John Mullan
speaker
250 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 28 Jan
John Mullan’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Hello.
Well, I think it resonates with people once they've passed the age of 40, probably, particularly, because of all Jane Austen's novels.
It is the most melancholy and also, in an old-fashioned way, the most romantic.
It's a heroine who thinks she's missed her chance of happiness in life, really, and then she gets a second chance.
And I think that that resonates with people when they get a bit further on in life.
It was possible that she was in a reflective mood because she was beginning to ail with the illness that was eventually to kill her.
But she wouldn't have known that.
But I don't think the melancholy in the book represents somehow the author's melancholy at all.
I sort of don't think Jane Austen was that sort of novelist, actually.
It's worth saying about the letters that they are quite unusual because many authors, the letters we enjoy and find interesting, are written to other authors and they're about writing and about the life of writing.
And Jane Austen's letters, the vast majority are to her sister Cassandra.
And they're really to Cassandra, they're not to us, they're not to posterity.
So, you know, when they were first published, I think quite a few Austen fans were a bit disappointed because where are the great thoughts of the author?
By the time she writes Persuasion, she's become extremely sophisticated with this technique.
So we sort of share Anne's insights, but also her delusions, her mistakes.
And to some extent, what I think some readers have thought of as her sort of masochism, her self-punishment, because she's sort of trying to make the best of the fact that she meets again this man, Captain Wentworth,
who she was persuaded to reject eight years earlier.
For a little capsule example of how brilliantly free and direct style works in Persuasion, after they've met again, Anne gets told by her very tactless, inconsiderate sister Mary that Captain Wentworth, after the meeting, has said to Mary that Anne...
eight years on, was so altered he would not have known her again.
She's lost her bloom.
Showing 141–160 of 250 · page 8 of 13
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