John Mullan

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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, 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, right?

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 written

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 Austin 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 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.