Sophie Gee

Yeah, he seems like a benign patriarch, although very ineffectual.

In a minute, I want to steer us into the future.

But I'm thinking about the birthday as this marker that we have in our own moment.

We too are so consciously in a moment of enormous turmoil.

All over the world, very much in the United States, in Australia, as a matter of fact, we're recording this in the aftermath of a devastating anti-Semitic shooting in Australia.

Everybody is deeply, deeply aware of these chasms of difference and conflict.

When you were doing the rounds for Jane Austen's birthday, did you feel any of the current anxiety?

Did you feel any of that coming up when people were thinking about Austen?

Or were we in festive mode of celebrating the escape?

Debony, that's such a smart answer.

I sort of want to linger with it for a moment because there's a depth there for me that really deserves even more attention.

You spoke lightly, but I think you're putting your finger on something very important, which is that Austen herself and perhaps something about the novel or what Austen does with the novel has this capaciousness and sort of container-like quality to it.

where it can hold many different points of view and many different positions of all kinds, social, political, religious, attitudes to love and parenthood, all the big topics of our time.

There's something about a novel that can hold it in capacity forever.

on our podcast, we're actually starting a series on George Eliot, and we're doing a long read of Middlemarch.

And I was looking, as I was starting in on Middlemarch, I was realizing how much Eliot learns from Austen.

And one of the things I think that she learns from Austen, along with irony and how you write brilliant satirical dialogue, is how you use the form to hold many different points of view.

Because, you know, we know about Eliot

I suppose, in more detail than we do about Austen, what she actually thought about stuff, because there's a lot of traces outside the novels.

We don't know so much about Austen.