of Byron as well for a while but she also is an amazing writer and thinker and at the same time as she is reading this Lady Arabella Milbank who went on to become Lady Byron is also reading Pride and Prejudice and there's speculation about who is it that's writing this novel where is it coming from and it went through several editions it was also being published in translation and adaption on the continent it's a complex question in terms of sheer bestseller numbers and in terms of income? No, but there were conversations about it. Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, she didn't do too badly in her own lifetime, really. Whatever it was, the £650 she left or something, it's not an insignificant sum of money. It would have been a good income for, I don't know, Mr John Knightley or something, you know, for a professional gentleman in a year to earn £650 pounds wouldn't have been too bad. So let's think now of 60, 70,000 pounds or something. There's not many novelists now who can earn that. So I think Liz is absolutely right. The Prince Regent, after all, who sort of forced her to dedicate Emma to him, you know, he'd come across her and had a set in every palace, as it were. Lots of people didn't know her name, didn't know who she was. Because she was publishing anonymously at the time. But they knew the product because, of course, Pride and Prejudice would say, by the author of Sense and Sensibility on the cover. So you knew that there was a single author. But I think also in the question, unless I've got it wrong, there was a sort of almost an implicit second question at the beginning, how much context do we need to know, which I'd like to address because I have a very quick answer to it. I think one of the sort of slightly miraculous things about Jane Austen is that you don't really need to find out about the times to understand the conventions that are at play That a really magic thing about her I think I would completely agree I read all the novels when I was very young and I didn know anything And I still love them And I also think there's something in this. With Austen, thinking about what these novels are about. And they're not about the Regency. They are set in the Regency. And that happens to be the backdrop. That is the social backdrop. If she wrote in the 1980s, those ballroom scenes would take place in a discotheque. I think there are aspects of particularly Mansfield Park and persuasion, knowing a little bit more about the Napoleonic Wars. It's all the way through. Again, it's not explicit, but it's there. And maybe having a little bit more knowledge about that helps. And they're set in the Regency. They are not about the Regency. For me, for me, for me. I will quote that from now on. You're totally right. That totally sums it up. And that's one of the reasons that Jane Austen carries on being so translatable, so re-readable. You mentioned Mansfield Park, Lizzie. Think about, you know, one aspect of the wartime stuff, which is about how Fanny's brother William can possibly, given his low origins, climb up the lower ranks of naval officers. And it's all through sort of patronage and somebody having a word with somebody else. And it's very important to the plot of Bandsville Park because Henry Crawford tries to win Fanny over by getting his uncle to help advance William Price's career. Now, when you read all that, you don't need to go off and read something about how promotion in the Navy works. There it is. There it is. She tells you. Yeah. Yeah. Our panel will answer more of your great questions after this short break. Hiya, I'm Katie Edwards and I'm a health editor at The Conversation. I'm Dan Bamgott. I'm a lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol, where I also work as a GP. And now we're teaming up to host Strange Health, which is a new video podcast from The Conversation. Each episode, we're going to be taking a health trend going viral on social media. It's going to be me and Dan, plus an expert. And we're calling it Strange Health because we're not scared of disgusting things. Me being an anatomist, I was like, oh, can I have a look? And it was huge. So follow us on YouTube or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with our panel, John Mullen, Emma-Claire Sweeney and Lizzie Dunford, answering some of your listener questions. So next up, we've got a question from Sydney Chaffer-Melly, who asks, what do you think Jane Austen would have made of social media? Emma, would she have been taking selfies and filming TikToks? What vision do you have of Austen looking at her social media feed? it's a fascinating image to conjure up isn't it who knows what she would have thought I can well imagine mixed feelings we do know to a certain extent she must have prized her privacy given that she did write anonymously we also know I think that she was quite a shrewd manager of her literary affairs so we know that she did some negotiations herself with the publisher John Morrie, which seems quite extraordinary to me, actually, that she took that upon herself when her brother, who had previously managed her affairs, I think was too ill to make the meeting. She talks about being fond of pewter as well as praise. So she did want to earn a decent living from her writing. We know that she sent one of her precious presentation copies of Emma to the wildly successful author Mariah Edgeworth, presumably in the hope that Mariah might praise her writing and that that might lead to greater kind of status and publicity. She didn't approve of the Prince Regent who John mentioned earlier, and yet she did dedicate the novel to him. I'm not sure how much choice she really had in the matter, but she appears to have used the situation to her advantage and used it to get some leverage with her publisher, with John Murray. So I guess this is making me think that she might have been quite good at it. we know she has a good line in very quotable pithy funny lines I think it could have been quite dangerous for her too we know also that she could be very sharp tongued she could be gossipy Cassandra could not have so easily destroyed the record when it came to social media screenshots last forever yeah I wonder there's just one thing that strikes me with some of her communications had in common with social media is that her letters, her surviving letters, and of course Emma's referred to the fact that Cassandra Boo Hiss destroyed a lot of letters, but one of the things about Jane Austen's letters and about some of the letters that are used in her novels, which is alien to us but for which social media might be a kind of analogy, is that they're written for general consumption sometimes, or they're written for friends and family. you'll know in Emma you know when Frank Churchill writes a letter which is wholly disingenuous which he writes to his father to congratulate him on his marriage and so on and it's shown around the whole village as Frank Churchill will know that it is because that's its function and one of the interesting things is the difference between the different kinds of letters the last and some would think the best ever letter in Jane Austen's fiction, that one from Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot, which never goes through the post and which is just slid across the desk to her as he leaves the room in the white heart, is as it were the most private letter ever written. And there's a whole gradation of letters which go all the way to the Frank Churchill letter which he deliberately writes to be shown around. And perhaps some of the letters in Austen and some of the ones that she wrote herself are a bit more like social media posts really than what we think of as letters as private heartfelt communications that's the one thing that does strike me about the social media analogy I'm not sure Wentworth's letter would have been quite as powerful if he had slid into her DMs though as it was writing it down in the book okay a question here a bit more about Austen's works themselves from a listener called Kieran Garvey he writes in Austen's work there are notable examples of complex and tricky characters who happen to be parents and the children who navigate life around them. I wonder what your thoughts are about the representation of parents in Austen's work and what we can say or perhaps only speculate about given the lack of source material on her relationship with her own parents. John would you like to come in on that one? I mean I suppose the very last bit of the question first I don't think anything about the parents in the novels necessarily tells us anything about her relations with her parents which were given the ups and downs of life excellent. I think she loved her father very much. And I think he was a rather terrific chap, actually. There are other examples of really extraordinary women writers, especially novelists, who got quite a lot of their early schooling in literature from their fathers, just of necessity, because they weren't going to go to school, let alone university sometimes. Many of the parental relations in her novels are either non-existent because the parents are dead and that's important to the plot sometimes or extremely difficult because otherwise there wouldn't be a novel all happy families are alike that Tolstoyan sort of dictum you need problem parents to write fiction sometimes And so even arguably the closest heroine parent relation in all Jane Austen fiction that between Elizabeth Bennet and her father he is very flawed And you realise that in the course of reading the novel. And it's a difficult realisation because he's also one of the most amusing and intelligent men in all Jane Austen's novels, and difficult not to be disarmed by him. But of course, they're also dreadful mothers, dreadful fathers. I mean, Sir Walter Elliot, how terrible can you get? Mr. Woodhouse, a life tending to Mr. Woodhouse with his killer phrase, gentle selfishness. You know, what about Mansfield Park? I mean, oh, your real parents are terrible. Your substitute parents are terrible. They're all terrible in brilliantly amusing in different ways for the reader, but all impossible for poor Fanny Price. So either absent or terrible parents seems to be sort of the rule in Jane Austen. And even a really affectionate mother like Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. She's a good person. She loves her daughter she does her best but she's endlessly making misjudgments and indulging some of the worst aspects of her offspring Eleanor can't rely on her at all she has to find her own sort of decisions and judgments about the world so maybe Lizzie and Emma disagree I don't see that as a reflection of Austen's own experiences. And I think that her own basically very happy family, immediate family, was terrific support and resource for her, actually. And she knew she was quite lucky. I wonder if novelists almost always draw something from their life. It's just very difficult to tell which aspects have been drawn from the novelist's own experience. I've written a novel very closely inspired by my sister but then the idea that it is my sister that's not actually quite true and oftentimes what people will assume I've drawn from my own experience might not be the case and the things that I really have drawn from my own family might slip under the radar so I think it's very dangerous to make assumptions I also think it's highly unlikely that Austen wouldn't have drawn at all from the well of her own experience and mixed that with her observations and her imagination and combined those things become something new and different. I do think there are certain comparisons that are hard to overlook so as John said it seems clear that Jane Austen had a close relationship with her father and that he was supportive of her and her work. So the fact that for her 19th birthday, he bought her a portable writing desk, the fact that when she was 21, he sent out a copy of her early novel, First Impressions, which later became Pride and Prejudice, we think, to a publisher, seems to me to show an extraordinary level of support. But I think what happened after his death does go to show that perhaps he hadn't been as careful as he might have done about protecting the financial future of his wife and daughters. The fact that they were, to an extent, dependent on the generosity or otherwise of her brothers. What I said about sense and sensibility might come to mind here. There do seem to be some comparisons to be made there. And the situation of the daughters in Pride and Prejudice. So it's not a direct comparison. It's not saying that she was writing autobiographically, but that perhaps fathers who haven't maybe fully provided for the future of their daughters is, you know, a subject that might have been closed home in some way. there also seems from austin's letters several references that might lead us to think that her mother could have been a bit of a hypochondriac she talks about at one point my mother would tell you that you know she was terribly sick but in fact she doesn't have a fever or a cough or a sore throat and and she says she has very little sympathy for someone who's suffering from that kind of cold and there are a few other references that make this seem as if it wasn't a one-off occurrence. And hypochondriac parents do appear quite regularly in Austen's novels. So I'm not saying in any way that Mr. Woodhouse is Mrs. Austen, but perhaps there were elements of her experience of her parents that she might have drawn on and transformed. And I think when novelists are writing well, and when their work is taking flight, often there's a kernel of experience that is then transformed into fiction. If you look at other novelists, they really do put real people in. They really do, I know. I guess I'm wondering that when you put it on the page, something changes. If you put the demands of the story first, then you have someone who is very, very closely based on your sister, but you're getting her to interact with somebody who's fictionalised or in a place your sister's never been to, a situation your sister herself has never experienced, then perhaps they're not quite your sister anymore. I've been doing quite a lot of research in Austen with fairy tales and actually looking at Austen as storyteller. And when you compare the archetypal stereotypes, particularly of parents, and within fairy tale, where you have that combination of the king and representing the father, there is actually throughout, particularly those first literary fairy tales that they're writing in the late 17th century, the father as the evil villain is a reference to Louis XIV. So I think there is something in, I'm not going to say it's definitely, but when you look in Austen, you have this ineffectual distant king and you have these ineffectual fathers. And I think Austen's novels are so mimetic and they have stood with us in a ways that so much hasn't. And I'm still working on it, but they are built into these wider, deeply Indo-European storytelling themes, as well as being of the Regency. I could keep going with these listener questions all day. That's all we have time for. thank you so much to our listeners who sent in so many questions and to Emma, John and Lizzie thank you so much for joining us to answer some of them. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. That's it for now from us here at Jane Austen's Paper Trail. We've really loved bringing you these conversations about Austen's life and work. You can read more from our experts about Austen on theconversation.com. The senior producer of this series was Eloise Stevens who did all our mixing and sound design too. Alistair Tibbet and Alice Mason do all our socials and promotion. Our executive producer for this series is Gemma Ware. 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 on 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 rate and review the podcast wherever you follow us. and tell your friends about us too. I'm Anna Walker, and thank you for listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail from The Conversation.
