C (3:28)

Somewhere around that.

B (3:29)

She's 250 years old in two days, you know, give or take, who cares?

C (3:32)

It's amazing how many modern implications her writing still has. Pride and Prejudice really cuts at the way the world looks at feminism. It defined feminism in some ways back then. I think her writings did. She was awesome and I'm a big fan. So actually, I should say too, that we asked you guys, you, our audience, guys, Bookworms, book nerds. Males, females alike. I don't want to say, just guys on classics. Bibliophiles, bibliophiles, book nerds. So we asked you to tell us what books you would be interested in having us do for the classic series. And we would encourage you guys still to, you know, write in those reviews any classics that you'd like us to revisit, any scholars that you would like to have on. Many of you wrote that Jane Austen was something you wanted us to talk about. So here we are. And it was a great conversation. It was dad who found the panelists. So it's a rare booking when dad has to book.

B (4:26)

It's two 18th century English novel scholars, Deveney Loeser, who was the Regents professor of English at Arizona State University, and Claudia Johnson, who is the Murray professor of English Literature at Princeton University. Deveney and Claudia proved to be a fascinating conversation. We had a chance to talk with them about Jane Austen. Claudia Johnson, Devoni Loesser. It is a pleasure to have you both in the bookcase I looked on artificial intelligence, and I asked how many books have been written about Jane Austen? And they said, we've lost count. So much for AI. How do you attribute her enduring popularity?

A (5:08)

Well, I think Jane Austen is one of the few authors who has not only a massive popular appeal, but an incredibly solid critical, you know, bona fides. Right.

C (5:18)

The.

A (5:19)

The critical establishment also agrees she's great. So maybe a quick answer, using a word that, you know, doesn't capture enough, is that she's a genius. And, you know, I think it's her genius that allows her to endure.

D (5:31)

You know, there was a time when Jane Austen didn't have a popular audience, when she was sort of a niche, you know, audience. And so there was a certain cachet of the class or something or specialness. You were one of the elect. That's not true anymore. Jane Austen is mass culture as well as high culture.

A (5:51)

The book I recently published, I have chapters on her first use in a court of law, which was in 1825. The early people in the 1820s were accusing other authors of plagiarizing from her. So, you know, even early on, there was some. There was some popular interest in her. But I think Claudia gets it absolutely right that there was also this sense among the elites that she was theirs.

D (6:12)

People have felt that to like Jane Austen is to really say something about yourself is to say something about the kind of person you are. And that's not true. I think of saying, I like Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare.

C (6:26)

What do you think about a person who says they're an Austen lover? What are those immediate impressions that you get from a person?

D (6:33)

One of the things it means is that you have good taste in quotation marks. Right. That you. That you like the real thing. You don't like noisy, vulgar, you know, cheap things. That she seems to stand for a certain authenticity and quality.

A (6:50)

And I might even put it more broadly with Jen, it's to recognize that she's rereadable and to want to reread her.

D (6:56)

Yeah.

A (6:57)

So there are people who reread her for many different reasons. But if you are smart enough to realize how rereadable she is and to enjoy doing that, to see new things each time, then I think you're on your way to becoming what some have, you know, for years called a janite.

B (7:12)

She was the, you know, the daughter of a rector. She lived a rather simple life, and yet she writes of a strata of society that I don't think many readers are in.

A (7:23)

I don't think her life was. Was simple, but you know, Sir Walter Scott is the one who said she wrote about the middling classes. And that might now seem like a crazy word to use here, but in fact, when she gets to the title people, most of them are pretty much skewered.

D (7:38)

In her novels, do we see a lot of upward social mobility? Elizabeth Bennet, you know, Mary Stacey, who's not an aristocrat, by the way, he's just a fabulously wealthy gentry, but, you know, her brother was adopted into a fabulous wealthy gentry family. He had at least three estates, perhaps more, you know, so it's not that she was completely marginal to that kind of life. It's actually in her family, I think.

A (8:04)

Where this gets complicated is that she rarely, not ever, but rarely gives voice to the working classes. But above the servant class and some of the working classes, she deals with the full range of working people and people who are living off the land.

D (8:19)

She also deals with the military clans as well. So she's not rarefied. She's actually not what was later called a silver fork novelist. She doesn't talk about daintiness and getting the right tea set. That's perhaps how she's apprehended later, but that's not what she's about.

C (8:38)

A lot of noise has been made about her being satirical. Would you describe her as a satirist?

D (8:43)

Absolutely. From first to last. I'm a great fan of her very early work, the work that she wrote as a teenager. And it is just uproariously funny and up to her last, the last sketch that she was working on. She's really making fun of people with heirs, people who think their birth confers worth upon them. She is always a satirist.

A (9:10)

To build on what Claudia's saying about the childhood writing, sometimes called RE Juvenalia, sometimes called her teenage writings. They've been rebranded as teenage writings because they. They seem very adult in many ways. Yeah, they're hilarious burlesques. They don't deal only with love relationships, as I think some people mischaracterize the major novels, but they have drunkenness, adultery, theft. These raucous, unconventional, hilarious texts she wrote in three volumes. They weren't published until long after her death, but they were preserved. And they are incredible. And they show us the satirist at work. They show us where she cut her teeth from ages 11 to 17 on these incredibly socially biting critical works of humor.

C (9:53)

The idea of being a female satirist back then, I mean, is it as foreign as the idea of me becoming quarterback of the. Of the Patriots?

A (10:03)

Yeah. I mean, Claudia's amazing book, Jane Austen, Women Politics, and the Novel, which has endured across three decades, as I think one of the greatest extant works of literary criticism on Austen, goes into all of the contextual reasons for this. But I think maybe your listeners will be a little surprised to Hear that between 1770 and 1829, there were something around 3,000 novels published in English, in England, in Great Britain, half of those with some form of anonymity, and about half, we think, by women. So Austin was doing something rare, but not quite as rare as we, you know, led to believe. I think this might be well known, too, to your listeners, but feminism isn't a word that comes into the English language until the mid 19th century. So we're already using a little bit of a back formation by putting it on Austin's writings for some reason, you know, for some. Proto feminist might be a better word for that. For that reason. But I think there is definitely, as Claudia's work so expertly points out, the unconventional woman, the woman taking risks in a very conservative social setting during. During war, post revolution, during a time when civil liberties are constricted. You know, Austen is doing something kind of wonderful, outrageous, and progressive with. Especially with her women characters.

D (11:24)

Elizabeth Bennet, you know, says at one point, I am resolved to act in that manner that will constitute my own happiness. Without reference to you or to anyone so wholly unconnected to me. Gina will constitute my own happiness.

A (11:40)

Austin knew she'd done something remarkable. You know, she, in her letters, privately referred to Elizabeth Bennet as delightful, a creature as ever appeared in print that is not quiet, modest, simple, absolute confident, and recognizing that she'd done something incredible.

D (11:58)

One thing you can reproach Austen for is not creating a character who is herself, you know, not creating an unmarried character who is actually stands apart. So, you know, her heroine, who's most, you know, delightful, is still the heroine who gets married. So if you want to criticize the extent of her feminism, you know, you can say that she didn't choose to represent someone outside of them.

C (12:29)

How loud a person was she about living her truth, or was she largely hiding from society's judgment at that time?

A (12:37)

I hope it doesn't have to be an either or, because, you know, I would consider myself an introvert. And I still do a lot of public speaking.

C (12:44)

You know, I think.

A (12:45)

I think often as a writer, probably was used to spending a lot of hours alone. So in that sense, maybe she was introverted. But in her letter, she talks about loving to go to parties. You know, I've been really interested lately in coming up with biographical examples of her hanging out with people we would never expect her to be with. International spies, opera divas, an aunt who was accused of shoplifting. She didn't live some small, quiet, simple life.

D (13:13)

I don't know why posterity is so interested in making her into a kind of boring, unreal person when she is intimately interesting person. I mean, she does live. She loved London, but, you know, she does live in a village, and that scale of a village may seem to make her. Make her small.

A (13:39)

I think one of her early biographers, her brother, yeah. Talked about her as having a. Lived a life of no event. And this did her no favors because he basically tried to make her seem smaller, probably to protect her reputation, her polite reputation, or his. Or his. Well corrected. But yeah, I think we own or do it with her so often in characterizing her as mild. And I'm really interested in pushing our perceptions and pushing the dial more toward wild. She did plenty of things that were wild for her era. And, you know, I think Claudia's right. She doesn't give us a female heroine who's a writer. She could have, some did. And she doesn't give us unconventional endings. But many of her married characters are miserable examples of what it means to be in a couple, and surely that means something.

B (14:33)

She never made much money in terms of income for the books. Many of the books were published posthumously. So did she understand any kind of contemporary success?

A (14:46)

I mean, if you have the Prince Regent asking you to dedicate a novel to him and he's a fan of yours and knows that you're the author and inviting you to his home to meet with his librarian, that's a kind of arrival. That's not. I'm toiling away in a small village and nobody's noticed me. That is, the Prince Regent has noticed you and thinks you're great. So I think we overdo it when we talk about her anonymity or her lack of success. Her books went through multiple editions, several of them, and she knew by the time she died at age 41 in 1817 that she'd achieved something. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, she used by a Lady on the title page, but she only did that once. Each time afterward, she let her readership follow her. So Pride and Prejudice was published as by the author of Sense and Sensibility. And each one afterward listed the previous novel she'd written. She wanted a following, otherwise she wouldn't have done that. I think we overdo the extent to which we imagine her as having died.

D (15:51)

Of people in the note knew who wrote Pride and Prejudice. I mean, I do think that Austin's family appreciated her, except maybe for the rich son who was sort of adopted out of the family. There's some indication that there was tension.

A (16:06)

Yeah. And she had a lot of encouragement from her father. Her father, the Reverend George Austin, took one of her early drafts, we think, of Pride and Prejudice, and tried to get it published on her behalf as her agent. And they rejected it by Return of the Post. And she would have been published a lot earlier in her life if that had gone through, but that was with the encouragement of her family. So again, I think we overdo it when we say this very literate, artsy, theatrical, musical family didn't encourage her. They absolutely encouraged her genius.

B (16:38)

How did she get published?

A (16:40)

I think you had a product like now, and you tried to find somebody to bring it to market for you. And it was common for women authors to employ a brother or a father or someone else on their behalf to shop it. And we don't know exactly why Thomas Edgerton became her publisher. He was known for military titles. So we think it's possible that there were some connections either to those brothers, early periodical deloitterer, or to her brother Henry's military connections that might have led Egerton to bite. But she took the best deal and she traded out and her publishers. And in her later career she ended up with John Murray, one of the most literary important publishers of her day. He definitely negotiated with her. Overpriced. She wanted £150 for it, so she gave it a higher value than 10 for sure. And he said they settled at 110. And she makes a comment about the roguishness and these kinds of things about how publishers negotiate. But 110 was still no small amount of money. Again, a clerk would have made about £50. That's right. So now she's in a much higher stratosphere with how much she's getting even for that first novel.

B (17:51)

She never married. Tell me about Thomas Lefroy.

D (17:54)

I actually don't like this question. You can.

A (17:59)

Again, I think the reason scholars don't like this question is because we don't ask it in the same way for Shakespeare or Dickens. Right. You know, I think we might know about Shakespeare and the second best bed to his will. You know, we might know that detail. But so much interest in Was Jane Austen ever in love? Because how could you write these novels, these great novels of courtship, if you weren't yourself? In love or weren't married. So, you know, I just want to bracket the question by saying that it's a evergreen question. People have been asking these questions since the 19th century. Was she in love? Who was she in love with? If so. So one of the theories is that she was in love early in her life with Tom Lefroy, who was visiting and was related to a local family. And we know from her letters that she flirted with him. I mean, she. She talks about it. You know, she talks about it in her letters, having flirted outrageously with this young man that she was clearly attracted to. In more recent years, it's been spun into fictional stories. The book that became the movie Becoming Jane, the Book.

C (19:01)

And I would like to say that I think the reason that we long for this is because Elizabeth Bennet was such a complex character, and she met her match. She met her intellectual match, and she met her, you know, a man who was going to be as much trouble as she was. And they worked perfectly together. And I think all of us long for that. For Jane Austen.

A (19:19)

Yeah, I think that's a beautiful way of putting it, Kate. We long for it, but that's about us. I think, you know, Elizabeth Bennet is a great character for modeling of just refusals. I think, you know, we focus on the acceptance, but in fact, the refusals are what make her life and make that book. So if Austin herself accepted and then refused a proposal of marriage, to me, that is also meaningful.

D (19:45)

Austin also knew that marriage would mean she wouldn't be a novelist. Hint would mean, you know, being a mother, loving her children, perhaps dying in childbirth.

A (19:58)

Yeah, that had to at least have been a year.

D (20:00)

Yeah. And that's doing what clearly gave her so much pleasure. You can't read one of Austen's sentences without feeling the pleasure in that composition. I think all we're trying to say is that Jane Austen's life isn't the life of Lamp. You know, it was missing something. She had something that we're awfully glad she had, and that also was a pleasure.

C (20:28)

Do we have any indication that Jane Austen had a favorite of her own works? And why?

A (20:34)

I think, again, we just have these 160 letters, but it seems to me that it must have been Pride and Prejudice. I think, you know, she refers to, again, to Elizabeth Bennet as. As delightful a creature as ever appeared in print. And she makes this joke that I think is often misunderstood. You know, she refers to the novel as light, bright and sparkling, and she says it wants shade.

D (20:56)

She says it's Too light.

A (20:58)

Thank you. Thank you, Claudia. Of course, gathering that intensifier. Too light, bright and sparkly. I read this as a joke. I don't read this as her actually being serious, that she should have changed the book.

D (21:11)

She wanted to do something different.

A (21:13)

Yeah. And she did end up doing something different. Next.

D (21:15)

Yeah, right.

A (21:16)

I think she. When she says, I'm going to add a paragraph or a section of solemn, specious nonsense, I think that's when she tips her hand. She had no intention of adding a section of solemn, specious nonsense. So to me, that is the one that, from what we can tell, she recognized as her greatest, and it's certainly been the most enduring. Now, we haven't talked a lot about Emma, but that is the one that is often recognized by critics as her masterpiece. And it was in the 19th century, the most taught. It was actually the first staged.

D (21:47)

Doesn't it say something about Austen that she said that in Emma she created a heroine that no one will much like but myself, that there was something rare and maybe not completely likable and Emma that nevertheless she really loved?

B (22:01)

Well, I thought Emma was by far the most complex character that I encountered.

D (22:05)

In all of her novels, certainly the most complex novel.

A (22:08)

And it's been compared to detective fiction, and I think that's for good reason. The way the narrator and the voice of the heroine are so intermingled and melded in what we call free indirect discourse is masterful. It's absolutely masterful.

D (22:23)

And this is something about Austen, too, that a lot of people said about her and a lot of people have disliked about her, is that there is a kind of chilliness.

B (22:33)

Yeah.

D (22:35)

You know, that she doesn't like. She doesn't like the display of emotion and her novels. She doesn't represent gooey proposals. You know, when Knightley proposes and what did she say? The narrator says, just what she ought to. Instead, a lady always does. She doesn't give us intimacy. And intimacy is very hard to narrate in novels. You know, the worst parts of Charlotte Bronte are when they're saying gooey things to each other. Austin retreats from displays of intimacy.

C (23:09)

Deveney and Claudia, if you would stick around, we have some Jane Austen centered, rapid fire questions for you after the break.

E (23:23)

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B (25:29)

Devonie Loesser Claudia Johnson what's the most obscure fact that you can think of about Jane Austen?

D (25:35)

Oh dear, I'm not prepared for this one.

A (25:38)

Okay, how about this one? It's often said that her authorship wasn't revealed until the author's note and the biographical notice in Pride and Prejudice. Her authorship was actually revealed in the obituaries that appeared about her immediately after her death.

D (25:54)

Claudia okay, I'm thinking it's not an obscure fact, but she is buried in Winchester Cathedral and there is a huge stained glass window commemorating her. Not just the various plaques, but the gravestone itself, sort of confer upon her an almost secular saint status that she's not just an author to be loved and enjoyed, but to be venerated.

A (26:24)

Three of her brothers, it's come to light through my research, participated publicly in the anti slavery movement. They were public activists and I think that deserves to be better known.

C (26:35)

Claudia, what was the age in which you discovered Austen and what was your first novel? And then, same question to you, Debeney Okay.

D (26:42)

Unlike many young women, I did not read her when I was young. I read her when I had my wisdom teeth pulled out. And so I read Sense and Sensibility in bed as I recovered. And like many people, you read Jane Austen when you're sick and when you get better, you're done with the novel. So for me, Jane Austen wasn't about marriage ever. It was about sisters. It was about, you know, relationships.

A (27:08)

My mother put copy of Pride and Prejudice in front of me when I was around 13. It took me a few times starting it to really get it and like to understand the humor. But once I did, I was hooked. And I only learned after she became my favorite author, after I got a PhD in British literature, that my mother had never actually read Pride and Cr. Oh my gosh. Very devastating to me. I thought it ruined my story. And so I realized that my mother, who did not have the benefit of a college education, I was a first generation college student, gave me Jane Austen because she knew it was what an educated girl should read. And we so often think of Austen's novels as economically aspirational or maritally aspirational. My tradition is that this was intellectually aspirational, and I now love that story for that reason. But Jane Austen be handed down from mothers to daughters who wanted their daughters to be smart.

B (28:02)

The Detroit question obviously is what's your favorite Austen novel? But I want to know what's your least favorite?

D (28:08)

I'm going to be really outrageous and say Pride and Prejudice.

C (28:12)

Really?

D (28:13)

Really?

B (28:14)

How come?

D (28:15)

Because I'm so sick of that being the sort of Ur Austin novel, when in fact it is not the Ur Austin novel, fabulous though it is. It's also the least typical. So I think Austen would be better understood if people actually read the the other novels with the devotion they give to this. So it's partly a resentful answer.

C (28:37)

Claudia, if you could have dinner with Jane Austen right now, what would you ask her or say to her?

D (28:42)

I'm not sure Jane Austen would want to have dinner with me. This is a question. No, I'm really serious. Because it's a hallmark of Janites that they actually consider that they have a personal relationship to Jane Austen and fact that they can call her Jane, you know, And I have never felt anything but courteous. I've never felt that intimacy. I don't think she'd like talking to me.

A (29:09)

I would love to know more about how she imagined herself as an author. She has a beautiful line from her letters. Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked. And in a relationship to other novel writers.

D (29:21)

I would love to hear her be.

A (29:23)

A more direct literary critic of what those looked like to her.

D (29:28)

I actually truly wouldn't presume to be in her company. And I said that out of a genuine modesty. Really, I'd be a little afraid of her, as I think people likely would have been.

B (29:42)

Thank you both. It's a treat to talk to you, but the most fun is to watch you talk to each other. Yeah, exactly. And get tickled by each other.

A (29:49)

Thank you. Charlene Fate. Thank you very much.

B (29:51)

Thank you both. It was wonderful. Deviny Loesser and Claudia Johnson, thank you ever so much, both of you and all of you who are listening. If you want to sing Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Jane. It is her 250th natal day, and I. Well, as I say, Emma's my favorite. Mansfield park is my least favorite. But they're all lovely. And Kate and I actually visited her, her home or where the Jane Austen Museum is. And she would sit at a little table next to a window at the front of the house as you come in. I think it was just to the right of the front door. And there she wrote.

C (30:29)

Yeah. And I learned so much from this interview, like, from the number of times that we would ask a question and they would go, gee, that's not quite true, or that's been greatly exaggerated, or, you're flat out wrong. It speaks to, I think, how many misconceptions there are about Jane Austen out there and how she gets lumped in with other writers when that's maybe not. I mean, she was starkly unique for her time, and many of the myths about her aren't true. And so I loved being able to sit down and talk with two scholars and have them go, no, you're wrong, and, no, that's wrong. And, you know, it may sound like we're getting our wrist slapped, but the more I get my wrist slapped, the more I learn. I love when I can learn as well as wax rhapsodic about one of my favorite authors. What a great deal.

B (31:13)

So do write in. Let us know who you think we should feature in future weeks when we don't have a book that we both like and we will find a couple of scholars. I love doing this. I love talking to them.

C (31:23)

Yeah, I do, too.

B (31:24)

And learning.

C (31:24)

I think it'd be fun to do Lewis Carroll, who I love Alice in Wonderland, and I love through the Looking Glass. I get the sense he was a little weird. And so I think maybe I'd like to learn a little bit more about Lewis Carroll, but you know what? We will take suggestions, anything from the audience. Throw something at us and we'll do it.

B (31:41)

So let me catch you up on who makes this podcast possible and then a final thought, a coda in effect, from Deveney Loesser and from Claudia Johnson. The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie is a joint production of Good Morning America and ABC Audio. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions and our Executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make special mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg and Ariel Chester of ABC Good Morning America and Josh Cohan of ABC Audio. You can follow us and rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you if you like to find any of the books mentioned on this podcast, you can find them listed in the episode description My favorite Austen.

D (32:24)

Quote I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible. And I actually think that that is said by Katherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. And I think Austen actually does write well enough to be unintelligible and think they understand her and don't understand her because she speaks well enough to be unintelligible.

A (32:49)

My students often say, you know, why do you read Jane Austen? Or why should I read Jane Austen? And I tell them, you know, these are not books that tell you how to live, but they are definitely books that allow you to explore what it means for an individual to lead a meaningful life in a world that's deeply unfair.

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