Freya Johnston

Some of the great comments about her own novels arise in the context of Austen advising her niece, saying things like, you know, three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.

I mean, that arises from thinking about a relative's work, not about another great author or in a public context of thinking about authorship at all.

Yep, yep.

I mean, who isn't?

Certainly, if you're thinking about the evidence of the letters, I wouldn't say that regret is a prominent feature of the correspondence or an emotion that she talks about there.

I mean, she did notoriously accept a marriage proposal from the unfortunately named Harris Bigwither and then overnight reconsidered it.

So whether she regretted that decision I suppose is something that we could speculate about that she did have the chance at one point in her life years before persuasion of having married and settled on a nice estate and have two friends his sisters close to hand that would certainly have got the family out of Bath and the problem of having to live somewhere she disliked but what else would it have meant I don't think she regretted not having children for instance and

One thing that the letters do dwell on a lot is how unpleasant and kind of disgusting she finds aspects of childbirth.

And indeed, two of her sisters-in-law died in childbirth during her lifetime.

But beyond that, as John says, Austen is not really the kind of author to inscribe her own feelings very legibly in the novels themselves.

Well, I mean, the early works are in a very obvious sense different in the fact that they're very, very short.

Although I think there is some continuity between the younger and older Austen in the sense that even in the mature works, she shows a certain impatience with endings.

She's

often rather uninterested in the couples in her novels once they've sorted things out.

And some readers have always felt actually these endings are a bit perfunctory or not very plausible.

I don't think people tend to feel that about Persuasion, although the ending is slightly peculiar if we are thinking of it as a happy ending because the final vision is of Anne still worrying, paying the tax of quick alarm.

for the fact that she's married someone who's in the Navy and therefore of whose security she's never really going to be particularly confident.

Well, I mean, probably as with most families, both.

Yes, she's absolutely, she is very close to her sister Cassandra, but close to and animated by the success or otherwise of all her siblings.

I mean, if you want to think of the one that probably had the most stressful impact on her, I suppose it would be her brother Henry, who was quite reckless and lost his money and took down lots of other members of the family when his bank failed.