Anna Walker
speaker
274 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 2 Jul
Anna Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Austen is well known for her use of free and direct style, which shares a character's thoughts or feelings without explicitly stating that it's doing so.
John, how does free and direct style help Austen to achieve this emotional depth in Persuasion?
The lengths we will go to to make ourselves feel better about a romance that hasn't gone to plan.
Well, at the start of Persuasion, when we learn that Anne was once engaged to Frederick Wentworth...
austin writes a few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance but not with a few months ended anne's share of suffering from it her attachment and regrets had for a long time clouded every enjoyment of youth and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect john does that echo attitudes towards emotion at the time in general what was the sort of understanding of happiness and depression in austin saying how was that different to how we think about emotions
And one emotion that we do recognise that is named throughout the book is regret, one of the strongest themes of the novel, of course.
Freya, do you think that's an emotion Jane was personally familiar with?
One sort of emotional similarity perhaps we can see between Anne and Jane is the emotional resilience.
We certainly see evidence in her letters of her ability to persevere through personal difficulties.
John, she certainly faced her share, didn't she?
Loss of her father, financial instability.
Freya, you've studied a lot of Austen's teenage writing as well.
What kind of differences are we seeing at this point of maturity in Austen's writing compared to her sort of juvenilia, as it's called?
Jane was very close with her sister, Cassandra, as Anne Elliot is with her hypochondriac sister, Mary, though that portrait of siblinghood is less than flattering, I would say.
Was Austen's family a source of happiness or stress for her throughout her life, Freya?
It's Cassandra's lap that Jane's head rests on for much of that time in her final days, isn't it?
When Jane's sister Cassandra was just 24, her fiancé Tom Fowle died of yellow fever in the West Indies, and she never went on to marry.
Might Jane have been drawing on this experience of her sister for the character of Anne Elliot Freya?
Persuasion was the final novel that Jane Austen completed, published just six months after her death in 1817 at the age of 41.
Freya, what do we know about how Austen died?
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