Our Romance with Jane Austen

0:05Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How are you guys doing? Doing great. Doing well.

0:25Now, if you're anything like me, when you think of a certain kind of period romance, you know what I'm talking about. hands brushing, repressed feelings, a prolonged marriage plot, an empire waste. The name that comes to mind is Jane Austen. Now, across the six novels that she wrote in her lifetime, Austen's work gives us, yes, romances for the ages, but also, more importantly, I think, humor and biting social commentary. What are some of our favorite tropes from an Austen novel? Can we locate some of those? will they won't they the love that dare not speak its name which which in this case which in this case is just like heterosexual love until finally in like the last five pages it speaks its name amazing right yeah totally yeah um money money is huge the need for money the having of money, what you do with money, how you get your money.

1:31Can money and love meet at that perfect place on the curve that will satisfy the emotional needs and ambitions of the heroine with her material needs? Yeah. Also another thing, and Alex, I know we've discussed this off mic, as they say, smart woman surrounded by idiots. Absolutely. That's evergreen in Austin. An insufferable, pompous clergyman. Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, we see you. And I'd say alongside the money, an attention to the properties of an estate. You got to really know, like, the estate, the home and hearth are the backdrop against which all of these things play out. Absolutely. And let us not forget miscommunication.

2:19If you could say something and get a true answer back and then make a decision based on fairly won information, we wouldn't be dealing with, first of all, the novel, and certainly not a novel by Jane Austen. Correct. It's true. Absolutely. So you, our listener, might be wondering, why Jane Austen? Why now? Well, to that I say, it's her birthday. Woo! You know, give her some flowers. This month, actually, and just about a week ago. And also, I don't know why, but the holidays just feel like a very Austen-y time. So we're taking this chance to share an episode we recorded earlier this year, all about Jane Austen and why we love her and why we've loved her for 250 years since her birth in the great year, 1775.

3:03Today, we're looking back at her work and the many, many adaptations thereof. We're going to discuss it all, the romance, the humor, and why after all this time, the works of Jane Austen still resonate. So that's today on Critics at Large. Our Romance with Jane Austen.

3:28Okay, let's start, as one must, with Austen's novels. There are six of them. Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Emma. Last week, thank you, listeners. Thank you, as always. We put out a poll on Instagram asking you all about your favorite Jane Austen novel. Dumb, dumb, dumb. 34 % of you, a plurality, said Pride and Prejudice was numero uno. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That reflects my sense of things. All the way at the bottom was Northanger Abbey. 4%. Are we surprised? We're not. And I'm just going to tell you why I'm not.

4:16And I need to be honest with my fellow critics. Yes. This is the one Austen novel I haven't read. The one that got away. Well, it hasn't got away for long because, boy, am I going to get on it now. You're going to tear in. But I cannot tell a lie. So we've heard our listeners' opinions. Does anybody want to jump in and go to bat for a favorite Austen novel? Friends? Okay. I'm ready to go to bat, but I just want to say something about the bat that I'm batting with. and the balls that are coming at it. Do I have a favorite? Sort of. Does it change? It does because these novels are very precious.

4:57There are only six. I mean, there are scraps of more. There's Sanditon, which she was working on when she died. There is Lady Susan, which was her earliest mature work, which is written in letters. And these things are not really considered with the six. The six. The apocryphal gospels. Exactly. Exactly. Well, not even apocryphal. No, they're out there. They're just not. They don't count. Okay. So, favorite, even though, yeah, people love to have favorites, it makes me a little bit nervous. And because it makes me nervous, I'm cheating. Okay. And here's what I'm doing. Okay. I brought two. I brought two.

5:28Oh, okay, okay. So, the first thing I want to say is I don't want to exist in a world in which Pride and Prejudice wasn't written. Absolutely. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to be around. I just, you know, wake me up when Pride and Prejudice is written and published. Wow. Yeah. This novel, I think the edition I have, the back of it, says something like, no novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. That is so true that when I went into labor, I brought Pride and Prejudice. Not labor. Labor. Wow. However, Pride and Prejudice, while it is a wonderful, sparkling gem of a novel, I brought it in merely to say that right now, at this point in time, my favorite is Emma.

6:12Hmm. And the most recent reading I did of Emma was this past spring. It is, I think, one of these novels that is actually so complex that it can really change every time you read it and show you different aspects of itself, in part because it's based on a total misunderstanding. It's based on Emma, the main character, Emma Woodhouse's chronic, inveterate misunderstanding of the world she lives in, the people around her, her own self, her own emotions, and the emotions of others. Everything is misread. And right in the middle of this, there is an actual mystery story. This guy, Frank Churchill, shows up.

6:50He is the natural son of a family friend of Emma's, but he was raised by rich relations elsewhere. He's been talked of in the village, in the town of Highbury for years. He comes to Highbury. He's charming. He's handsome. He flirts with Emma. Emma starts to feel tempted by him, sort of. She's rich on her own, so she doesn't need to marry. This is unique among Jane Austen heroines. And the mystery is what the hell is going on with Frank Churchill and Emma? But also, what is his deal? There's someone called Jane Fairfax, a poor relation of another friend of the family's who's lounging about. She showed up at the same time as Frank.

7:24What could the deal be? So the first time you read this novel, you don't know. Every subsequent reading, of course, you have the information. And I think that this is one of these novels that gets so rich when you read it knowing what's going to happen. Because you see how Austen is creating the mystery, but you also see how Emma is misreading. The experience of reading Emma is really reading a bad novelist. Emma is writing a novel about her own life. And she sees the people in her life as characters. She has what we call, in this year 2025, main character syndrome. And like, it's not unfair. Her name is on the book.

7:59She is the main character. But this is a book about the flaws of having main character syndrome, where you feel that everyone else is existing in your story. It's a bit of an outlier in Austen's over, right? Like the heroine herself is totally an outlier. Isn't she kind of uniquely different from all other Austen heroines? You get it right in the first line. Yeah. Which is, Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

8:32Those things are not true. That's like the opposite of everything. Of any other Austen heroine. And handsome, clever, yes, those things are true. Rich? No. And it is the rich that is totally different. I think basically Jane Austen set herself this project. She famously said of Emma, I'm going to write a heroine who no one but myself will much like. Because those things are unsympathetic. You don't like people like that. She just like has it going on. She's running around her town. She's the queen of her little world. But I do think that one thing that goes on in Emma is you see how small that world is.

9:02And it increasingly – this is one of the novels where Austen ventriloquizes the attitudes of society the best, I think. And you feel how confining it might be. Yeah, you're – oh, great. You're the princess of Highbury. Well, like, that's not a very big or cool place to be the princess of. You know, Emma – it comes out at one point in this novel that Emma's never seen the sea. She lives in England. It's an island. But she's never seen the sea. She's not going far afield. She's provincial. Yeah. She's provincial. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the world of Austen in general, that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of an Austen novel, is that the world of her characters is often very small, right?

9:43It's provincial. It's kind of drawn with a fine brush. They don't go that far, usually. You know, they might go to Bath. They might go to Lyme. They might go, you know, it's like there's not a lot going on. There might be a ball or two. There might be an outing. You know, there might be like a game of cards, like there might be a concert. But but other than that, it's mostly either people like staying in their own homes and having their own domestic dramas or there's a visitor. You know, there's like they go to visit in the village. Somebody from the village comes to visit. You know, it's like the dramas are very, very, very localized, which might lead me to another pretty localized book, which is my favorite, which is Austen's Persuasion.

10:34So this is Austin's final novel, published in 1817. And it is about Anne Elliot, who is gasp, 27 and unmarried. She is the daughter of a vain, stupid baronet, Sir Walter Elliot. And it's a kind of a Cinderella story. She has two sisters, one older, one younger, Elizabeth and Mary. Both of them are total duds, self-centered narcissists. And Anne Elliot is kind of shuttled between Mary's house, the younger married sister, and also a family friend, Mrs. Russell, who is described as a very wise woman, a fine lady, who made a mistake. Eight years before, eight years earlier, when Anne was in the full bloom of youth, she fell in love with Mr.

11:31Wentworth, a sailor who was below her class-wise, didn't have a fortune. They fell deeply in love with each other. And Lady Russell said, you cannot marry this man. You have to reject him. He is not worthy of you in station, in fortune. and she persuaded her, persuasion, to let go of this love affair and say, okay, I reject you. Now, Anne, the bloom of youth gone, nearly an old crone is she. Suddenly, Captain Wentworth returns to Anne's life and then begins this sort of like, will there, won't they situation, which is so familiar to us from Austin's general work. Okay. I love this book. There is a review that Virginia Woolf in 1924 wrote of a kind of edition of all of Austin's novels that came out then.

12:33And she speaks of persuasion. And I just want to quote her. So she's saying of Austin, her attitude to life itself is altered. Austen's with this book. She is seeing it for the greater part of the book through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which until the very end she is forced to comment upon in silence. And so I think the thing that Wolf says about silence, this is a book about loneliness. because I think in almost every other Austen book, there is, you know, whether it's like Lizzie and Jane and Pride and Prejudice or like there is like a bosom friend usually or some sort of like outlet for the heroine to, even if carefully, even if, you know, of course, it's not like things are very repressed and circumscribed in all the books, I think.

13:31But I think there is usually some person who you can kind of confess your feelings to. And in this book, Anne Elliott is totally alone. In her consciousness, she is completely alone. She has only her own counsel to take. And so the idea of kind of suffering in silence is really heartbreaking in this book. Is that approach to sort of individual consciousness the reason that you like this book so much, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think it really moved me the first time I read it. I just reread it. I finished it again last night because I hadn't read it since I was in my 20s. Just last night. So I really enjoyed it.

14:08And I was like, I just remember feeling so moved by the fact that she is so alone and has to be so watchful on her own. and finally this like tension of silence over the course of this book is finally broken when Captain Wentworth delivers a secret letter to Anne Elliot. A secret letter. I know. And it's so romantic and it's like finally, finally. The release of this built up, the tension isn't totally erotic. This like long build up. It's almost like intellectual. Yes. But these thoughts have been accruing and accruing and accruing and accruing. It's emotional. But Vincent, and I think we're going to come back to that, that is it for all of them.

14:55Sure. Like, you know, that's it. I think that the intellectual being erotic is the huge appeal of these books over time. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. That's a good point. That there can be like a surplus of not just feeling but of thought and that this— And that the act of thinking is sexy and thinking together but also thinking very seriously about life and about oneself and expanding your knowledge. that is beautiful and that is attractive to someone else, but also to oneself. It makes one worthy of attraction. And then many listeners brought up this letter scene as the reason they love persuasion. And I'm going to read a little bit from Captain Wentworth's letter.

15:37I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman. That his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Literal chills, my friends. My God. I know. I know. No. The man has been a C for so long. He's been fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Has he forgotten? No.

16:25No. No. Absolutely not. And just Anne's response, such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. Oh, agree.

16:40All right, Vincent. Okay. My favorite Austin book is, I think, kind of an outlier because it is, to my mind, the least plot heavy. And it is also, to my mind, the least romantic by a far cry. It is Mansfield Park, Austin's third novel. And to me, if the novel is on some level the art of narration, to me it is where it is the pinnacle of Austin's art. That the narrative strategy of this book is just, to me, incredible. And to that end, I'm going to try to like speed through the plot because to me the plot is almost not the point. A young woman at the outset of the novel, 10 years old, her name is Fanny Price, is sent to live on an estate called Mansfield Park.

17:29which is owned by her uncle by marriage, Thomas Bertram. He's the baronet of this locale. And her uncle and aunt have two daughters who are sort of perfect products of their society. They're beautiful, handsome, charming in their way, but also sort of totally horrible to her, as is basically everybody in this book, except for the son of this family, Edmund, who is kind of the friend of her heart. and soon when the cleric, Mr. Norris, the Reverend Norris dies, another group of people move into the house where he once lived with Mrs. Norris. And these are the Crawfords, Henry and Mary. And their deal is that they are kind of more worldly.

18:15And they're siblings. They're siblings. Mary is very good looking. And Henry is really funny. It's like, he's not that handsome. Everybody's always like, first time you meet him, You're not that impressed. But he has what's called comportment. He has countenance. So basically, kids— He knows how to work it. That means he has riz. He just like kind of— He's rizzed up. He's rizzed up. Every time you meet him, he just like seems cooler. And people—and he's known as sort of a playboy. And in the fullness of time, he, as a sort of game, tries to attract the scrupulously moral Fanny, who says no, says no, says no.

18:53and it's very dangerous liaisons quoted in that sense and you know not to spoil it the apex of the novel really the moral and narrative crux of the novel is her total rejection of him can I read a passage from Mansfield Park to just talk about this narrative issue I insist that you do Thomas Bertram has gone to attend to his state in Antigua and a whole paragraph is dedicated to like why nobody misses him. And whether this is a correct feeling to have. So his daughters, the Miss Bertrams, were much to be pitied on the occasion, not for their sorrow, but for their want of it. They don't miss their father.

19:36Their father was no object of love to them. He had never seemed the friend of their pleasures, and his absence was unhappily most welcome. Unhappily most welcome. So there is the real thing that they should feel, and the thing that they sort of, in the context of their moral world, do feel. And these things are at odds, but only in the life of the narrator. The narrator is like, they should feel this way. They're much to be pitied, but they don't feel this way. And the manners, the theatricality of the society is like kind of foremost, like how one should act and how much like the marriage plot, everything else that we've talked about, is really just a working through of one level of morality and a deeper level of morality.

20:21This is so interesting, Vincent. And I think you're totally right to position it as this kind of almost philosophical novel. You know, it's a novel of ideas in a sense. But there's also something very pragmatic about Austen in this novel and in others as well. when we think about the example of not loving one's own father, right? So she positions, as you say, all of these levels of like one should and one doesn't, one yearns to, one mourns the inability to, you know, all of that. But she is presenting people, daughters or relatives who don't like this father figure, and that's okay. Like she presents him as an asshole.

21:09The same thing happens in persuasion. Anne doesn't love her father. Her father certainly doesn't love her. She will act properly and she will respect him because that is kind of the structure of things and what one should do morally, I guess. But it's also presented as totally okay that she doesn't love him because he's an asshole. So there's a kind of pragmatism in Austin that is another level of that, right? It's like, yeah, there are all of these levels, moral levels. Should, should, should. Should, should, should. But there's also just life in which some people suck. And it's okay, in fact, advisable probably not to mistake them for something else.

21:55And even if it's like your own father, your own mother, whatever it is, it's okay not to love them. That's right. Which is kind of radical. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

22:09Jen Austin's works are enduring classics, but she herself is a bit of a mystery. What do we know or think we know about the woman behind the novels? Critics at Large. We'll be right back.

22:29Hi, I'm Willa Paskin, the host of Decoder Ring, Slate's podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. On Decoder Ring, we dive down rabbit holes and obsessively explore questions hiding in plain sight. Like, why has slow dancing gone out of style? And when did we all become obsessed with hydration? And where did the word mullet, you know, to describe a hairstyle, come from? That's Decoder Ring, named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by The New York Times. Listen to new episodes every two weeks and make sure to follow us so you never miss one.

23:09Okay, so listening to you guys talk about some of these novels that I love so much, it, to me, justifies why, even though we're here, like, picking favorites, it's impossible. And I don't just mean because we love them all equally. Like, no, we don't have to. We're human. That's fine. But people love these books. And I think they love them for a few different reasons. Because they're so witty. Because they're so funny. They are hilarious. Like, if you haven't read Pride and Prejudice, read it and tell me you don't laugh at the first scene when Mrs. Bennett is running around like Mama Hen, just like clucking about Netherfield Park being let it last.

23:44You know, it's just and they're very human. And then, of course, the love aspect. And I just want to say something in defense of the love aspect. Absolutely no defense is needed. No defense is needed. But I do think sometimes when people like raise their eye at the idea of Jane Austen and all these women getting married, I think what's going on is love is the answer to loneliness in these books in a very profound way. The proper love is an answer to loneliness. You know, for instance, Fanny Price, her kind of soul's friend, is the young boy, later man, who she ends up realizing she has real love for because of communication.

24:22Like, because of a real— They can talk. Yeah, they can talk, but I mean, like, communication on even a deeper level of seeing who you are through someone else and having the same effect on that person and, like, growing together. And I think even with Emma, which in some ways is the most cynical of the novels, because Emma marries exactly the guy you'd expect her to marry. She's the richest lady around. She marries the richest guy around. And like, oh, by the way, her sister's already married to his brother. But what makes you believe that this is good and beautiful, even as I do think there is very much an arch eyebrow in this novel about that match, is that there is, again, a communication between the two of them that is not possible with others.

25:01And part of the sadness of the book to me is how rigidly classed that is, that the communication is possible because only one man can really speak freely to Emma because of the class position and can really observe her faults. But that's hot, guys. And so I think the hotness of the mind is what makes Jane Austen so enduring over time and not only not frivolous, but provides this thing that people want to see in their own lives. That is my theory. Interesting. See, that to me brings into question something I think to me quite large, which I think to your point about like the whole cloth of this corpus, these six books.

25:46The big question for me is like the nature and the depth of the satire, whether we're supposed to like it or find it hot at all. Our colleague, Emily Nussbaum, introduced a concept that I think is so useful, and I think about it all the time when I'm looking at something that seems to be ironic in some sense, is the idea of the bad fan. That is like you watch Breaking Bad and you end up cheering on Walter White. You want to cook meth. And you're like— Let's cook. Exactly. Let's cook. Let's cook. And like, you know, you start to hate all the characters, like his wife, Skylar, who wants him to not cook, perhaps, you know, all this kind of thing.

26:30And how much we root for the romances that we find as they play out under these, really, like, when you think about it objectively, kind of excruciating constraints, as we say, of class, situation, et cetera, how much we are supposed to submit to the sort of the rhythm of suspense and will they or won't they and how much we're supposed to enjoy that and have that eyebrow up is, to me, a question. Because I don't, I will say I am not a rereader of Austen. I have like a admiring part of my mind about it. And like the art of the books, every time I go back to them, especially the smoothness and the quick facility of the narration and how easily she can go into different minds.