Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Jane Austen (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in Regency England by historian Dr Lucy Worsley and actor Sally Phillips to learn all about the life and works of literary legend Jane Austen on the 250th anniversary of her birth in December 1775.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of England’s best-loved authors, and the creator of such indelible characters as Elizabeth Bennet, Mr Darcy, Emma Woodhouse and Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Whether you have read one of her six books – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park – or seen one of the many adaptations, most of us have some experience with Austen. But her life story and how it influenced her writing is perhaps less well-known. This episode explores her early life as the daughter of a rural clergyman, takes a peek inside the books a teenage Jane was reading, and delves into her romantic and familial relationships to see what shaped Austen into the formidable literary talent she was. And it asks a key question: was Jane Austen, who wrote such wonderful women characters, a feminist?
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Clara Chamberlain and Charlotte Emily Edgeshaw
Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:07 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are donning our bonnets, seeking an eligible bachelor, and promenading back to Georgian England to learn all about literary icon Jane Austen for her 250th anniversary year. Happy birthday, Jane! And to help us explore her life with pride but no prejudice, we have two very special guests. In history corner, she's a historian, curator, author and broadcaster. She's the host of the fantastic BBC Sounds historical true crime podcasts, Lady Killers and Lady Swindlers. She's the presenter of many wonderful BBC TV documentaries. She's the author of many bestselling books, including, lucky for us, Jane Austen at Home. And you'll remember her from our episode about another literary giant, Agatha Christie.
1:52 Greg Jenner? It's Dr Lucy Worsley. Welcome Lucy.
1:54 Speaker 05 Hello. Thank you for having me.
1:56 Greg Jenner? Delighted to have you back. And in comedy corner, she's an award-winning actor, writer, sketch comedian and presenter. You will know her from all of the things, including the beloved Smack the Pony, Miranda, Green Wing, Taskmaster, I'm Alan Partridge Veep, and of course, the Bridgerton movie franchise, which is- Basically Pride and Prejudice. And you'll definitely remember her from our episode about fairy tales. It's only Sally Phillips. Welcome back to the show Sally.
2:17 Speaker 06 Hello Greg, thank you for having me back.
2:19 Greg Jenner? Delighted to have you back. Sally, it's lovely to have you back in.
2:22 Speaker 06 It's lovely to be here.
2:23 Greg Jenner? I, I mean, you're in a BBC sitcom called Austin. Different spelling, it's a lovely show. But it is not an adaptation.
2:29 Speaker 06 No.
2:30 Greg Jenner? But you, you were in Pride and Prejudice, sort of, because Bridget Jones's Diary is Pride and Prejudice?
2:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, Bridget Jones's Diary is basically Pride and, the first novel is exactly the plot, I think.
2:43 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
2:43 Speaker 06 Helen just took the plot of Pride and Prejudice and took her characters from the newspaper columns and put them into that structure. But that's what you always get told to do by movie executives. So they say, there are books written about it, that all rom coms have to be Pride and Prejudice. And consequently, I have developed a slight fear and phobia of Jane Austen.
3:03 Greg Jenner? Oh no!
3:04 Speaker 06 So, I mean, she is, when I read the books, I do absolutely love them. And she's also the sort of grandmother of a particular strain of female comedy, that you sort of trace the line from her through E. M. Della Field, Helen Fielding, and then even on to Fleabag, I think, this kind of ironic.
3:24 Greg Jenner? Interesting.
3:24 Speaker 06 Female protagonist.
3:26 Greg Jenner? And you also, of course, were in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
3:29 Speaker 06 I was, and that was fascinating. So I was Mrs. Bennet in Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. Yeah, it was interesting to play Mrs. Bennet in that context, because if there's a zombie apocalypse, you genuinely do want to keep your daughters safe in quite an expensive, stately home with high walls.
3:45 Greg Jenner? It's a lovely film. It's not necessarily a family-friendly film.
3:47 Speaker 06 I think it's the best Austin adaptation there's ever been, Greg.
3:51 Greg Jenner? So, what do you know?
3:58 Greg Jenner? This is the So What Do You Know? where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And no guessing needed, it's Jane Austen, you know who she is. All six of her classic novels have been adapted for the screen multiple times. Maybe you swooned over a wet Colin Firth in BBC's Pride and Prejudice. Or you sighed over Keira Knightley and the famous Matthew McFadden hand flex. Perhaps you melted over Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet in Sense and Sensibility. Or rooted for Anya Taylor-Joy in Emma, or Dakota Johnson in Persuasion, or did you giggle at my personal fave, Love and Friendship with the brilliantly funny Kate Beckinsale? And of course Jane Austen's life has also been dramatised in films like Becoming Jane and the recent BBC TV series Miss Austin. But was Austen's life anything like her novels? And how soon is too soon to break off an engagement?
4:43 Greg Jenner? Let's find out. Sally, I'll start with you, see what the levels are. What sort of family?
4:48 Speaker 06 Low, low, Greg.
4:50 Greg Jenner? What sort of family and class position do you think baby Jane was born into?
4:54 Speaker 06 I know her parents ran a school for boys. So she was surrounded with boys. So what does that make them? Well, teachers or like parson kind of level?
5:06 Greg Jenner? Okay, so sort of middle class?
5:07 Speaker 06 I don't know what that is, is that middle class?
5:09 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I think we could call them middle class.
5:10 Speaker 06 Not aristocrats anyway.
5:11 Greg Jenner? Not aristocrats, okay.
5:11 Speaker 06 But they had some wealthy relations.
5:13 Greg Jenner? I think that's a pretty good summary. Lucy, was Jane Austen ostentatiously wealthy at birth?
5:18 Speaker 05 Well, she belonged to this level in society that's called the pseudo-gentry. I love this term. It means that you want to belong to the landed gentry, but you don't actually have any land. So there's quite a lot of make do and mend and keeping up appearances at this level in society.
5:37 Speaker 06 And like desperate longing for servants?
5:39 Speaker 05 Yes.
5:40 Greg Jenner? Oh, it's very sort of high synth bouquet, is it? It's very, yeah.
5:44 Speaker 05 There's a bit of that going on.
5:45 Greg Jenner? Right.
5:46 Speaker 05 And her dad was a rector, as you say. So he had money from a parish, but it was a rural parish, which didn't give him enough money to live in the style of a gentleman, which is what he wanted. So he had side hustles. He ran a school from the house.
6:01 Greg Jenner? This is George, is it?
6:02 Speaker 05 George, Mr George Austen. And they also ran a farm.
6:09 Greg Jenner? Let's talk about the siblings, because you said lots of boys running around. The boys are brothers, that's, Jane has many siblings.
6:15 Speaker 05 She's got six brothers, imagine that, and a sister. And it seems like part of the reason that she became a writer was to make jokes to entertain them all. There's a lot of children to be occupied in this life.
6:28 Greg Jenner? So the mother was Cassandra, so Jane's sister is called Cassandra, named after the mother, is that right?
6:32 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:33 Greg Jenner? And the father, George, had a bit of a reputation, Sally. He was known as the handsome proctor.
6:38 Speaker 06 Oh. So Proctor, it sounds like he's like.
6:42 Speaker 05 It was from when he was studying at college. A proctor is a sort of a university position. And he had, he was famous for his lovely hair. And when he got older, he had this lovely head of white silky hair.
6:53 Speaker 06 Leonine, he's Michael Heseltine, basically.
6:56 Greg Jenner? Lucy, tell us more about the, the childhood of Jane. It's a sort of agricultural childhood. We imagine her with quill in hand. But actually, she's growing up on a farm. She's more likely shovel in hand, sort of scooping up manure and, you know.
7:08 Speaker 05 She had to do actual work. We know that she had to help out in the dairy when they were shorthanded. She knows quite a lot about cooking and that sort of thing. Yes, it's not all balls and tea parties.
7:20 Greg Jenner? What else do we imagine in terms of her education, Sally?
7:23 Speaker 06 I have no idea whether girls went to school. I imagine you had governesses. Did she have her own governess or did she have no education?
7:30 Speaker 05 It's interesting, this whole question. Her dad was quite progressive. And he would let Jane and her sister read all of the books in the house, which included all sorts of trash. But he didn't let them study Latin and Greek with the male pupils. For the very good reason that that would prevent them from ever getting married. Because once you could speak Latin and Greek, you were unmarried. But sometimes the girls were sent away for short periods at boarding school. This was never a great success. They had to leave the school because they wanted enough money to pay the bill. And the schools that they went to were quite informal. And they did have lessons in girlish things like history and needlework and drawing and music and dancing. And they also would read trashy magazines together. It's been suggested
8:15 Speaker 05 that Jane got her sort of interest in writing, not from the serious tomes by Fielding and Richardson and so on in her father's library. But perhaps just as much by reading the trashy magazines that the girls shared in the dormitory at the Abbey School.
8:27 Speaker 06 So seventeen ninety, seventeen eighty, she's in boarding school. And what is a trashy magazine then?
8:33 Speaker 05 Ghost stories, romances, pirates, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that Jane's own novels would be the complete antidote to intercourse.
8:43 Greg Jenner? So Jane started writing when she was twelve. Sally, when did you find out you were funny?
8:48 Speaker 06 I think people were laughing at me.
8:52 Speaker 06 About that age, I started writing stupid poems and things to make.
8:56 Greg Jenner? So eleven or twelve, that sort of age?
8:58 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:59 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
8:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, I suppose I started writing little plays for the family.
9:03 Speaker 05 This is exactly the same.
9:04 Greg Jenner? This is it?
9:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, I'm identical to Jane Austen.
9:07 Greg Jenner? You aren't the Jane Austen of your era.
9:08 Speaker 06 I wish, I wish, I wish. But yes, I started doing that plays for the parents and friends, getting my brothers to dress up as things, dressing up in mother's old clothes and putting football socks on our hands and pretending to be cats and doing Aladdin and...
9:25 Greg Jenner? I mean, that's almost exactly the Jane Austen story.
9:27 Speaker 06 It is, yeah.
9:28 Speaker 05 They put on plays in the barn at Stevenson.
9:31 Speaker 06 Wow.
9:31 Greg Jenner? So tell us more about some of these spoofs then. Are they, is it in-jokes or is it sort of broader genre parody?
9:38 Speaker 05 The thing that I find so attractive about her juvenilia, her early short stories, is just how badly people behave in them. There's quite a lot of violence and people going mad and running amok.
9:50 Greg Jenner? My favourite of the Austen films is Love and Friendship. And she wrote that at fifteen?
9:56 Speaker 05 Yes, it's not like one of the standard six novels, but it's an early...
10:00 Greg Jenner? It's a novella, isn't it? It's very short.
10:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:03 Greg Jenner? When did we get our first, one of the classic six novels that people have probably read?
10:08 Speaker 05 Well, while she was still living at Stevenson, so by the time she was twenty-five, she'd already drafted the first three, the ones that would end up as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. But they were described in her lifetime as gradual productions because they were produced so gradually. There would be many, many drafts and refinements.
10:31 Greg Jenner? Oh, really?
10:31 Speaker 05 It's extraordinary to think that the bones of Pride and Prejudice were down there on the page when she was about twenty-one. The one that would become known as Sense and Sensibility, you can see what a journey it went on because it was originally written in the form of letters between Eleanor and Marianne. It was an epistolary novel.
10:47 Speaker 06 Was that quite common at the time?
10:49 Speaker 05 It was.
10:50 Speaker 06 Dracula, isn't it?
10:51 Speaker 05 It was a well-known format, but, well, it limits you, doesn't it?
10:54 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
10:54 Speaker 05 It limits what can happen, really, if you've got to write to somebody else to describe it.
10:58 Greg Jenner? Yes. Let's turn on to Pride and Prejudice because that's her most... Most beloved novel, yes, truth universally acknowledged. Can we talk about Pride and Prejudice? How Jane created it and how did she feel about it? Was she proud of it? Was it her favourite book?
11:10 Speaker 05 Was it her favourite book? I'm not sure that we know that.
11:13 Greg Jenner? Okay.
11:14 Speaker 05 But it's certain.
11:15 Speaker 06 She loved Lizzie, didn't she?
11:16 Speaker 05 Yes, she was very proud of her Lizzie, calling her "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". But in the world of the Georgians, Lizzie was actually a bit in your face. She seems recognizably modern in some of her attitudes, but it was quite shocking at the time. This was definitely a sort of a bold move to make such a sparkling, feisty heroine. And there's also some very snobby people in it, like Mr Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. And I think part of the background of this is that one of Jane's brothers had been adopted by richer relatives and he'd actually gone into the proper landed gentry.
11:57 Greg Jenner? Oh.
11:58 Speaker 05 And when Jane went to visit him in his new home, in his new luxury lifestyle, she felt a bit like an outsider.
12:05 Greg Jenner? Oh, really?
12:06 Speaker 05 And being an outsider is definitely part of Lizzie Bennet's sort of core, isn't it?
12:11 Greg Jenner? Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher, not by Jane, but by her father.
12:16 Speaker 06 I thought it's her brother.
12:18 Greg Jenner? Her brother does it, it's a different book, her brother. Her father, he's sort of the proxy here. So Jane wasn't even allowed to go to the publishing meeting and say, "I've written this book". It's the dad.
12:27 Speaker 05 We don't even know if Jane knew that he'd sent it off to a publisher. Yeah, we don't know that for a fact, but he got a pretty sharp refusal. No thanks.
12:36 Greg Jenner? Oh, God, imagine being that guy, turn down Pride and Prejudice. So Austin's third novel was written in her early twenties. That is Northanger Abbey, which has got a fantastic Gothic title. Northanger, it's sort of, you know, you can feel the kind of, the moon is dark and the clouds are coming in and the owl is hooting. It's not her best known novel, but it was her first success in terms of publishing. It's her technical debut in terms of how the publishing world saw her.
13:00 Speaker 05 It was her first novel that was successful in that a publisher actually bought it for £10. £10.
13:06 Greg Jenner? Ka-ching!
13:07 Speaker 06 What is that in today's money?
13:09 Greg Jenner? £10, no.
13:12 Speaker 05 It was not a lot. She, the only money that she had at that time was twenty pounds a year pocket money that her dad gave her. And if she had been a governess, she'd have earned thirty five pounds a year.
13:23 Speaker 06 Right.
13:23 Speaker 05 So not a king's ransom.
13:25 Greg Jenner? So it's a three month salary, maybe. It's a bit of money.
13:27 Speaker 05 Hmm, yeah, and it's the first money she'd ever earned.
13:30 Greg Jenner? Sure, but this is seventeen ninety eight, ninety nine that she wrote it. But it doesn't come out then.
13:35 Speaker 05 For ages, for ages. North Angler Abbey was written in seventeen ninety eight, ninety nine, but it wasn't published until after her death in eighteen seventeen, in a double volume with Persuasion.
13:47 Greg Jenner? In her life, her brothers, her father are doing the negotiations for her. Why is this, Lucy? I mean, women have been writing novels for decades by this point.
13:55 Speaker 05 Yes, but it's a dirty business. It's a dirty business to be a lady, to be a, literally, to be a lady novelist. And it is possible there are role models like Frances Burney.
14:06 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
14:07 Speaker 05 But often they had to present themselves as doing it because their husband had died or because their children were starving. You needed a really strong motive to do it. To do it as a member of the pseudo gentry was just completely socially inappropriate. So that's why she used pseudonyms to correspond with her publishers.
14:24 Greg Jenner? But she never published as Jane Austen?
14:26 Speaker 05 When she was alive, her name wasn't on the cover of her books.
14:30 Speaker 06 By a lady.
14:31 Greg Jenner? A lady.
14:32 Speaker 06 By a lady.
14:33 Greg Jenner? Jane Austen, by this point, had written a few things. The thing that's a constant with Jane Austen, it always ends with a happy ending. Does that mean she was drawing on happiness in her own life? Or is that just simply the form that you had to do as a novelist?
14:47 Speaker 05 You've got to define happiness.
14:49 Greg Jenner? All right.
14:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. Because, you know.
14:52 Greg Jenner? Marriage, marriage at the end.
14:53 Speaker 05 Exactly. In the, in the stories, the marriage plot unfolds. There's always a happy ending in that she gets together with, the heroine gets together with the hero and lives a comfortable life. There's also an element of happiness and completion in the fact that the heroine gets somewhere to live. Because all of them have, nearly all of them have some kind of problem with their home. They've been chucked out of it. They've got no money. They've got no financial security.
15:17 Speaker 05 And it's just not clear whether Jane herself was, as generations have believed her to be, disappointed in love. I mean, because she was a spinster and because she died a spinster, people have thought, oh, well, she must have been, you know, kind of sad and dried up and lonely and screwed up. But she actually made decisions actively not to marry.
15:40 Greg Jenner? All right, so she didn't marry, but she did nearly marry Sally. Do you know this story?
15:45 Speaker 05 No.
15:46 Greg Jenner? All right, there was an engagement, Lucy, the gentleman in question, eighteen oh two, in sweeps, the wonderfully named.
15:54 Speaker 05 Mr. Harris Bigwither. I know it's not, I know it's not funny to laugh at people's names, but that is, that is a bit of a funny name.
16:01 Speaker 06 It's quite. That is hilarious.
16:02 Greg Jenner? Harris Bigwither.
16:03 Speaker 06 Mr. Harris Bigwither, that was never going to work.
16:06 Greg Jenner? No, can you imagine, you know, the front.
16:08 Speaker 06 Can you imagine the wedding night disappointment of Mr. Bigwither?
16:12 Greg Jenner? And the front cover of Pride and Prejudice, you know, written by Jane Bigwither. It just doesn't work, does it? Come on.
16:18 Speaker 06 So tell me about Mr. Harris Bigwither.
16:20 Greg Jenner? Well, I mean, what is there to say, Lucy? It's a, it's a brief fling, let's put it that way. In fact, do you want to.
16:25 Speaker 06 Is he in Bath? Is she in Bath by eighteen oh two?
16:27 Greg Jenner? Not quite yet in Bath, I don't think.
16:29 Speaker 05 She was visiting his sisters, who were good friends of her.
16:31 Greg Jenner? Okay.
16:31 Speaker 05 And he proposed and she said yes. And he came with a mansion and a fortune. They lived in this lovely house called Meny Down Park, his family did. And she said yes until the next morning, when she broke it off.
16:45 Greg Jenner? Oh.
16:46 Speaker 05 She just couldn't go through with it. He was six years younger than her. He was quite physically unimpressive and of course he had a silly name.
16:56 Greg Jenner? I mean, come on.
16:57 Speaker 06 And did she acknowledge to Cassandra that she just couldn't be called Mrs. Bigwither?
17:03 Speaker 06 Did she, how did she talk about it to Cassandra?
17:04 Speaker 05 It was a big, it was a big drama. It was a big drama because the stakes were so high. Because as well as Jane getting a home for the rest of her life and a fortune.
17:12 Speaker 06 Everybody would get a home.
17:13 Greg Jenner? Cassandra could come and stay.
17:15 Speaker 05 Exactly. And she was really good friends with his sisters. There was so much going for it. Except for the man himself.
17:21 Speaker 06 So what did she say about it?
17:22 Speaker 05 She didn't say anything. No, no, there was just a.
17:26 Greg Jenner? She just, the 24 hour cooling off period, she just went, yeah, no, sorry, sorry, no.
17:30 Speaker 06 Just can't do it.
17:31 Greg Jenner? Just can't do it.
17:32 Speaker 05 But I think there's not an accident in the timing of this, because the night she breaks off the engagement, just before that, she'd made her first book deal.
17:40 Speaker 06 Northing Abbey. She had the hope of, I can, I will be able to support myself, I'm not going to need to be Mrs. Bigwether.
17:47 Speaker 05 I do think that. There's no, there's no actual linked evidence for it, but it seems to me psychologically sound, that she thought, maybe I can make my living in another way.
17:57 Speaker 06 So it's a hinge moment, and she never speaks of it again. How very discreet of her.
18:01 Greg Jenner? Yes, she's a classy lady. Let's talk about her twenties, her late twenties, her early thirties. The family does move to Bath in 1801.
18:08 Speaker 06 Bath has been dining out on that ever since. But is it, or is it not true that she hated Bath?
18:13 Speaker 05 There's quite a lot of evidence that you can build up to suggest that, no, she had a terrible time there.
18:18 Greg Jenner? Really? Okay.
18:19 Speaker 05 Yeah. There's another school of thought, which is that the evidence is kind of hints and allusions to things.
18:25 Speaker 06 And is that sponsored by Bath tourism?
18:30 Speaker 05 In 1801, her father decides to move the family to Bath, basically because he knows he needs to get husbands for his daughters. There's nothing for them to live on after he's died.
18:39 Greg Jenner? And that's the marriage market.
18:40 Speaker 05 That's the marriage market. And Jane is not really into this husband hunting thing and is no good at it. And then when he dies, the family begin, so this is Jane, her sister and her mum, they start a new life as poor relations. They've got no money. They have to live on handouts from Jane's brothers. One of the brothers says, I've got a plan. I've just got married. I'm a naval captain. I'm going to be away at sea. I'll rent a house for my mother, my sisters and my wife in Southampton. It turns out that Frank's new wife didn't want to live with her mother-in-law.
19:08 Greg Jenner? Right.
19:08 Speaker 05 And this sort of fell apart as a plan, and they couldn't afford the rent. And then Jane's other brother, Edward, the one who got adopted by the rich people.
19:17 Greg Jenner? Ah, yes.
19:18 Speaker 05 He comes up with a better plan, because he owns a house back in Hampshire, and he lets his mother and sisters live there without any rent for the rest of the...
19:24 Greg Jenner? And this is Chorton.
19:25 Speaker 06 For the rest of their life.
19:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
19:27 Greg Jenner? So we do finally get sort of literary success for Jane. In 1811, Sense and Sensibility was published as the A Lady. A Lady publishes it. It sells well. She retains the copyright, that's good, because she get royalties. Then eighteen thirteen Pride and Prejudice, she sells the copyrights.
19:43 Speaker 05 Yes, really silly move, terrible error. So it was the publisher, John Murray, who got all of the, all of the cash from what turned out to be a big smash hit.
19:52 Greg Jenner? So she just got paid once and that's it, no royalties ever. So one of the biggest novels of all time.
19:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
19:56 Greg Jenner? Ah, that's annoying. And then nothing published under her name until after her death.
20:02 Speaker 05 Emma was published.
20:02 Greg Jenner? Oh, it was Emma published, okay.
20:03 Speaker 05 And so was Mansfield Park. Oh, no, not under her name, no, you're right, sorry.
20:08 Greg Jenner? So always a lady.
20:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:10 Greg Jenner? Book writing, Sally, book writing, she's committed her art. Do you know the next novel?
20:16 Speaker 05 So we've had Pride and Prejudice, Sense Sensibility, Northanger Abbey. Is the next one Persuasion?
20:23 Greg Jenner? No, it's Mansfield Park.
20:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:25 Greg Jenner? Eighteen fourteen, again about a poor relation, Fanny Price, who goes to live with a wealthier family. It's, it, it feels familiar, Lucy.
20:33 Speaker 05 I think people are really interested in this one now because of the possible critique of transatlantic slavery.
20:38 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
20:39 Speaker 05 That's kind of hidden within it.
20:41 Greg Jenner? The Bertram family have made their money in the, in the new world and it's.
20:45 Speaker 05 They have a plantation.
20:47 Greg Jenner? Yeah, it's very distasteful.
20:48 Speaker 05 And the, the, the head of the family goes off and he visits this plantation and then he comes back again. And it's only poor little Fanny, who's shy as anything, who dares to ask him what's going on over there.
20:59 Greg Jenner? Okay.
21:00 Speaker 05 And there's this idea that Mansfield Park, this big grand house, is in fact corrupt. The people there are not good people. And like you were saying, it's Fanny who's the most humble character, who actually has the sort of moral purity and self-worth to clean the whole stable out really, and make everybody behave better.
21:20 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so we have Emma then published in eighteen fifteen, that's your favourite novel of the, of the six, Lucy. We need to talk about Persuasion and, and obviously Sanditon, because sadly Jane became very ill in eighteen fifteen, sixteen, and she was writing Persuasion. And and she never finished Sanditon, Lucy.
21:36 Speaker 05 This is heartbreaking because it was Jane really loved going on holiday to the seaside. This was considered to be a place of health and happiness for her and for all Georgians. And Sanditon is a seaside romance and she wrote it when she was really ill and in bed. And in the little fragment that survives, it's written in her sort of pencil and you can tell that she's ill. But she's clearly imagining a world where she's healthy and happy and by the sea. She's never going to get there.
22:03 Greg Jenner? That's very sad. I mean, she does, I mean, she died in the eighteenth of July, eighteen seventeen. She was only forty one. And she left everything to Cassandra.
22:10 Speaker 05 Yes.
22:10 Greg Jenner? Her sister.
22:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:11 Greg Jenner? Um, Persuasion was published posthumously then, eighteen seventeen, so straight, just after her death, the book comes out.
22:18 Speaker 05 Yes, her family just flogged everything. They said, okay, right, let's move on, sell the copyrights, we'll take the five hundred pounds.
22:23 Greg Jenner? And then Henry got the copyright back for Northanger Abbey.
22:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, and published it.
22:27 Greg Jenner? Okay, so it's it's an extraordinary life, Sally. It's it's tragic in some ways.
22:33 Speaker 05 It is sad, isn't it? It is sad. But what amazing books.
22:38 Greg Jenner? One could view Austen's stories as sort of Gentile bonnet fests. But she's living through an era of tremendous historical turmoil. You've got the French Revolution, the anti-Catholic Gordon riots, the Napoleonic wars, the abolition of slavery act. We have the changing rising of the, you know, the classes, the industrial revolution. We have huge turbulence. Britain nearly goes into sort of revolution a couple of times. But critics have accused her of writing small books in a big time. Lucy, fair?
23:05 Speaker 05 Well, I don't think it is. This is a traditional criticism. And you can read them as sort of defenses of the existing order. Because things get resolved at the end and there's a lot of concern about who's going to act properly and look after the countryside and the community. But if you look for the details of the great changes of her time, they're there. They're just done in a feminine, domestic way. One example I like is that in Pride and Prejudice, the silly girls, Kitty and Lydia, they go into the town. And they come home and they say, oh, we had a great day. We went to a hat shop and we saw a soldier being flogged and then we had tea. And they come home and they say this. Really shocking thing, they saw someone being flogged in the street of their local town.
23:48 Greg Jenner? And a soldier.
23:49 Speaker 05 But because they're silly girls, it's used to express their character. They're too silly to see what's happening. So that's how the Napoleonic War is present in Jane Austen in a subtle feminine way.
24:00 Speaker 06 I find it fascinating, Lucy was telling me just before we started recording that Winston Churchill said Jane Austen's books got him through the Second World War.
24:07 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
24:08 Speaker 06 I mean, there's a deep comfort and optimism, isn't there?
24:11 Greg Jenner? Hmm, yeah. The Nuance Window!
24:19 Greg Jenner? Time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Sally and I sit quietly and sip tea in the drawing room for two minutes while Lucy sits at the pianoforte to serenade us with something we need to know about Jane Austen. My stopwatch is ready, you have two minutes Lucy, take it away.
24:34 Speaker 05 A lot of people have got the idea that Jane Austen was some kind of little old lady living in a cottage in the countryside, producing masterpieces kind of by accident. And this is what her family want us to think, because it was socially inappropriate for her to be this kind of ambitious, professionally successful female writer. And when she was writing, she didn't have a proper study, she'd write on this wobbly little table in the corner of the drawing room, which had a squeaky door. And she would never get this fixed, because when the door squeaked, she would know to hide away her paper and to get on with whatever it was that her family wanted her to do.
25:16 Speaker 05 So here, kind of in secret, she was producing her late great books, Emma and Mansfield Park and Persuasion. And to me, these are books with a really serious message, which is that it is so rubbish that women are expected to marry for money. So kind of in secret, she was in fact writing the books that would blow the locks off the doors that were keeping women like her trapped in this subordinate position in society and in their families. And that is why I think she's not just an important writer, but also because of the risks she took to become a writer, an important human being. I must say, this is my interpretation.
25:59 Speaker 05 And the great thing about Jane Austen is that she's such a rich artist, you can see what you want to see. You can make the case that she's a brilliant comedian. You can make the case that she's defending the social order and she's all about doing the... The conventional right thing, or you can make the case, like I do, that she wouldn't have recognised herself as such, but that she was a feminist.
26:23 Speaker 06 I loved reading that she, a letter she wrote to her sister, where she talks about going around the galleries in London, looking for portraits of the characters in Pride and Prejudice. That, to me, is just so, because that's sort of what I do preparing a part, I collect a load of, I collect a life and an image and, you know, smells and all of that. But the idea that she's, these characters live on, they live on for us, but they live on for her too.
26:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:52 Speaker 06 And she's telling Cassandra, I haven't been able to find a portrait of Lizzie. And I'm sure that's because Mr Darcy is so proud of her, he wouldn't want her portrait up in public. But I found Jane, the very image of Jane, wearing a yellow dress, which confirms to me that Jane, that yellow was Jane's favourite colour. It's just fascinating to me that when you do something good, they do carry, these characters do live on and they do live on with you, you know.
27:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
27:20 Speaker 06 And I love that they lived on with her.
27:22 Greg Jenner? Listeners, if you want more of Sally, check out our episode on Fairy Tales, it was an absolute treat. For more literary geniuses with Dr Lucy, seek out our episode on Agatha Christie, another formidable, brilliant writer. And if you long for Regency romance, come dating with us on our episode about Georgian courtship with lovely Caryad Lloyd. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds in the UK to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than any other podcast app. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the wonderful Dr Lucy Worsley, thank you so much Lucy.
27:55 Speaker 05 A pleasure, thank you.
27:57 Greg Jenner? And in Comedy Corner, we have the sensational Sally Phillips, thank you Sally.
28:01 Speaker 06 Thank you very, very much for having me.
28:03 Greg Jenner? And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we dust off another favourite from the library of history. But for now, I'm off to rummage in the loft through my old teenage comedy sketches, in the hope that they're as funny as love and friendship, but let's be honest, they won't be. Bye.
28:20 Greg Jenner? Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4.
28:35 Speaker 07 Two months ago, I was just an ordinary mum.
28:40 Speaker 06 From BBC Radio 4, as part of Limelight, this is Mother Cover.
28:45 Greg Jenner? Our system has identified you as a candidate for a position. See this woman here in the photo? She attends a mother and baby group at the town hall.
28:53 Speaker 07 Can I sit here? I'm Gwen, by the way. Liz. Is she dangerous?
28:57 Greg Jenner? Lives are at stake here, Gwen.
28:59 Speaker 07 What do you mean, lives? Gwen? What are you doing? I want out. I want out now. Oh my god, Liz, that tree, look out!
29:10 Speaker 06 Listen to the whole series right now, first on BBC Sounds.
29:15 Speaker 07 What on earth is your mummy up to?
29:22 Greg Jenner? Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Saffron Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new programme that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.
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29:51 Speaker 03 It often starts with a question. What were lines doing in York in the third century? Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? Then we search for answers.
30:01 Speaker 06 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.
30:06 Speaker 03 If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure. As I was doing the research for the programme, my jaw just dropped further and further down. In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Watch the discussions unfold and explore over a thousand conversations in our archive. I'm Nisha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world. In Our Time. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:40 Speaker 03 Coffee? Love a cup of tea.
30:42 Speaker 06 I'll have tea, too.
30:43 Speaker 03 Tea for me, please.
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