Archive: Emma

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His ninth choice is the episode on Jane Austen’s novel Emma, first released in November 2015. Austen described her leading character as "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." Emma is one of Austen’s most popular novels and arguably her masterpiece, a brilliantly sparkling comedy of manners published in December 1815 by John Murray, the last to be published in Austen's lifetime. This followed Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), with her brother Henry handling publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817). With Janet Todd Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge John Mullan Professor of English at University College, London And Emma Clery Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (first published 1975; Oxford University Press, 1988) Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Richard Jenkyns, A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen (Oxford University Press, 2004) Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1988) Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2004) David Monaghan (ed.), Emma (New Casebook Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) John Mullan, What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (Bloomsbury, 2012) Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (Anthem, 2003) Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (first published 1986; Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Janet Todd, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2015) John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2014) John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 1992) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Hello. For this week's In Our Time classic, I've picked Jane Austen's novel Emma, described by Melvyn guests as the author's masterpiece. I first read Emma when it was chosen as a set text for my A-level English. It was also the first novel that I read more than once. And as Melvyn guests agree, one of the greatest pleasures of this magnificent novel is how every reading reveals something new about character, mores and plot. Jane Austen weaves personal ambition, desire, snobbery and instinct on a backcloth of a closed social circle in a small community in Surrey. While the eponymous heroine Emma is vivacious, clever

• 2:51Speaker 04

  and, let's face it, self-regarding, she slowly learns through mistake after mistake that she must wield her social power with greater care and attention to other people's feelings. Melvyn guests demonstrate how subtly Austen creates each character, from the slightly pompous but stable and wise Mr Knightley, through to the mysterious governess Jane Fairfax and her lover Frank Churchill, who Emma erroneously believes is destined to marry herself. After listening to this episode, characterised by one of the live-list and most entertaining examples of verbal jousting between Melvyn and his guests, I defy you

• 3:34Speaker 04

  not to want to return to Emma or read it for the first time. Enjoy listening.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Hello. At the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, et cetera, et cetera. This writer we know to be Jane Austen, and the novel was Emma, described by some of the speakers in our programme today as her masterpiece and by one as the greatest novel written in English. The plot revolves around Emma Woodhouse, described by Austen as a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. Several of the other characters do very much like her, though, in particular, for a while, the conceited vicar Mr Elton, the gentlemanly Mr Knightley, and in his way, the charming Frank Churchill. Emma meanwhile tries to rein marriages for her female friends. She claims success for that of her governess

• 4:24Speaker 05

  and now wants even greater success for the lowly Harriet Smith. It all takes place in a small Surrey village, a place in which Emma is virtually immured. Her father wouldn't let her leave the place and she has little inclination to displease him. With me to discuss Emma are John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London, Janet Todd, Professor Emerita of Literature at University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newham College, Cambridge, and Emma Clery, Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Emma Clery, to understand Emma better, what do we need to know about Jane Austen's early life?

• 4:58Speaker 06

  Well, it was around the time that Emma was written and published that Jane Austen began to define her specific field as a novelist. She wrote to one correspondent, "Three or four families in a village is the very thing to work on", and to another, "that she specialised in scenes of domestic life in a country village". And so, these were her roots. This is where she came from, what she knew best. And she decided that this is what defined her as a writer. She was born in December 1775 in a small village, Stephington, 16 miles south

• 5:41Speaker 06

  of Basingstoke. Her father was George Austen, a clergyman, but not a clergyman like Mr Elton in Emma. He was very well-educated, cultivated and very hard-working. He was also quite poor, and it wasn't quite enough to live off his earnings as a vicar at Stephington. And so, he also on the side ran a boarding school for boys from his own home and did a little bit of farming on the side as well. Her mother Cassandra was also very intelligent. She had a dry sense of humour. She had aristocratic connections, but was really willing to put

• 6:25Speaker 06

  her shoulders to the wheel as well. Together, they raised six boys and two girls. The boys, well, the eldest one went into the clergy, like his father.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  We don't need to go through all the boys. Let's go through the girls.

• 6:40Speaker 06

  Okay, but it's interesting. I think it will be important later on.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Yes, it will, but six is enough to start with at this stage.

• 6:46Speaker 06

  Okay, okay. And in various ways, they influenced her life and her thinking, the careers that they went into.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  What had Jane Austen written before Emma?

• 6:56Speaker 06

  She had written three full novels by the time she was in her mid-20s in the 1790s. She had drafts or first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and North Angar Abbey. But she didn't have the connections or the savoir-faire somehow to get these works published. And so, it didn't happen. And it wasn't until 1810 that, with the help of her brother Henry, who was by that time a banker in London, she managed to get a contract for Sense and Sensibility.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  As I understood it, her parents wrote as well, didn't they, and encouraged, and very much encouraged her. And her father, Richard, educated her at home, but more than anything, gave her access to a very big library.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  That's right. Yes, I don't know about a very big library, but certainly a choice library. They were enthusiastic about novels. That was an unusual thing about them. I think her father even read Gothic novels. We've got a record of that in her letters. So it was a very stimulating environment. There were amateur theatricals, there were riddles, games, like in Emma. And they were all scribblers, you know, almost all of them did some form of writing, wrote comic poems or essays. Two of her brothers even ran a journal called The Loiterer for a little while.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  He died without much money and left Jane Austen and her sister and her mother virtually penniless, saved by one of the six brothers.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  Yes, that's right.

• 8:22Speaker 05

  Put in a cottage. And then she felt she could get on with being a more professional writer.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  Yes. Well, it took a while still to get established. There were sort of years in the wilderness, yes. They lived in Bath for a while, the unmarried daughters with their mother and father. And then when the father retired, died in 1805, they moved to Southampton for a little while to live with a sailor brother. And then finally, they got this little house, this cottage in Chorton, which was part of the estate of her brother Edward. And it's at that point that she took out her manuscripts, started to revise them, and away she went with her career, with Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  John Mullan, what reputation did Jane Austen have at the time of Emma's publication?

• 9:09Speaker 07

  Well, you read out the title page of Emma by the author of Pride and Prejudice, et cetera, et cetera. And Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice in particular, and Mansfield Park as well, to a lesser extent, were quite successful, quite widely admired, quite widely read. She made some money from at least a couple of them anyway. And this sort of body of novels did, I think, had begun to exist in the imagination of a polite reading public. But many of those people would not, most of those people, I think, would not have known who Jane Austen was. It was actually with the publication of Mansfield Park the year before

• 9:53Speaker 07

  Emma that the secret, if that's the right word, began to leak out. I mean, her brother Henry started boasting about it. And it's evident that, I mean, it's a famous, the famous fact that Emma, when it appeared, was dedicated to the Prince Regent, a man whom Jane Austen abhorred. A dissolute Gorman with many mistresses, but he was a fan of her writing and requested her, through his librarian, to dedicate her next novel to him. So she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation, but not necessarily, I mean, quite a few of those people wouldn't have known

• 10:36Speaker 07

  who she was. She wouldn't, they certainly wouldn't have known that she was this person in a village in Hampshire. And I think it's quite important comparing Jane Austen to, well, the writers, that she knew no other writers. I mean, she was a member of no circle, no literary circle. There were comical attempts later in her last years to sort of meet a famous person. She thought she might meet George Crabbe. She never did. And this is in the age where, the age of romantic literature, where literary circles are the thing. Everybody hangs out with everybody else. I mean, every writer in Britain meets Coleridge, but even sort of the peasant poet Jean Claire comes

• 11:18Speaker 07

  to London and meets other writers. And this extraordinary sense of her, her work is being read and talked about by friends and acquaintances and members of her family, but not other novelists, let alone other major literary figures.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, she has, as I learned from, probably from your notes, she has ambitions to be a literary figure. She has ambitions to go to make money from her writing. She isn't in it for just the hobby. And that's very much part of her intent. And she does get some critical attention, even though that too is anonymous.

• 11:50Speaker 07

  She does. Well, she does. I mean, her early fiction gets some good reviews. And Emma, eventually, it gets a review by Sir Walter, by Walter Scott, although he's probably kind of told to do so by John Murray.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  And it is anonymous.

• 12:04Speaker 07

  And it is, and it is anonymous. But I think you're, I mean, the first thing you said is absolutely right. Jane Austen, I think, has two, two important things. One, provable, and one, my feeling. The provable thing is she cared a great deal about making money. She didn't have much money. Any money that she made from her novels was sort of extra money for her. She didn't have an income. She relied on the, on the charity in a sense of her brothers. And so that was very important. But the second thing, I think, is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really high ambitions. I think she knew, she was doing completely new

• 12:48Speaker 07

  things with fiction. She didn't have anybody, I think Mansfield Park was the first novel, which wasn't, as it were, responding to other people's novels. She was responding to herself from Mansfield Park onwards.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Can we just take that on briskly, John? She reworked, when she started to get public, she reworked some of the, some of the earlier novels.

• 13:07Speaker 07

  Yes. I mean, so it's very important, as Emma says, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, we don't have the originals of those, but they were reworked versions of early stuff. Mansfield Park was not. And from Mansfield Park onwards, she is doing entirely new things. And she is inventing technical, I mean, you know, people think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  I'm sure we'll come back to that, John. I think if I come back to you, I'm sure we'll come back to that. And I can repeat that because, Jan and Todd, for those who haven't read Emma, would you, I'm sorry, but you can be as brisk as you want. Seven sentences should do it.

• 13:57Speaker 07

  Well, I think not, actually.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Briskly, a summary, a summary, but once a summary.

• 14:02Speaker 07

  It's either, you can either do it very, very quickly, or you can do it in a great long time. And I shall try to be something between, yeah, brisk, I think. Because it's either about nothing, or it's about everything. It's a fantastic novel. If you start actually describing it, you feel a bit like Mariah Edgeworth saying, well, what is it about? All we know is that, you know, Mr. Woodhouse liked very thin gruel. And what is it about? I think the story would do it, to tell you the truth. Well, I'm trying to do the story. I'm getting there. There's the three or four families in the, I did get the short story in this one. The three or four families in the country village, and it's about a community, as well as about a character, Emma. It's called Emma. And it

• 14:45Speaker 07

  begins with Emma alone in intellectual solitude, although she's rich, privileged, healthy, only twenty, and beautiful. She is living with a sickly, selfish, foolish, adoring elderly father. And she's just lost her governess and friend. And she is lonely. And she's also bored. Boredom is much discussed in this period. And she seeks a friend, and she lights on Harriet Smith, a boarding school girl, below her in social status, of only seventeen. And she proposes to train her up to be a friend. She treats her rather like a doll. She says, come and walk,

• 15:30Speaker 07

  and we walk, and come and stay, and she stays. And Mr. Knightley, the neighboring squire, who's been advising her and talking to her since she was a very small child, warns her that this is wrong, and that she will do Harriet damage. And sure enough, she does, because she persuades the girl to not to be interested in the very pleasant tenant farmer who's in love with her and who is more on her status, but to go for the rather, with a very handsome, new vicar, Mr. Elton. Of course, it turns out that Mr. Elton is more interested in Emma and her thirty thousand pounds. And when the mistake is realized, in a very, very

• 16:13Speaker 07

  funny scene, Mr. Elton goes off in high dudgeon and comes back with a wife so ridiculous that she is one of the joys of the book, Mrs. Elton, and her snobbishness and her apparatus of happiness, is, I think, to me, a great pleasure. After that, two more people come in. I am moving along briskly here. First, there is Jane Fairfax, a beautiful orphan of great accomplishments. And Emma is jealous of her. This is the friend she should have had, except that, of course, she wasn't around at the time. But nonetheless, Mr. Knightley feels this is the friend she should have had. Emma tries, but Jane is very reserved. And as a result, Emma, who has a great deal of

• 16:58Speaker 07

  imagination and spirit, invents a back plot for her, which is malicious. She's helped in this by the other visitor to the town, Frank Churchill, a rich young man whom Emma had always thought dedicated to herself when he finally showed up. He does come, and they have a very edgy courtship. I am coming to the end.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have got all the main characters. And it's this and that and the other, and then they end up with.

• 17:26Speaker 07

  But it's like a great party. Everybody comes in.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  It all, it ends up with marriages.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  It ends up in marriages. It's about marriage very heavily.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  So, no, no, it was very good. It was very good. It was just, you know, I think you'd done it. So that's fine.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  They all marry the right people.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  They all marry the right people. That's right.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  Sort of.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Exactly. Now, I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it. This is written in eighteen fifteen. Just to put the demarcation in place, Waterloo, things going on, turmoil, revolution, terror, and all that sort of, not a whiff of it.

• 18:02Speaker 07

  Not a whiff of it. Well, there is a whiff.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  There's a whiff?

• 18:05Speaker 07

  There is a whiff. Yes, there's a whiff. There's a kind of interesting, and maybe ironic, or maybe absolutely sincere patriotism in it. It was very clear about England.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  That's a whiff more than a whiff, isn't it, really?

• 18:18Speaker 07

  No, it's a whiff. But it's about England. It's England versus France.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Moderate England.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  Versus French, and their silly language, and their ways. That is very much there. And it's about, I think it's also about what is the kind of England that is coming into being.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  It's in England where things are changing, where people are coming back from the war. The war is over. There's not going to be another war for a long time. How is it going to work? How is it going to work as people go back into positions they should perhaps be holding?

• 18:50Speaker 05

  You think there's much about there really? I mean, I just, you know, you're reading deep. I mean, it's more about those people you've mentioned and the machinations and intricacies and the evolutions of the plot around the eight and nine of them, isn't it?

• 19:01Speaker 06

  Yes, but the people are moving up. The Coles and Mr Perry are moving up in a social status. And Emma, who through his eyes we mostly look, is worried about it. She doesn't know what to make of it. There are shifting things in the village. And the village is being, is close to London. It feels London pushing against it.

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• 22:11Speaker 05

  We've got our own Emma here, clearly. How does Emma Woodhouse compare to other Austen heroines?

• 22:16Speaker 06

  Yes, well, she is spotlighted by the title. This is the only one of Austen's title which features the heroine. And in doing that, she's sort of highlighting her own daring in creating such an original, such an unusual heroine. Heroines in the proper mould were underdogs. They were Cinderellas. They had to face all sorts of melodramatic trials and tribulations. They were bereaved, they fell into poverty, they had threats to their reputation, they had pursuing villains, seducers. And so all of that was swept aside by the opening paragraph of Emma, which lays down

• 23:00Speaker 06

  all her advantages, her material, worldly advantages, and insists that nevertheless, this is going to be an interesting person to follow. But we do, it does highlight a danger in the first chapter. The danger, she's facing the danger of intellectual solitude, is the phrase that's used there. And Austen takes that really seriously. And I think that is the sort of driving force of the entire novel. This danger of intellectual solitude, which really is built, is based on the very limited horizons that even a very privileged woman had at that time.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  She also takes seriously the fact that she fears that no readers will like Emma for herself because she is conceited and snobbish and manipulating and very classist and intolerable in many ways. That's why a lot of readers didn't like her at the time. Now, you've all marinated into admiration, but at the time.

• 23:56Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, absolutely. So, I mean, that's another aspect of her experimentalism and her daring.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, but let's stick to the point. She's a very, I mean, she's very snobbish. She's very manipulative. She's very spoiled. This is okay. I mean, this is what she is though, isn't she?

• 24:12Speaker 06

  She's mixed. She's mixed. She is intelligent, she's resourceful, she's imaginative.

• 24:20Speaker 07

  She's funny.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  She's funny, she's witty, exactly. She, she's kind and she's compassionate as well, and she's pragmatic. She has all sorts of good features, but just simply wasted in the environment. Yeah, so she is warped. She's warped by these narrow circumstances that she's forced to fit with.

• 24:38Speaker 07

  I was just going to say, yes, I mean, all these qualities are there, but in a way, it's beside the point because we're standing and talking about her as if, you know, we're in our favourite heroine, unfavourite heroine competition. But the point about the novel is it's almost entirely, not entirely, but almost entirely narrated through Emma's consciousness in incredibly sophisticated and funny ways. And so we don't look at Emma. I mean, we do, we do judge her and we're expected to judge her, but also we inhabit her. We see the world through her eyes. And a lot of the plot things that Jan, I think brilliantly managed to pack in are things, some of them are things we see immediately, but some of them, I think, are things that

• 25:23Speaker 07

  on first reading, we don't see immediately because we're seeing the world as Emma sees it. And Jane Austen uses this technique, which wasn't described until the early 20th century, called free and direct style, which she invented, actually. I mean, she invented it, and novelists since have sort of used it. And nowadays, novelists use it without even thinking about or knowing what it is, which is to narrate a novel, not in the voice of a character, but through the mind and warping predilections and prejudices of the character. And that's what she does. And that's why Jane Austen's thing about nobody will like her is a joke. I think it's a joke. I don't think she minded about it at all. She was laughing about it.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Jan, can I come to you about sticking rather obstinately to the character of Emma? Nobody is willing to, it's very strange.

• 26:11Speaker 06

  She is fictional.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  You all want to wash her. I know, but I'm interested in fictional characters. I'm sure you are, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I mean, the fact is that she's being washed clean all the time. It is, her snobbery makes you cringe. Her manipulation of Harriet, she's very cruel to Harriet. She takes Harriet away from a very good marriage, and Mr Knightley reprimands her, Emma, for that. She's nasty about the, on Box Hill, she has a spasm of nastiness, a snobbish nastiness. When she rejects Mr Allen, she says it's partly because he doesn't realise the number of, the distance between himself and herself. She's so much higher up the social scale than he, how dare he even propose to her? Let's get that on the table and then we can move forward.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  Well, I think you've put it on the table, actually. But I think it is there. I think the cruelty is there, and I think it's there more perhaps than both of you have stressed. I think there are times when I really found her intolerable. There was, there's one point where Harriet, you know, the simple child, she's only seventeen, she's had no background at all, sees the Martins again. And it's a very awkward situation. They all like her very, very much in the shop. And she narrates this in a very simple, straightforward way, and Emma is almost moved for a moment. And then it says, but what can you expect from a silly, shallow girl like Harriet?

• 27:33Speaker 07

  And this is a girl, she's taken into her house as supposedly her friend. Things like that I think are are.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  And played with, really. She's played with her as if she were a doll, really.

• 27:43Speaker 07

  Yes, she is. And she, it goes on, and I think the box hill. Um, yes, of course. Uh, she's shadowed by Miss Bates in many ways and and she worries about her. But nonetheless, to say something like that in a public place. Is is is not acceptable.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  I I do feel you're exaggerating the the dark side of Emma because I think.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  I'm drawing attention to it. I was about to switch and say that they're a great quality, which you can do for me.

• 28:08Speaker 06

  Okay, that is what I will try to do. I'll I'll try to make a a case for her. Um, I think it's made very apparent to the reader just how um constraining, how claustrophobic. Her circumstances are and that really it's through the lack of any options in her life. Um, that she is forced into this sort of fantasist role. Um, and I think there's a real feminist agenda actually with this novel, which can be seen through an array of of. Of female characters. We've got Jane Fairfax, who by rights really should be the heroine of the novel. She was the the more of the standard heroine. She's an orphan, um, she has no means, she has no dowry.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  Um, she's doomed to life as a as a governess and she has this extraordinary outburst where she says. You know, it's the trade in governesses is is like the slave trade, you know, it's it's it. She doesn't say it's got the same cruelty involved, but um but that nevertheless, there's something involuntary and oppressive about it.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  And one feels fundamentally sympathetic to sympathetic towards her because she's ruled over by a tyrant.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  And they have, uh, her father is either sick or pretends to be sick, and he won't let her out of his sight. He even wants her to eat what he wants her to eat. He won't let her go out of the place. She lives, she's never been to London, she's only fifteen miles away, never been to seaside. And can't go anywhere with, so she's tyrannized by this man, whom she to is for whom she is what we would now call. A devoted carer.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  And we see this extraordinary forbearance, that we see the way she's she checks what she wants to say, she tries to compensate for his. Um, damaging behaviour to others. Um, I mean, she's absolutely masterful in that and and in different circumstances. If there were an Emma today, you know, she would be, you know, a businesswoman, she would be someone, you know. Showing these sort of extraordinary abilities she had to best advantage. She could go to Oxford, study P P and become prime minister.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  I think it's John's turn now, come to.

• 30:07Speaker 07

  All right. I mean, yeah, Mr. Woodhouse is the the with his habits of gentle selfishness. It's a verbally wonderful novel, full of these kind of killing phrases. And he's hilarious. The thing about Mr. Woodhouse is that. In some ways, he's the opposite of his daughter. She thinks that she knows what other people are like. And this is one of the many ways in which. You know, that when you're reading it, however awful it she she sometimes is, there's a bit of most readers that think. Emma Woodhouse, c'est moi, because she's always coming, she's trying to work out what's going on in other people's heads, and that's what makes her interesting. But she's, most of the time, she's wrong. He is incapable of thinking that anybody's different from him.

• 30:49Speaker 07

  So this is absolute sort of deadly neutralising thing. So he assumes that everybody thinks like him. And I mean, the most incredible thing about Mr. Woodhouse, this sort of valetudinarian, is that he must have had sex at least twice in his life. Because he's got two daughters, it's inconceivable. And he's a sort of enemy to.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  But it is conceivable because it was conceivable.

• 31:09Speaker 07

  And and and this is a novel which everybody, every possible pairing of young people is being imagined. Except the one that's going to really happen, Emma and Mr. Knightley, of course. And he can't see it at all because. To him, matrimony is the enemy and he doesn't realise what's going on around him. Just to come in on that here, I think Jane Austen has a sort of. A soft ironic spot for these these vegetable people. Um, because she likes Lady Ber- not doesn't like, but she presents with a sort of loving concern. Lady Bertram in in Mansfield Park as well, people who can hardly get off the sofa. And and Mr. Woodhouse is like that. And yes, indeed, he's an absolute tyrant of his daughter. Um, at the same time, he and he has warped her because, of course, she is first with him. He also adores her.

• 31:55Speaker 07

  And so she can't imagine a life, or she worries about a life where she isn't so totally.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  Her mother's died when she was young.

• 32:01Speaker 07

  Yes, when she was five. And she needs to be central to somebody, so that man is the centre. But to go back also to your point that you, yes, one is Emma and you are because you're in the book, but I always feel a certain. I feel I have a sort of anxiety about Emma, that that if I was there, I'd be be more like Mrs. Elton and that. You know, she would find one quite inelegant and be incredibly snobbish. I mean. I find the whole, I found Emma very interesting, but I also found the whole of Highbury interesting and all these people in it. And there is something about Emma, because we're inside her, that is terribly appealing, as is anybody, we're inside. Yes.

• 32:41Speaker 07

  At the same time, I still think you have to hold on to, there is a a kind of, there is a cruelty and something quite disturbing in the centre of her. I agree with Emma that, with Emma clearly, not Emma Woodhouse, that that um. But she's warm. You you you are misjudging her a bit because the point is that Jane Austen, as it were, gives you the material to make your judgment. So the example you gave, which is a brilliant one, of of Harriet Smith meeting the man she's rejected and her sister. And telling, guiltlessly telling Emma, her puppet mistress about this. And the brilliant thing is Emma doesn't respond by thinking, oh, they're they're, but they're they're silly people. She has to conquer her immediate realisation that, what is it, there's a mixture of.

• 33:25Speaker 07

  Of wounded feelings and delicacy in their response. And she knows that, she's clever, she's understanding, and she has to. Fight to reassert her absurd pride and power. And it's because of that that she's a character like no characters ever existed before. A reader and and she does the same thing when she when she looks at him and reads the letter. She realises that it's a very good letter, so she has to wipe it out. Um, and.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  This is the letter that Martin writes to.

• 33:52Speaker 07

  Emma, yes. And she's always trying to avoid other people's words in a way. I mean, she she she goes.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  Learn and she.

• 34:00Speaker 07

  And she learns.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  She is.

• 34:01Speaker 07

  I mean, that's what's so great about it. That's why she.

• 34:03Speaker 06

  She has conscience.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Yes, she is ferociously judgmental, though, isn't she? That isn't, that isn't me being unfair to her, Emma. I mean, she is ferociously judgmental.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  But I think you've got to, you've got to measure that against the against the pressures on her. Her only purpose in life is to be queen bee of this village, so anyone who challenges that is going to be in trouble.

• 34:23Speaker 05

  When I say these things, I think I'm describing somebody, I'm on John Mullan' side, describing somebody who. The contradictions and the delusions, which is coming to a moment, are the enrichment. But one mustn't duck the fact that they are. Some pretty dark, well, they're not dark, some distasteful things going. Let's talk about marriage.

• 34:39Speaker 07

  Yes. Okay.

• 34:40Speaker 05

  Go on then, John.

• 34:41Speaker 07

  Marriage? Oh, well, I mean, I said I said the Highbury, um, and. Jan was saying this wonderful world of Highbury where sort of nothing happens, yet everything's happening. And one of the everything that is happening. Is that people are imagining pairings, you know, and this is something that Jane Austen knew in her own life. And she makes, uh, she makes the humming heart of her fiction. So everybody sort of between the age of. Fifteen and forty who isn't married might marry somebody. And everybody is speculating and thinking and wondering who will marry who. And Emma is a matchmaker and she's making matches in her mind and this is nearly disastrous.

• 35:21Speaker 07

  But also for the reader, this is a kind of, it's a kind of detective story actually as well because we talked about. Jan talked about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. Um, I think most people, the first time you read the novel. You absolutely know that Mr. Elton is really after Emma and what a fool she is not to see it. And as he himself says, when when she says to him, he proposes and she says, but what about Miss Smith? He goes, Miss Smith? I mean, he says one of the most truly evil lines in literature. He says, I mean, some men might not. Everyone has his level. I mean, isn't that fantastic, you know? And but she, we all see that, but I think on the first reading, we don't see what Frank Churchill's up to.

• 36:06Speaker 07

  He is so cunning and he has arrived in order to, let us say. Canoodle with Jane Fairfax, but he can't do it most of the time on his own. He manages to get her on her own once. And he has to do it in front of other people. And she, Emma, has no idea what he's up to. And I think the first time we read it, we don't. And I think even every time you read it, you see how cunning, even more cunning he is.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  Can I go to John here? So do you want that? Because I want to ask you a question as well.

• 36:34Speaker 07

  Can I just, no, just say that Mr. Knightley is the sort of detective of the whole book.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  He's the great landowner, squire.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  He's the squire, he's a good man, except that he's a bit unimaginative and he doesn't. Dance when he should and he doesn't necessarily use his carriage. And he hasn't got quite enough money either to do up his grounds and his house. Quite well eventually. He dances quite well in the end. But he is a kind of detective. He's, and he uh, he has a reason because, of course, he's in love with. Emma, it transpires.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  Since the age, since she was thirteen.

• 37:03Speaker 07

  Exactly. So some people find this a little odd, but he also knew her as a baby. I mean, he has always been there. He's one of these familial lovers who comes into the the story. He's a brother-in-law as well. But he is the kind of detective, she's, he's looking for clues throughout because he thinks. That there is something wrong about Frank Churchill. And so he's always looking, they they play.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Games, they play riddles, they do all these things and they, they, they try to second guess each other. They try to look for clues as if the whole place was playing a game. And they listen to their, other people's weird language and see if underneath it they can hear something that they shouldn't perhaps know.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  What do you, what's your view on the, on the, on the, on the role of Mr. Knightley? Now, Mr. Knightley has a central, and of course it's called Knight, Perfect Gentle Knight, yes. It's quite, he is, um, he in his own way, he's not so much a manipulator, but he, he sort of, he, he's going around the village clearing up the mess really, isn't he?

• 38:04Speaker 06

  That's not quite how I see him, no.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  We, we have slight disagreements.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  No, and he, he enters the novel in the first chapter as a, as a sort of figure of salvation almost. I mean, he is Emma's only resource really in this, in this novel. She, he is the one who is going to make life possible for her. And the first conversation between him and Emma is so exhilarating, it's just wonderful. I mean, there's a massive age gap between them, as you've mentioned, about seventeen, eighteen years. Um, but she gives as good as she gets. It's like Elizabeth Bennet in Mr. Darcy again, um, but sort of in a slightly different way. He's not a stranger, he's someone familiar. They, they have this wonderful sparring relationship and, you know, it's like a screwball comedy.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  Or it's like, um, Oberon and Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream. And there are many allusions to, um, to Shakespeare in the course of the novel. Um, the course of true love never did run true and all that.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Can I go back to John for one second, John Todd? Um, Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton, it can be something rather annoying and over verbose. Um, what do you, what can we tell about Emma from the way she reacts to them?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Well, in, in some ways they're, they're shadows of Emma. Um, I actually enjoy them thoroughly. There are people who find, who find Miss Bates utterly irritating. I mean, it's an interesting thing, isn't it, how you, how you actually write in a novel, um, describe a rattle? And you want to show a medley of, of indiscriminate prose without boring somebody. And I think she does, though there are people who find Miss Bates boring, as Emma clearly does. But if, I mean, it's also been pointed out that if you listen to her speech, you will find out a lot more about the village than you would otherwise know. And she actually gives away a fair number of clues. But I think the point you're actually asking is why does Emma so much dislike her?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  She's boring and, and stupid and so on and so forth, but not entirely stupid. Um, she understands when she's been, um, got at by Emma very quickly. But I think in some ways she shadows her. After all, she is stuck there with an elderly mother. Um, she is a spinster and one of the things where Harriet does catch Emma is where she says, if you don't marry, as you say you won't because you're first in your father's house and you are everything to your father, why do you need any other man? Um, why do you need to go when you're rich? Um, Harriet says, but you'll be like Miss Bates. So she, there's that shadow of that always there. And then, of course, Miss Bates, um, is the aunt and has to live with Jane Fairfax.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And again, these relationships of tyranny, um, of kindly tyranny is something that Emma knows all about. So I think it's to do with, with, with that, with the, the fear of spinsterhood and what it means. Um, but I also think Mrs. Elton is another thing altogether. Um, Mrs. Elton has come in with her apparatus of happiness, um, and her music and her accomplishments. And in some ways she's a, a terrible sort of shadow of what Emma is. I mean, she's, she's much stupider and she has no ability in the way that Emma has to change and to grow and to learn from her mistakes.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  At the same time, that snobbishness, that manner of patronizing people, of taking them up, of feeling oneself superior, um, of not understanding that you have to create a community all the time. That is something that is a bit close to the worst side of Emma.

• 41:34Speaker 05

  Would you like to talk a bit more about Mr. Knightley, Emma?

• 41:38Speaker 05

  You're in a great position to do it with your name and.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  Um, yes, well, uh.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Well, he's been rather neglected in this conversation.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  Yes, he has a little bit, hasn't he? Um, so Mr. Knightley is an interesting figure. In a way, he represents tradition. Donwell Abbey is described in a, in a beautiful passage through Emma's point of view as the epitome of Englishness. Um, it's calm, it's, uh, it's sort of lit by this beautiful soft sun and so on. Um, but, um, but at the same time, he is a, he's a working man. He's absolutely involved in the, um, the life of the community. Um, he is the, uh, presiding genius over the various, um, plans for, you know, upholding, I think he's magistrate probably. He's, um, he runs the parish council. So he's, he's a very active man and you get a glimpse of that side of things.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  I think there's a sort of taste of Hardy almost in, in the picture of, of Mr. Knightley. And also actually of Robert Martin, there's a tiny little vignette, um, where we get that side of, of, of the life of Highbury.

• 42:44Speaker 07

  And Mr. Knightley's, um, love for Emma, which has been sort of touched on as being, it's a bit weird because, you know, he said he started loving her when she was thirteen, but actually within the novel, I think it's, it's very brilliantly done. You can read Emma, I mean, if you've, if you've read it lots and lots of times, you might think, I'm going to read it just for Mr. Knightley this time. And if you read it just thinking about him, Frank Churchill comes in and one of the subsidiary points about Frank Churchill is he, even as soon as his name's mentioned, he starts generating something that Jane Austen's very interested in, which is jealousy.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  Jealousy, yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  And very, very subtly, I think, Mr. Knightley starts changing in his, in his address to Emma actually, and his response to her, and she doesn't see it, or she sees it and is puzzled by it. Why is he so cross about this man he hasn't even met? And Mr. Knightley's love, I mean, Jane Austen knows exactly what she's doing. His love for Emma, which comes right at the end as a sort of surprise to Emma, but it shouldn't be a surprise to the reader because his sort of love story is there too.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  And also for the first time he's got a real rival and that terrifies him, I think.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I think it's clever the way that, um, no, I was just going to say it's, it's also clever the way that if you go back through the book, you see that Emma has been noticing him over and over again. Um, she notices where he stood in a particular time. Said, well, oh, that was where Mr. Knightley stood, um, that he came in his carriage. Yes, he came, of course, to bring the Batess, you find later, but she notices it. And over and over again, although it's a mass, and Jane Austen is wonderful at these great mass social scenes, she knows where Mr. Knightley is at every moment.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  Is there any, sorry, please, say.

• 44:30Speaker 06

  Just, just to add to that, I mean, there is something again so unusual about their relationship, Mr. Knightley and Emma's. It's, it's very egalitarian and it's not blind to faults. There's no, there's no, um, idealization going on here.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  In what ways does she fault him? In what ways does she find fault with him?

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Oh, often, you know, she criticizes him, for instance, for not sort of living up to his status in the, in the community. Um, she teases him on, on numerous counts.

• 44:57Speaker 07

  She says, you're so unfair to Frank Churchill. And he goes, nonsense, nonsense.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  No, she, she gets him on jealousy.

• 45:02Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  And very clearly. And, and that is such, as, as, um, you said, is, is such a big theme in the whole book.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  The, yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 45:11Speaker 06

  And, and there's a lovely bit where, um, uh, she, um, teases him about his notion that he's going to look after his young nephews, who she actually has responsibility for because he has more time. Um, of course, he doesn't have more time. Emma's the one with all the time on her hands and, and, and she does it in such a kind of loving, but also, um, teasing way. It's, it's, it's like nothing else, I think, in the fiction up to this point.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  He also is the best man in the book. And Emma says at one point, I deserve the best, um, because I never put up with anything else.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  He thinks he's the best woman, he has this phrase, I blamed you and lectured you and you have borne just no other woman in England. One does wonder how many other women in England he knows, but still.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Well, neither of them knows very many other people, but in Highbury, they are the best and the two best married.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Highbury I could have put up with, but the best known woman in England, hard to swallow, but it's hyperbole.

• 46:04Speaker 07

  But he's a man in love, he's a man in love.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Absolutely, I, I say it's hyperbole.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yes, and we don't hear what she says after all, so we do want to hear what he says.

• 46:10Speaker 05

  Where did Emma, uh, where, all right, finally, where, where does Emma rank among the novels of Jane Austen in your opinions? We've, we've got, we've got, we've got a whiff or a whiff from John, but let's end with him, briefly.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think it is her masterpiece. It's the last book that she, we know that she absolutely finished. Um, persuasion may well, and I think has not been entirely revised. So Emma is.

• 46:37Speaker 07

  Is the culmination of her career and it is the cleverest, the most subtle, the one in which she thinks about her own artistry as well as putting artistry into the book. So, yes, I think it's her masterpiece.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  Emma.

• 46:50Speaker 06

  Yes, for artistry, it must be be first. I think for for feeling and plot, for myself, it's persuasion. But but, yes, it is. It is an extraordinary achievement and, of course, it's had a great legacy, which I hope we'll be able to have time to talk about.

• 47:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think.

• 47:07Speaker 05

  We don't, we have half a minute.

• 47:08Speaker 07

  I think it's her her greatest novel. I mean, lots of Jane Austen fans, and I'm with Emma on this, will find Persuasion the most moving of her novels, the most powerful, in a way, the most visceral. But Emma is just fictionally the most complicated. It's it's as if with Emma, you feel it's like reading Twelfth Night or something. You feel the person who wrote this can do anything they want. They are totally in control. And I think because of that, it's also one of the very greatest of all novels in English. And you can read it over and over again. Yes, and see things and see little tricks. See things every single time. But she's left for posterity and only on the 10th reading do you manage to find. We all think it's brilliant. Yes.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  Thank you very much, Janet Todd, Emma Clery and John Mullan. There's a quiz on Emma on our webpage. Next week, we'll be talking about The Salem Witch Trials. Thanks for listening.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvyn and his guests.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  This is when we complain about all the things we didn't get in.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  How terrible I was and how we didn't do anything we should have done. This is now going down very well.

• 48:13Speaker 07

  If I ever come again, not the plot, please.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  You did the plot.

• 48:18Speaker 07

  If we ever do. I keep saying we should do Anne Radcliffe. If anybody ever asks what to do, the mysteries of the doll. You're right, Mrs Elton is just. I think Mrs Elton is brilliant and I. Sorry, it's the Garden of England. It's the Garden of England and the Baruch Land. It's just so funny. And then when Emma says, oh, well, I think quite a few counties have been called the Garden. No, I think not. No, only sorry. I'm sorry. But but, see, I think what we didn't catch, if I'd say anything, it's the humour.

• 48:44Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 48:45Speaker 07

  It is a very funny book and I think that's why I like it now that I'm old. I think when I was a bit younger, I wanted I wanted passion of the sort that you get in Persuasion. I always liked that. But now that I am now, oh, I think that I I think there's a lot in this that is wonderful. It it it shows you how to carry on. Because even the thing that you were talking about, Melvyn, about her being cruel with Harriet Smith, which is completely true, but even then, Emma sometimes laugh, I mean, one of the cruelties is that Emma and you sometimes laugh at Harriet Smith's suffering. So Harriet Smith, after she's discovered Mr Elton, never loved her. There's a bit I was just reading the other day. And with the cork plaster and all that.

• 49:27Speaker 07

  Where where Emma's trying to find other things to talk about so that she doesn't go on about Mr Elton and she's she's talking about the poor in Highbury. And and and Harriet naturally says, Mr Elton was so kind to the poor. And she brings out these little this these little things that she's kept like a child.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  I think there are two ways of looking at that, really. I mean, the poor guy, yes. I mean, maybe I feel more distressed.

• 49:50Speaker 07

  Because Mr Elton's not kind to the poor. He's a horrible person.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  I'm not interested in Mr Elton.

• 49:55Speaker 07

  He turns away from the house.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  I'm interested in Harriet at that stage. And that's a that's a that's a remark from a stricken seventeen year old who's been horribly snubbed and let down. And so that's where my attention is and I'm banging the table. Attention, I'm not banging the table, I'm just tapping on it, practising my piano. And that's that's a different thing. So I think it is funny in a way, but I'm more moved by it. This this girl's not knowing what's happening to her. She's been taken up by this very superior, this this sort of goddess of the village and made just turned made tried to they tried to she Emma tries to turn into somebody else and, of course, it doesn't work. I feel a bit very sorry for her. Am I the only one who feels sorry for her?

• 50:33Speaker 07

  I feel sorry for her. There's a one point she looks at her and she says, there's Harriet, sitting, looking pretty, and that's all she needs. And we have no idea. She is such a child. But that's a. We don't know what's inside it. Brilliant dialogue, isn't it, between Mr Knightley and Emma when Mr Knightley discovers what she's done?

• 50:50Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  And when Mr Knightley really lays it on the table. She's an illegitimate stupid girl. And Emma says these quite clever things and he sort of goes, rubbish. You're talking balderdash, you know.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  That's that's the occasion for one of these wonderful phrases that the the novel abounds with, he rises in tall indignation.

• 51:07Speaker 07

  Yes. But at the end of it, there is Mr Knightley talking to Harriet and saying, I found more in her. Yes.

• 51:15Speaker 06

  Yes, she does improve.

• 51:16Speaker 07

  She has improved.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  And also.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 51:19Speaker 07

  She actually does improve.

• 51:20Speaker 05

  Has she improved or has she, for the first time, met a genuine person who's prepared to take her seriously?

• 51:24Speaker 07

  No, she's met. No, she's she's she's been improved because she actually comes, first of all, she just echoes everything that Emma says. She uses the same words. She says, oh, that Jane Fairfax has only technique or something, which is exactly what she is. Emma would say, that's rubbish. But later, when she says, and there's a wonderful moment where where Emma is suddenly realising she means Mr Knightley. And she says, oh, Miss Woodhouse, you do forget. Yes. Now, the early, that's. That puts the hairs on the back of my neck now with that dialogue. That's a sophisticated statement. And so although she may not be made more suitable for the wife of of Robert Martin, she has improved. Yeah. She's learnt self. I mean, Emma doesn't see it like that. Emma sees herself as somebody who's made a Frankenstein. Yes.

• 52:09Speaker 07

  As become a Frankenstein, made a monster who's grown self-important. But in fact, she's made somebody who has more self-esteem, that she could say that to her patroness. Yes.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  What about legacy?

• 52:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, Simon, with some tea or coffee.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 52:22Speaker 07

  Because the amazing thing is, I was reading that, I I was, I was reading that George Henry Lewis essay about about Jane Austen the other day. And actually, I think even he doesn't realise how good it is. But he is really, it's really interesting that he's he's saying, you know, in the eighteen sixties, well, people are still buying these novels and there are obviously people out there who like them. But he's essentially saying, but none of the clever people I know pay any attention to them at all.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 52:50Speaker 07

  And nobody and and still, you know, even. And it's still not on the level of George Eliot. And no, he says she's better, he says in that article, she's better than George Henry. But only in certain respects, I mean, in certain respects, intellectually. But isn't it incredible that that sort of in the eighteen nineties, Henry James, who gets his techniques from in a way from Jane Austen, but he's still really condescending.

• 53:11Speaker 06

  I think people are remarkably negative about about Austen's work in the nineteenth century and.

• 53:16Speaker 07

  But even the twenty second. Conrad writes and says, what's it all about? I've just read Pride and Prejudice. Nabokov. They're jealous. I don't understand why people said. Jealousy, it's jealousy. What about Henry James saying, everybody, dear, dear Jane, she's so cried up. So I think we're talking about about. And then you get one or two people, Virginia Woolf gets it, doesn't she? She totally gets it.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  There are many more Radio Four arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at bbc.co.uk/radiofour.

• 53:48Speaker 05

  Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making WhatsApp Docs. You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done, how to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and wellbeing, equipping ourselves. And our listeners. With the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even. And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We must certainly not, Zandi. We have a lot of new topics coming up, from tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of WhatsApp Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain? The AI was describing the pain that it was in. It said, the signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being. Listen, I was an emo kid in the two thousands, too. This is not that novel. It does, yeah. It sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know. Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore? It's actually kind of blowing my mind. Join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.