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

But I do think that that was also, at least to some degree, a part of it, that it didn't have to be an us versus them of the present moment.

I do think the present moment has given us the plenty of opportunity to talk about things that are devastating.

But for many people, returning to Jane Austen is an opportunity to talk about things that are great.

Her genius, her happy endings, whatever it is that brings them, their love of reading, their love of books, their love of smart women, whatever brings them to those texts, it seems like a common space to celebrate some things that have happened that are at least not bad, if not always good.

Right.

I do think there is something that Austen's doing that is maybe a step beyond or a more brilliant capaciousness, which is that she really doesn't tell us what to think very often.

She might tell us more what not to do or ridicule things that one shouldn't do.

But I think she holds open a space for us to ask ourselves,

What is this character doing?

What would I do in this situation?

Maybe more than others before her did.

And, you know, I love this one line from her letters where she says, pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.

And she's talking about heroines of novels in this line.

But she's also telling us that the supposed morally ennobling heroines and characters that she's reading in novels from those days do not work on her.

Like, they have the opposite effect.

Love that.

They made her wicked.

And she's kind of celebrating that a little bit, but also showing that these people who think that they are giving us these didactic, you know, moral exemplars...

are producing in some readers or readers like her the opposite of what they say they wanted to.

Well, we see it a lot at the endings.

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