Professor Devoney Looser

speaker

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 · last 12 months

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

For instance, the end of Northanger Abbey, where she gives readers two choices, neither of which I think she's actually serious about.

Does this recommend parental tyranny or filial disobedience?

She's not really recommending either.

But the idea that she might put these as possible morals to her tale shows us the way she's being intentionally slippery and funny at the same time.

Yes, and I think most people here would go to the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, but let's not do that because we've done that so many times.

A different one that I love doing with my students is the opening of Sense and Sensibility, which is less remarkable, but she says the family of Dashwood was long settled in Sussex, and

If you read it and you read the rest of that paragraph, she is describing what is about to be a deep unsettling.

And the use of the word settled there is undone by the end of that page.

And I think that is also just a really remarkable kind of opening up of...

Ways to read multiply?

I think it's going to have a big year in 2026 with that Daisy Edgar Jones version that's coming out in September.

The 30th anniversary of the Ann Lee and Emma Thompson version, which I just got to see in the theaters last night.

They did a re-release.

Oh, my gosh.

Also, just the close-ups on those enormous screens.

You just realize the incredible camera work, the incredible acting.

At some ways, I think my answers have become less nuanced.

She's a genius.

These are these ineffable words we use as shorthand, but that many people agree on, as we know, in the scholarly world, in the high literary world, but also in pop culture, in mass culture among...

readers who might not read as deeply or widely in this period or afterward as many of us are afforded opportunities to do, who still say she's great.

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