Chapter 1: What questions do listeners have about Jane Austen?
Welcome back to Jane Austen's Paper Trail for our bonus Q&A episode. We were delighted that so many of you tuned into the podcast and even happier to receive so many emails with your Jane Austen questions. You'll be pleased to hear that unlike Cassandra Austen, we won't be burning your letters. Instead, in this episode, I'll be presenting them to our expert panel and demanding some answers.
Our first panellist is Emma Clare Sweeney, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University and author of The Secret Sisterhood, The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Wolfe. Welcome to the podcast, Emma.
Thank you.
I'm also joined by John Mullen, Professor of Literature at University College London and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen. Hello, John.
Hello.
And completing our trio is the director of Jane Austen's house in Hampshire, Lizzie Dunford. Thanks so much for joining us, Lizzie. Thank you for having me. So to kick us off, I'm rummaging around in my sort of virtual bag of letters for Jane Austen. And we have an email from a listener called Sarah Hoxbergen.
Sarah writes, I'm curious to know what we know about Jane Austen and faith, and also Jane Austen and religion. How did Austen's personal faith influence her? And how did she view the institution of the church in her day? Lizzie, can you shed some light on that one?
It's a fascinating question, but also one that with so often is really hard to answer. She doesn't really talk about this herself. And the only way to understand her faith is to look at her acts and look at what she did. She presents the institutions of the church
Interestingly, within her novels, with a broad spectrum of critique and praise and understanding, but she also presents her clergymen as people rather than necessarily representatives. And I'd be really interested to hear what everybody else on the panel thinks. It's a very difficult question to answer, actually.
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Chapter 2: How did Jane Austen's faith influence her writing?
Well, I've forgotten most of what I learned at GCSE Science, so I'd say Austin and I are in a similar boat. Moving on to a question from Clementine Burney. Clementine would like to know, would Jane Austen have considered herself a feminist? Emma, what do you think on that one?
Well, it wouldn't be a term that she would have recognized. I think the notion of the importance of equality between the sexes is one that we can read into a lot of her novels. So if you take Sense and Sensibility and the exploration of women's economic dependence on men and the way in which the inheritance system wreaks an injustice on women.
So we have the Dashwood sisters who on the death of their father are reliant on the generosity or otherwise of their half-brother. And I think these kinds of themes about Female agency or lack of it within wider systems are ones that Austen comes back to time and again in her novels. A scene that I've been thinking a lot about recently is from Emma.
Mr. Elton, who John mentioned earlier, is the really horrendous vicar in Highbury, the setting of Emma. He's in a carriage alone with Emma and he professes his love for her and he makes really unwelcome advances. And in rereading the scene, I was struck by how many times he attempts to seize her, to take hold of her.
And the way in which she resists, perhaps partly down to having a certain amount of privilege from her class status, she has the confidence to turn down his advances. And I think she plays in her novels with these different levels of power, whether that be to do with gender or whether that be to do with wealth or class.
I'm thinking of a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra about a friend of Austen's, Anne Sharp. And Anne Sharp, it appears, has reported to Jane Austen about some kind of harassment that she has received at the hands of a more powerful man. Austen One appears to believe her, reports it to Cassandra without questioning it.
But what she then claims in a very playful way is that she really hopes that Anne Sharp is going to get to marry a more powerful and wealthy man and that sort of marriage might protect her from these kinds of advancements. And I guess her novels generally are marriage plots too. So it's marriage that saves these women from the precarious economic circumstances.
one of the ways I think we can read it is to think that by having this quite conservative marriage plot, it allows Austen to get away with exploring things that might have been quite subversive at the time. So whilst I don't necessarily think we could say, yes, Jane Austen would consider herself a feminist, certainly not in the terms we might conceive it today.
I think what we can say is that she had a persistent interest in what happens when women make choices and speak up.
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Chapter 3: What scientific knowledge did Jane Austen possess?
she was writing autobiographically, but that perhaps fathers who haven't maybe fully provided for the future of their daughters is, you know, a subject that might have been closed home in some way. There also seems from Austen's letters, several references that might lead us to think that her mother could have been a bit of a hypochondriac.
she talks about at one point, my mother would tell you that she was terribly sick, but in fact, she doesn't have a fever or a cough or a sore throat. And she says she has very little sympathy for someone who's suffering from that kind of cold. And there are a few other references that make this seem as if it wasn't a one-off occurrence.
And hypochondriacs' parents do appear quite regularly in Austen's novels. So I'm not saying... in any way that Mr. Woodhouse is Mrs. Austen, but perhaps there were elements of her experience with her parents that she might have drawn on and transformed.
And I think when novelists are writing well and when their work is taking flight, often there's a kernel of experience that is then transformed into fiction.
If you look at other novelists, they really do put real people in.
They really do, I know. I guess I'm wondering though, when you've put it on the page something changes if you put the demands of the story first then you have someone who is very very closely based on your sister but you're getting her to interact with somebody who's fictionalized or in a place your sister's never been to a situation your sister herself has never experienced then
Perhaps they're not quite your sister anymore.
I've been doing quite a lot of research in Austin with fairy tales and actually looking at Austin as storyteller. And when you compare the archetypal stereotypes, particularly of parents, and within fairy tale where you have that combination of the king and representing the father, there is actually throughout, particularly those first three fairy tales that they're writing in the late 1800s,
17th century, the father as the evil villain is a reference to Louis XIV. So I think there is something in, I'm not going to say it's definitely, but when you look in Austen, you have this ineffectual distant king, and you have these ineffectual fathers. And I think Austen's novels are so mimetic, and they have stood with us in a way that so much hasn't.
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