Emma Claire Sweeney

Thank you.

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 of

And so I think there's a lovely sense of playfulness there, being able to mess around with an ecclesiastical document, I suppose.

What we do have is Cassandra's account of Jane Austen's last moments of consciousness.

And Cassandra claimed that Austen 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.

Well, it wouldn't be a term that she would have recognized.

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've been thinking a lot about recently is from Emma.

Mr. Elton, who John mentioned earlier, is 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.