Jonty Claypole

He then turned to Miss Milner.

"'Can you say the same by him?'

She spread her hands over her eyes and exclaimed, "'Oh, heavens!'

Doryforth struck his forehead in doubt and agitation, but still holding her hand, he cried, "'I cannot part from her!'

Then feeling this reply as equivocal, he fell upon his knees and cried, will you pardon my hesitation and will you in marriage show me that tender love you have not shown me yet?

Will you in possessing all my affections bear with all my infirmities?

She raised him from his feet and by the expression of her countenance, by the tears that bathed his hands, gave him confidence.

He turned to Sanford, then placing her by his own side as the form of matrimony requires, gave this for a sign to Sanford that he should begin the ceremony on which he opened his book and married them.

Isn't that wonderful?

If you've enjoyed this episode, we urge you to read Fanny Burney's Evelina and Her Diaries.

We urge you to read Mariah Edgeworth's Belinda.

Of course, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications, as well as her travels through Scandinavia.

Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House and Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story.

They're such extraordinary books.

And one of the things I ended up thinking about, Sophie, and just to end, I'll be interested to get your hot take on this.

From reading all these books, what came clear to me is that I think a lot of the things that Jane Austen is credited with inventing or bringing to literature aren't actually necessarily true.

She's not necessarily doing a number of things for the first time.

I think the sort of radicalism, the way she writes about women, the way she writes about sex, the way she writes about politics, I think she's very much part of a generation and she has forebears

It made me think that actually I think her greatest innovation is actually an aesthetic one.

Jane Austen nails plotting in a way that no writer of the novel up until that time had done.