← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
758 Jane Austen in 41 Objects (with Kathryn Sutherland) | 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (#5 Greatest Book of All Time)
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- [00:02]
A
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey folks, it's Jack. Let's talk about comfort. What does that word mean for you? It might be the comfort of being well rested. No tossing and turning, just deep, refreshing rest with support for your back and good organic materials like wool and latex to keep you cool. No more sweating at night. Trust the wisdom of Mother Nature. Comfort might also mean putting your money to good use, investing in a product that's smart for your health, your home and the planet. That's where Avocado Green Mattress comes in. It's an eco friendly, health conscious choice from a company that values transparency and ethical practices. It's the right mix of luxury and sustainability. Better for you and better for the planet. Head to avocadogreenmattress.com today and check out their mattress and bedding sale. Avocado Dream of Better. Think your lashes have hit their limit? Discover limitless length and full volume with Maybelline Sky High Mascara. The Flex Tower Brush bends to volumize and extend every single lash from root to tip. And the lightweight bamboo infused formula makes lashes feel weightless. Now in eight bold shades so you can take your lashes to new heights every day. Visit maybelline.com to shop Sky High mascara now. Hello. 250 years after Jane Austen's birth, we're still searching for clues as to who she was and what she's meant for the world. She left so early at the young age of 41. An author who has looked for her in objects will be here today. Plus, we look at Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, the number five book on our list of the 25 greatest books of all time. That's coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Let's get straight to our conversation. Jane Austen, of course, needs no introduction. She's about as beloved as any writer in English, this side of Shakespeare and maybe more. So we find her endlessly fascinating. So it's worthwhile to take a new, innovative approach to telling her biography as Katherine Sullivan has done. Let's hear from her now. Then stick around for our look at six things to know about 100 Years of Solitude. Okay. Joining me now is Katharine Sutherland, senior research fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. She's here to discuss her book, Jane Austen in 41 Objects. Katherine Sutherland, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [03:00]
B
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
- [03:03]
A
So let's Start with you and your history with Jane Austen and her works. Do you remember the first time you read one of her books?
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B
Yes, I do. Like many of us, I discovered Jane Austen as a teenage reader at school, and I was given Northanger Abbey when I was 13. And I still actually think this is the best of her novels to give to a new young reader.
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A
Right, right. That's interesting, because so many people come in through Pride and Prejudice.
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B
They do, don't they?
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A
Yeah. What makes Northanger Abbey? What gives that the nod for you?
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B
Well, I think because Heroine is only 16 years old, so she's also a teenager. So she was only a couple of years older than me when I read the book. And she was a girl who was still trying to find her way in the world. She was reading pretty silly stuff and she was, you know, making mistakes. And so I found her very easy to identify with.
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A
Yeah, right. And so after that, did you seek out more of Jane Austen or did you take a break?
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B
Well, actually, having said that, I found her easy to identify with. I did. I wasn't generally greatly taken with Jane Austen at that age. I was drawn to a rather different literary tradition. I was more interested in adventure stories, in myths and legends and stories with plots. Stories with plots. To be honest, when I first read Jane Austen, I couldn't kind of get it. I thought, well, what's happening in these novels? Nothing very exciting is happening. So it took me a while before I began to appreciate her.
- [04:52]
A
You know, it's funny, it reminds me of somehow my parents wound up with a bunch of books they got at an auction, or someone had given them a box of books or something, and old books. And my sister and I picked up this. We were teenagers and we picked up this copy of Maupassant, and we couldn't believe that it had been published. And we were telling our parents, you know, and they said, well, you know, he's considered to be a classic short story writer. And we were insistent that he had no idea how to write stories because his endings just tapered off and nothing happened. And, you know, we were waiting for the big surprise or the. And it just was a totally different sensibility that just didn't resonate with us at that age.
- [05:41]
B
Exactly, exactly. That's how I felt about Jane Austen, you know, that all that really is happening in those novels is, you know, characters perhaps drink a cup of tea together, they gossip a little, they go shopping, they maybe prepare to go to a ball. But, you know, you're thinking, well, yeah, but what's really going to happen. What's really going to happen? Yeah.
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A
Right.
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B
So it did take me a while to appreciate what she's doing in the novel.
- [06:08]
A
Where's the ogre? Where's the.
- [06:11]
B
Exactly.
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A
But at some point, I'm sure it kind of took you, as it takes a lot of readers, and especially when they're mature, you realize how much is going on and interior lives of these people, it starts to become so dramatic. It's almost. And suspenseful. It feels like you adopt the stakes that Jane Austen is providing.
- [06:39]
B
I think that's right. That's right. And I think you're right about the interior life. And of course, when I was younger, I didn't see that, but that's one of her great contributions, is that she develops the psychological novel.
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A
Yeah. And you just live and die with something as small as a remark or.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Character can just shatter someone's world. And it's so heartbreaking and it's so gripping.
- [07:06]
B
Yes, yes.
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A
So at some point, you started reading her novels, and were you also aware of Jane Austen's life, or did you just read the books with the name on the COVID and not knowing much about Jane Austen?
- [07:19]
B
Well, of course, when I was given Northanger Abbey, what I was also given, because it comes with it, is that short biography, which is prefixed to Northanger Abbey, written by her brother Henry, within months of her death. So I read that pretty early on, but I was aware that this was a description of someone who could never possibly have existed, because it's much more of a hagiography than a biography. It's an idealized image. He describes her as faultless, never uttering either a hasty, a silly or a severe expression, he says, and as having neither the hope of fame nor profit from her novels. And even as a teenager, I was aware that this was highly unlikely as a description of a novelist who'd make such a big impact on the world. And you just have to read a couple of her letters to realize that she's uttering hasty and severe expressions all the time. So I was aware that there was this kind of family description of her which probably didn't match any human being who had ever lived. And I must admit that intrigued me. So, years later, I actually worked on an edition of James Edward Austin Leigh's pioneering biography of 1870. It's called A Memoir of Jane Austen, which. Which still is the source book for all the trade biographies that have subsequently been written. And I became interested in how that had been built up. This is the next generation of the Family. He's publishing this biography of his aunt in 1870. And of course, he's remembering his aunt over 50 years because she died over 50 years before. So he's elderly, he's in his 60s. He's consulting his sisters Caroline and Anna, who had lived with Jane Austen as young women, and they're coming up with this picture. But it's so distorted by their own failing memories and also distorted by the fact that so much of the evidence had by then been suppressed. If Jane Austen ever wrote diaries, none of them had survived. Her sister Cassandra had destroyed most of her letters, and Sy became interested in. In unpicking their rather again, still hagiographic reading of their aunt and trying to discover just how the family had tried to manage and control Jane Austen's public image.
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A
Right.
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B
I've always had a sort of critical approach to biography, if you like.
- [10:07]
A
Well, that is a nice transition to your book because several of the things that you've just mentioned seem like a kind of corrective would be to look at her life through objects. I mean, we. We do have this image of St. Jane and the family with their memories and. And so on, but when we're. We're wondering what a person really was like, if we just see the things that they were, you know, the chairs they were sitting on and the objects that they owned and the things that they had in their life, it's a way of bringing them back down to earth and saying, this is not a. An ethereal person who lived among the celestial spheres or something, but this is a person who was walking around and was brushing her hair and was doing all the things that we might expect someone in the real world to do. And also, when you talk about kind of a lack of evidence, this is evidence. This is the kind of evidence that, that you can put your hands on or look at in a picture instead of the kind of evidence like a failing memory or an anecdote that may be told thirdhand or that kind of thing.
- [11:17]
B
Yeah. Or even a disguise, because they are trying to disguise many aspects of their aunt. They don't want to accept that she was a professional, ambitious woman who wanted a life of her own and wanted to change the novel and change our understanding of how things work. So they were very much pulling back from that. And of course, she was a Regency writer. She belonged to an age where people were more open. They were Victorians. Her biographer was a clergyman as well. And so they had a more reduced and moralized sensibility, I think, than. Than she did. So they're very coy about what they're prepared to say.
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A
That's interesting because I tend to think of the kinds of things that a Victorian writer might want to cover up, might be sort of more on the moral side or a scandalous kind of thing. But it sounds like they maybe were also trying to tamp down a sense of ambition or a sense of certitude, which I wasn't aware of.
- [12:24]
B
I think that's very much what they try to do. And one of the things that James Edwards suggests is that really what she was most skilled at with her hands is not writing novels, but sewing shirts, and that somehow, you know, it's in between her little habits of household sewing, the things that she's doing for other people, for other members of the family. It's only in the moments when she's free of those kind of domestic chores that she actually turns to writing. And he says, well, the writing just came naturally to her. You know, there was no, as it were, sense of conscious sense of ambition, which is clearly untrue.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that seems to do such a disservice to who she likely really was, because she was. Probably couldn't wait to put down the sewing in order to, well, I'm sure return to her manuscripts.
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B
Exactly, exactly.
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A
Ah, okay. So was this your idea to look at Jane Austen's life through objects, or did a publisher come to you?
- [13:30]
B
No, no, it was my idea. What I wanted to do in the book was I wanted to address a paradox, really, that of all writers, Jane Austen is among the few that we most ardently wish to know and even to possess. We're very possessive about Jane Austen. So little survives for us to base this on.
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A
Right.
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B
So 41 objects is a kind of ironic biography, quite deliberately so, summarizing a life in 41 objects. Of course, 41 is the number of years she lived, but I'm also conscious that 41 is a prime number as well. And that was important to me too. But summarizing a life in 41 objects is a way of acknowledging that no life can be fully known or recorded, that all our encounters with another life are selective and partial.
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A
Right.
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B
So at the same time, I was thinking that objects are, in a sense, the most tangible signs of possession. Objects help us get a handle on someone or help us feel close to somebody.
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A
Right.
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B
So it's also a kind of biography in reverse. Each object has its own little biography, and Jane Austen's life, as it were, becomes a moment in theirs, Just a moment when the object cuts across Jane Austen. And for a moment we can catch a glimpse of her. But essentially I'm working with the idea that everybody's unknowable.
- [15:06]
A
Right, okay, so let's talk about the objects. And in looking at what we know of her possessions, she was, I guess, would you say she was sort of upper middle class? I'm just wondering.
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B
Yes.
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A
Yeah. So how do her possessions and just the number and the expense of them compare with what an upper middle class woman of today might own? Does it strike you that she, she only had a handful of things compared with what we might expect for a woman today?
- [15:40]
B
Absolutely. I mean, her possessions are far fewer than a woman of her class would own today. She lived in what social historians would call the proto consumer age. So it's just the beginning of that explosion of materiality and possessions. And it's that time when going shopping acquires a new significance. You know, it lies somewhere between leisure and a form of work. In a previous generation, shopping was kind of going to market for things that you absolutely needed in order to live. And now it's become much more a leisure activity. And it's something that gives gentry women like Jane Austen, upper middle class women, as you say, a kind of sphere of public agency. It's a way shopping becomes a way of structuring the day in a Jane Austen novel. You know, if you think about it in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, the young Bennet girls, they walk most days, we're told, to the milliner's shop in Meryton in the town nearby. Or the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility, who are seen shopping just off Bond street, that fashionable area of Mayfair in London, where they happen to bump into Robert Ferrers, who's lingering over a toothpick case.
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A
Right.
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B
Or, you know, Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith, who go shopping in Highbury at their local shop called Ford's. And this is a moment, and I think Jane Austen is one of the first to capture this, the idea that shopping can be of structural significance in a woman's day. But of course, at the end of the 18th century, when Jane Austen is born, Linda, London has become the kind of the emporium of the world. All kinds of goods are beginning to be funneled through the ports of London. So, you know, all kinds of things like spices and perfumes and silks and muslins, things that Jane Austen herself, of course, is interested in. But yeah, in terms of possessions, of course, the actual things she owned, she will have owned much less than a middle class woman of today.
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A
Now we Sometimes think of shopping as being kind of a double edged sword, so to speak. Or we think of it as people will use it as almost therapeutic, but then they'll regret acquiring too many, you know, obtaining too many objects. And why do I, why do I have so many pairs of shoes and, you know, now I got to throw all this out and what am I doing and, and is there any of that in Jane Austen or were they a little more level headed about what they could afford and what it meant to buy things, that it wasn't the kind of thing you would frivolously do.
- [18:31]
B
There's a lot of information about shopping in Jane Austen's letters. In fact, often when she's say, in London or in Bath, she's writing home and she's been sent on errands by members of the family to buy new gloves or trimmings for a bonnet or to buy cloth for the making of clothing. So there is that sense of her entering and being in and enjoying a material world for sure. But of course she had a very limited income most of her life. It was only in the last couple of years of her life that she had any real independent money. So you don't have the sense of her throwing it around. On the other hand, one of the items in the book, in 41 objects, is a really high end, fashionable item. And it's a pelisse, which is an outer coat, a close fitting garment. And we know that she owned this item. It's still in England in a collection of the Hampshire Cultural Trust in fact. And the evidence of this item shows that it really was quite expensive that, that time. And she probably bought it around 1814 when money was coming in from her novels, profits from the novels. And it was an item that would be equivalent to somebody buying say a costume from Chanel nowadays or Vivienne Westwood or Versace. So it really is a high end object. But generally speaking, her actual income, the money that she had to spend, was modest, so she wasn't throwing it around. If the novels can provide evidence to go on, there is a sense that she sees having money of her own as a kind of limited form of independence and also of identity. There's a wonderful passage in Mansfield park where Fanny Price has returned to her birth family in Portsmouth and we know that for the first time in her life she has money in her pocket to spend. And the narrator says of Fanny, who is setting out money on a subscription to the library and buying a few luxury food items. And the narrator says, wealth is luxurious and Daring. And I think that's rather nice. It's. She also says that it gives Fanny a sense of being a person in her own right at last.
- [21:11]
A
Okay, so for an object to be included in your book, did you have any criteria other than that it would tell a story about a particular moment in Jane Austen's life or give some sort of aspect, you know, something that reflected some part of her? Did you say that it needed to be something that she owned or something that we could put on display today, or was there any other criteria that you used as part of your selection process?
- [21:43]
B
Well, one criterion certainly was something she owned. So there's a muslin shawl in there that we know she actually made herself. And wall. There's a book in there that we know she owned. But there are also places that she visited. The Carbot Lime Regis, number 50 Albemarle street, her publisher's house. Residence, the house of John Murray II, who is her publisher. I've also got in there items that place her at a particular moment. So an item that she didn't own. For example, a theatre bill for a performance, but we know that she went to that specific performance. So the theatre bill was for a play she attended at Covent Garden on the 15th of September, 1813. So that theatre bill places her there very precisely. She mentions going to the theatre that very day in a letter. So items like that. But I've also got objects that represent our conversation with her. So, for example, a plate that was designed by Vanessa bell in the 1930s, and Mr. Darcy's wet shirt from 1995. Because it seems to me a biography is always a conversation. It's conversation between a subject, Jane Austen, and the biographer, the person writing it, who has their own interests and opinions. And one of the things I also wanted to address was when does a life end? You know, in a sense, an afterlife. And Jane Austen's had so much afterlife. An afterlife is part of a life.
- [23:30]
A
Yeah, Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Katherine Sutherland. Hey, folks, it's Jack. Headed for the chaos of opening presents. And I want to tell you about a gift that will be a favorite long after the wrapping paper is gone. Aura frames. We got one for my parents a few years ago, and it is still lighting up their living room with pictures of their beloved grandkids. It's easy to set up. You can preload it with photos before it ships, and then you can add to those photos all year long, right from your phone, courtesy of the handy Aura app. For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best selling Carver mat frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code literature at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code literature. This deal is exclusive to listeners, and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays and support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Hey, folks, it's the holidays, which means you need energy and a robust immune system. Let me tell you about my morning routine. I exercise. I put a scoop of AG1 powder into a water bottle, I shake it up, and I'm good to go. AG1 Next Gen is a whole body health program that contains more vitamins and minerals than ever before, and it's clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps. And if you use my link, you'll get the newest formula and best price available for AG1 next gen right now. That's right. AG1 is running their best offer ever. If you head to drinkag1.com literature, you'll get the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2, an AG1 flavor sampler, and you'll get to try their new sleep supplement, AGZ for free, which has been a game changer for my nightly routine. That's drinkag1.com literature for $126 in free gifts. And for new subscribers. Close your eyes, exhale, Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
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B
Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
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A
And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry.
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B
Namaste.
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A
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. Okay, we're back. So, Catherine, what kind of research did you do? Did you have all of these objects in mind and you were just ticking through them, or did you go out and reread the letters or dig into the novels or talk to anybody or how did you come up with your list of 41?
- [27:12]
B
Many of the objects, in fact, almost came to hand because they're part of the collection at Jane Austen's house, which is the literary museum based in the house in Chawton where she wrote and published her novels. And I'M fortunate enough to be a patron of the house, so I had access to a lot of the objects, so many came to me that way. But others, yes, you're right. It is just through reading her letters, through looking at her life in the round, thinking about objects that I believed were significant in her life. Or, yes, objects that can connect in some way with the novels, but they also needed to be objects that I felt could be, as it were, not just moments where we touch Jane Austen, but moments where the imagination can fly off and develop something more. So, yes, an object grounded in the facts of her life, but an object that, as it were, has wings and can fly.
- [28:17]
A
Yeah. Do you have an example of an object like that, of an object that triggers new imaginations on the part of the observer?
- [28:26]
B
Well, I could tell you what my favorite object was, because that, in a way, gets at something I was trying to bring out in the book. And my favorite object is a flower spray, and it's a spray of artificial flowers that is actually what's known as a found object. It was discovered in the rafters of an outbuilding of Chawton Cottage, which is now Jane Austen's house, in 1978. And it's faded and it's fragile and it's a spray of artificial flowers. But it can be dated quite precisely to around 1800.
- [29:08]
A
Wow.
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B
Now, this item has absolutely no family provenance, it has no direct attachment to Jane Austen, but because it was found inside a building that is now classed as a museum, it has to be meticulously recorded and conserved. That's one of the duties of a museum, that whatever you find inside the space has to be conserved. So we had to record and conserve it. But what intrigued me about this object is that Jane Austen wrote a letter from Bath in June 1799, and she's shopping for bonnet decorations and she spent too much money already on other things. So she says, I wanted to get fruit, artificial fruit, to decorate a bonnet, but she said I didn't have enough money to buy plums and cherries. But then she says in the letter, but I have got enough money to buy a flower spray. And she says, and I do think, on reflection, that flowers grow more naturally out of the head than fruit, which, of course, funny story, but this whole story and the connection, or possible connection with the flower spray struck me as kind of pointing to the absolute limits of biography, where, as it were, imagination takes over, because we can't be sure that this object belonged to Jane Austen. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But it's one of those objects, you know, that is on the very edge, and I like that for that. It appeals to the imagination.
- [30:50]
A
Yeah. And just looking at the letter where she's writing to Cassandra, who had wanted her to look for hat decorations.
- [31:00]
B
Yes.
- [31:00]
A
Yeah. I'll just read the paragraph here, because it shows some of the detail with which she's passing along information about these objects. She says flowers are very much worn and fruit is still more the thing. Eliz has a bunch of strawberries, and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums and apricots. A plum or green gauge would cost three shillings, cherries and grapes about five, I believe. But this is at some of the dearest shops. My aunt has told me of a very cheap one near Walcott Church, to which I shall go in quest of something for you. I don't know that I've ever written an email with that much detail about something that I was going to buy for someone else with, you know, breaking down the prices like that, and kind of conveying, well, here's what the styles are today and here's some information about ones that I've seen. So it really is kind of an incredible moment in a letter that gives us some insight into this, Jane's mindset and her relationship with Cassandra.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, it's wonderful. And she does that regularly, doesn't she? Because when she's shopping for fabric for a dress, she will describe in detail, you know, how much a yard of fabric might cost and the quality of it and so on. She is, in that sense, a very good shopper, and she knows a bargain when she sees one, that's for sure.
- [32:24]
A
Right, right. Which, as you alluded to earlier, given the context of the age, it's not just a character trait, but it shows a kind of agency that was being taken by these women.
- [32:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [32:43]
A
Were there any objects that were unexpected for you as you were doing this, where you thought, oh, wow, that's a. That's a surprise, but I will definitely want to include this one.
- [32:55]
B
Well, the flower spray was that. Actually, it was that object, because I hadn't expected to come across this. And one of the starting points for writing this biography was me actually going through the list, item by item, of everything we have at Jane Austen's house. And there are. You know, it's an extraordinary range of things which both belong to her, the period of her life, and also come right up to the present day. For instance, we've got some dolls that are fashioned from characters in films, you know, like Clueless we have clueless dolls in our collection. So there were all kinds of objects that I could choose from, but I made my own path through them, as every biographer does. Every biographer has a plethora of items they can work with, and you choose your own route through.
- [33:48]
A
So we talked about the Jane Austen that was prepared for us by her family. What kind of a person would you say emerges from the 41 objects that you've selected? How would you characterize the Jane Austen who had, you know, possessed these objects and encountered these objects that we find in your book?
- [34:08]
B
Well, I do hope that the objects offer real points of connection with a remarkable woman. That's one thing I wanted to do, but. But I was very conscious that she is a remarkable woman who pioneered a novel of everyday events. And also she pioneered, as we mentioned right at the beginning, she pioneered the psychological novel in which domestic space and ordinary objects become a kind of theater for female self expression. So I was very conscious of that as I was writing it and as I was choosing the objects. A particular phrase I had in mind when I was writing the book is a phrase from Virginia Woolf, in fact, a description of women's rooms that she has in A Room of One's Own, the book that she wrote in 1929. And in it, Virginia Woolf says the very walls of rooms are permeated by women's creative force. And she says it's because women have spent centuries indoors. And so I was thinking that these objects, because of women's way of living, have a particular kind of resonance. And I was thinking very much about choosing domestic, ordinary objects as a way of linking to what Jane Austen is doing in the novel. But also, of course, objects which have this extra dimension as being a kind of having a kind of psychological resonance to I also. The other thing I had in mind, it kept coming into my head and I couldn't get rid of it, was the phrase from John Keats, the poet, in which he says, touch has a memory, which I think is a wonderful phrase. And somehow objects are tangible, they're touchable. Almost the sense that they contain something, some kind of essence. So I was thinking of that too. And the third thing I was thinking of was of my mother's death, actually, which happened a few years ago, but being aware that after she died, what we were left with was a pile of things, a pile of objects that represent a life. And so I was thinking of all these three things were interweaving really, as I was writing the book.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, I think we do have that feeling through Objects, which is. It seems unusual, but on the other hand, maybe it's natural. I heard this thing when I was a kid. I had this book, it was called A Book of Odd Facts. And they talked about a survey they had taken. And this would have been. This book probably was in the 70s, so not long after World War II, by comparison. And they did a survey of people and they said, if you had Hitler's sweater, would you try it on? And people said, no, absolutely not. And they said, okay, next question. What if we unraveled all of the yarn and then re knitted the sweater now? Would you try it on? And they said, no, absolutely not. And then they went, you know, a third step and said, what if we completely undid all of the yarn, boiled all the yarn, you know, dyed it a different color, and then re knitted it and gave it for you? Would you try it on? And people still said no. And it is this feeling of. We know when we try on clothes of someone else or when we pick up something that someone belonged to someone, we feel that person connected to that object. We feel a kind of connection to them. And even just looking at the photographs in your book, I can kind of feel that, and it almost feels sometimes almost intrusive that this is something that somebody had kind of intimate moments with or just, you know, were alone in the room with this or held this in their hand. And I can feel that. That closeness of that person to that object.
- [38:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. I hadn't heard about that book you described from your childhood. Would I wear Hitler's pullover? But, goodness, they're very powerful questions, aren't they?
- [38:22]
A
Yeah, right.
- [38:22]
B
Yeah. They do bring that sense of the tangibility and the power of an object into focus. Very much, Very much so. I also included. And one of the objects I included was an object Jane Austen would have had, but this wasn't it. And it's Marianne Knight's dancing slippers.
- [38:43]
A
Yes.
- [38:44]
B
Because I wanted to get at the idea that many of the things about a life, anyone's life, even a life that's well documented, cannot actually be captured, and yet they might have been very important in that life. We know that Jane Austen loved dancing. She includes a ball in every one of her novels. Right at the beginning of the family biographical tradition, Henry Austen, one of the things he records in that short biographical notice in Northanger Abbey is the fact that his sister loved dancing and excelled at it, yet none of her dancing slippers has survived. And the only reason this pair of Marianne Knights has survived. Marianne Knight was Jane Austen's niece, is that they were never worn, because the thing about dancing slippers is that they only survived for one evening's dancing because they're so fragile and delicate, and dancing at the time was such an energetic activity that an evening's wear would destroy them forever. And so I wanted to get at that idea that actually so much of our lives is fleeting and can't be recorded, and yet it might be one of the most powerful things about us.
- [40:04]
A
Right. Ah, okay. So do you think that someone. This is kind of an odd question, but do you think someone could have chosen 41 different objects and portrayed a completely different Jane Austen? Or do you think that there's enough overlap that if you get to a number like 41, you're kind of coming at a sort of truth about someone that it's. You know, unless they were deliberately trying to sabotage the project. But, I mean, do you think 41 is enough that it would. We get a pretty good sense of a person no matter which 41 objects you choose?
- [40:44]
B
You know, I actually think that is a really, really important and a good question, because I think every biography can be written differently. I do think of biographies as a bit like portraits. And we'd never expect. If there were four or five portraits of a person, we'd never expect them all to look the same. We'd accept that a portrait is a conversation between the painter and his subject or her subject. And I think the same is true of biography. It's conversation. It's a relationship between the biographer and the biographized, as it were, between a subject and a sitter. So I do think that somebody could have chosen 41 different objects. I mean, my sense is they probably would have chosen 20 the same as me, but I think they could, without being dishonest or distorting, have found a different 41 objects and come up with a person who looked slightly different. Yeah, for sure.
- [41:49]
A
When you mentioned the portrait, I just heard this amazing anecdote. I'm working on an episode on Gertrude Stein, and I heard the story of her sitting for a famous portrait that Picasso painted when she was. When they were young together. And she looked at it at the end and said, I don't understand. I don't like it. My face looks like a mask in this painting, and my face doesn't look like that. And Picasso said, it will.
- [42:22]
B
Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful. And the other person who's been so painted and every portrait looks different is the late Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Britain. And there's an astonishing range of portraits of Queen Elizabeth. And each one has a truth.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah, right. Okay, maybe we've already covered this, but I was wondering if you had any reflections on what we get out of looking at a life through objects that we wouldn't get from. From a straight biography or reading a collection of letters, for example. Have we covered that already? We've talked a lot about what we get from objects. Yeah.
- [43:07]
B
Yes, in a sense we have, but I think it's this tangibility, this sense of closeness because letters, of course, are almost always now when we have letters, we have them in printed form. We don't have them. I think if you had the actual documents, that's different because you have there something that is haptic, as it were.
- [43:30]
A
With the paper and the handwriting and the ink and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:35]
B
But you know, it's mediated. Whereas with objects you're getting perhaps as close as you can.
- [43:43]
A
Okay, last question. Did this project make you think about your own life as a set of objects?
- [43:49]
B
Of if you know, it didn't. And that's probably. That's probably a lack of imagination on my part. It made me think very much about. About the lives of people I'd lost. So it made me think about my mother's life. But yes, perhaps I should, you know, I'm sitting in my study at the moment surrounded by objects, perhaps I should think, which are the, you know, however many I would want to be remembered by.
- [44:14]
A
Yeah, yeah. Maybe you better throw some out in case some future biographer gets the wrong idea.
- [44:21]
B
Exactly. Exactly.
- [44:24]
A
Okay, let's leave things there. The book is called Jane Austen in 41 Objects. Katherine Sutherland, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [44:33]
B
Thank you. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
- [44:48]
A
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Okay, that was Catherine Sutherland. Let's turn now to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which took the world by storm when it was published in 1967. Telling the multigenerational story of the Buendias, a family who lives in the fictional town of Macondo in Colombia, the novel has been translated into 46 languages and has sold more than 50 million copies. It is also number five on our list of the greatest books of all time. But before I get to that list and this novel, people, I hope novels like this one make you think about traveling, and our discussion of Jane Austen might make you think of traveling, too. And I do want to share with you the news of our History of Literature podcast tour. Guess where we're headed? England, London, Oxford, and Bath. Yes, Bath, which is the stomping grounds of Mary Shelley and, even more famously, Jane Austen herself. You can travel with us and see some of these objects that Katherine was talking about by joining our tour scheduled for May of 2026. The last I heard, there were still two slots available. Learn more by emailing me at jackwilsonauthormail.com or masahico that's M A S A H I k o@johnshorestravel.com you can find those email addresses in our show notes or just contact us@historyofliterature.com we have several wonderful stops reserved, and we'll be dining at some very literary places, enjoying each other's company, and drawing inspiration from some of the greatest authors who have ever lived, from the time of Chaucer through Shakespeare, the 18th century, the age of Austen, the age of Dickens, the age of Woolf and beyond. Please do consider joining us for the trip. I would love to meet you in person and have you experience this tour alongside me and the rest of our small group of literary pilgrims. Okay, back to 100 Years of Solitude. Six quick hits in honor of the number five book fact number one. The inspiration arrived like lightning. Marquez, a journalist and sporadic writer of fiction, was in his car with his family on their way to a vacation in Acapulco. All of a sudden, I don't know why, I had this illumination on how to write the book. I had it so completely formed that right there I could have dictated the first Chapter word by word to a typist. End quote. He turned the car around, asked his wife to handle the family finances, and locked himself away for 18 months. He wrote every single day as he also smoked six, six packs of cigarettes a day. My goodness, that's something more than chain smoking, I think. You'd have to have a few cigarettes going at once, I would think. But in any case, it worked. The family, their finances were dwindling. Toward the end of that 18 months, they sold their car, then started selling household appliances so they could buy food and paper. Finally, he had to sell one last appliance for the postage to send the manuscript to a publisher. He would never be hungry again. Fifteen years later, he was a world famous author being awarded the Nobel Prize. Fact two, that final sale of appliances, the last appliance he sold for postage, only produced enough money to send half the manuscript. Marquez intended to send the first half to his publisher, which was all he could. He could only afford the stamps for that much. But he screwed up and he sent the second half of the manuscript instead. It hardly mattered. The publisher was so excited by what he read and so eager to read the first half that he contacted Marquez and paid for the postage himself for the other half of the book. Fact number three. How big was its reach? Well, it sold like hotcakes. It was popular with intellectuals as well as sex workers and blue collar laborers. It was read by everyone. It ushered in a new Latin American literary movement called El Boom. Quote. It was seen as the first book to unify the Spanish language literary culture long divided between Spain and Latin America, city and village, coloners and colonized. End quote. That was from Vanity Fair. In spite of its runaway success, Marquez once claimed that it was not the kind of book he himself would have ever read. If I hadn't written it, he said, I never would have read it. I don't read bestsellers. The book was so famous that a banana company, United Fruit, which served as a model for a kind of nasty company in the book, was forced to rebrand itself. Perhaps you know it today by its new name, Chiquita Banana. Fact number four. The book is famously an example of what's been called magical realism. One of the important things about magical realism, a phrase that was first coined in 1925 by a German art critic talking about a certain type of painting, is that there are two sides to it. Magical or supernatural things. Unbelievable events are described in a plain, realistic style, but also everyday reality is described in a heightened, magical way. That's the part we often Forget. In any case, Marques rejected the term. Everything I've written, he said, was based on something I've known, experienced, or heard before I was 8 years old. You only have to open the newspapers to see that extraordinary things happen to us every day. There's not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality. End quote. And indeed, sometimes things that seemed magical at the time were later found to be based on science. In the book, a plague of insomnia sets in on Macondo, and villagers start forgetting the words for everything, leading one of the buendias to start labeling everyday objects. Eight years after the book was published, a neurologist published an article describing this very condition in three of her patients, and it is now known as semantic dementia. 5. The legacy of Marquez's work stretched beyond Latin America. Perhaps most famously, Salman Rushdie was deeply affected by his reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and he drew upon its influence when writing his own magnum opus, Midnight's Children. After Marquez died, Rushdie told this story. About 20 years ago, I was in Mexico City having dinner with my friends, the writers Carmen Boyosa and Carlos Fuentes. At Carmen's house in Coyoacan. The name of Garcia Marquez came up, and Carlos, talking humorously about Gabo's gigantic presence in the world of Latin American letters, said, you know, it's now impossible for any of us to use the word solitude without somebody thinking we are making a reference to one hundred Years of Solitude. I'm really afraid that soon it will also become impossible to use the phrase 100 years. I asked if Garcia Marquez was in town. He was mainly living in Mexico City in those days, and Fuentes said, no, he's in Havana visiting his pal Fidel. I was disappointed because I had never met him. If he was here, we could have arranged a meeting, Fuentes said, but sadly, you lost out to Castro. Then he added, of all the writers in the world, it's crazy that you two have never met. And he got up and left the room. When he returned, he beckoned to me to follow him. There's a phone call for you, he said, and you really ought to take it. He had called Havana and told Garcia Marquez I was with him, and Gabo had agreed to talk to me. My spoken Spanish is close to non existent, although I can understand things if people speak slowly and clearly and don't use too many complicated words. Garcia Marquez claimed incorrectly, in my opinion, that he knew very little English, and we both spoke French at about the same level. So our conversations swung back and forth between those three languages. Strangely, in my memory of the conversation, there is no language problem. As I remember it, we were just speaking to each other warmly and openly. During the course of our talk, he paid me the greatest compliment I have ever been paid by another writer. At my age, he said, I no longer read very much outside the Spanish language. But there are two writers in English about whom I think I want to know what they are doing. One of them is JM Koetze, and the other is you. I have tried to repay that compliment ever since by writing and lecturing about his work. It was a moment to treasure, and I treasure it still. We never met face to face, but thanks to Carlos Fuentes, at least we had that phone call. Now they are both gone. All of us who were their ardent readers miss them both. End quote. And finally, number six, Marquez had the chance to look back on his accomplishment when he gave his address to the Nobel Prize committee. He said, I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths. And that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Columbian is but one cipher more singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. End quote. The lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. If that was true in 1982, before the rise of personal computers and the Internet and smartphones and AI, before the world shrank to its current size with communications and the sharing of information now instant and ubiquitous, before political walls and other borders collapsed. How much truer is it now? We have never been more connected, and we've never been more alone. Solitude is everywhere. If Gobble were here today, he could write an addendum. The 100 years that he set out to record in 1965 could easily be 160 years of solitude now. 160 years and counting. Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Katherine Sutherland for joining me. We will be back soon with. Oh, boy. The Godfather. A new book goes very deep into all things Corleone. We'll talk to the author and we'll have a little scrooging to do soon and some other goodness as well. I'm getting in the holiday mood and I hope you are too. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Sam. Foreign. Hi, it's Reece Gorman, Congressional reporter and host of the brand new podcast On Notice. This is the new podcast from Notice, the nonpartisan newsroom covering politics and policy in Washington, dc. Each week I'll bring you real conversations with members of Congress and those who make the Hill run, and it's packed into just 30 minutes so you can learn a lot without taking too much time out of your busy day. Join me for On Notice. That's Notice spelled N O t u s available every Monday. Wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube, you might be curious what it takes from equipment to general know how to make a podcast like this come to life? Maybe you're interested in making your own series as your New Year's resolution? Which is why you should check out my show Podcast Perspectives, the award winning series hosted by me, Jeff Umbro and produced by the Poglomerate, recently named the best podcast production and marketing agency by PR Daily Podcast Perspectives Explore explores the audio industry through conversations with the experts behind the podcast you love from the Washington Post, Iheart, Pushkin, La Manada and beyond. 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