John Mullan

Hello.

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 religion,

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 country.

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

Yes, yes.

And Jane Austen 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 her last moments are eloquent and sincere 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.

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