Professor Devoney Looser

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189 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 21 Feb

Professor Devoney Looser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Secret Life of Books · Jane Austen's Birthday: why everyone wants to party with Jane · 21 Feb 2026 podcast

I mean, this is a time of incredibly fast social change, but also great pushback against the kinds of changes that are being asked for, demanded by many.

And I think...

That really speaks to the present moment, this moment of feeling like things are going forward, but then getting a lot of blowback and a lot of slowing down.

And I think Jane Austen was very much in there, in being interested in those new philosophies, wanting to put them in the mouths of her characters, but doing so in a culture where they weren't going to be necessarily applauded or welcomed right on the face of it.

Yes.

Well, I think people then would have understood all these militia units traipsing around are there because there is a fear of invasion.

You know, so I think that's something that we've lost.

Now, I think it just reads like, well, there were lots of redcoats and don't they look handsome in their uniforms?

Right.

I'm not, you know, not saying that's not there, too.

But they're there in the first place because of a concern for civil unrest and potential invasion from the French.

Right.

I think that part is baked into the novels, but we just don't read it.

We don't see it in the same way.

Persuasion is where this very much is on the surface.

But there are other places in her novels where it's there for readers then, but maybe not so much now.

Well, I think it's... Here's one example I would give, and I don't know if this is pushback exactly, but I think it's wonderful and effective and fascinating that Mr. Bennett gets to be the one to say, "'Elizabeth Bennett's refusals are okay.'"

That we have a man, a father figure coming in at this moment where she is absolutely rebelling against one parent and rebelling against the system and everything that's expected for women of her class and indeed for her family's well-being going forward.

But she has her father's go-ahead.

And I think that was a very clever way of doing it.

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