00:00:30.000Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast.
00:00:45.020My name is Anne Foster and we are in our Regency era.
00:00:49.520That's right, it's a new series on vulgar history and we're going to be talking about
00:00:53.820interesting and wild and weird and scandalous people from the Regency era.
00:01:00.000What the Regency era is technically, it's a time period from 1811 until 1820, when the Prince of Wales became the regent of England because of the illness of his father, George III.
00:01:13.700But in kind of popular speaking, the Regency era is often extended a bit. So it's kind of like from like the late 18th century, right up until when Queen Victoria became monarch in 1837.
00:01:25.820So what we're talking about is the late 18th century, early 19th century, primarily in England.
00:01:34.100And as a shorthand to describe this period to people, which I've been doing often lately, I say, well, you know, it's like Bridgerton.
00:01:40.380And some people know that. And sometimes they say Jane Austen Times.
00:01:44.100People seem to either know Jane Austen Times or they seem to know Bridgerton.
00:01:47.840That's the era that we're talking about.
00:01:49.360Jane Austen is by far, I think, the best known person from the Regency era. If you go to a
00:01:57.180Regency event, of which there are many, you know, tea parties and Regency era balls and everything,
00:02:03.440Jane Austen is very much the inspiration for a lot of those things. And so today we're kicking
00:02:07.620off this Regency era series by talking about Jane Austen herself. Of all the people I profiled on
00:02:14.280this podcast, I think Jane Austen might have the biggest and most passionate fan base out of any
00:02:19.840of them. And so I really wanted to do justice to this iconic writer. And I knew I couldn't do that
00:02:26.040on my own. And so I have the most fantastic guest with me. It's Dr. Paula Byrne, who is one of the
00:02:32.420world's leading experts on Jane Austen. She has written two nonfiction books about Jane Austen,
00:02:38.200and she's just published a new novel about Jane Austen. It's called Six Weeks by the Sea.
00:02:42.980And I was so grateful Paula joined me to help explain the importance and the influence and the real life story of a woman who, a lot of people know her life story, but I think more people know her name or her books than they know what she actually, what her life was like.
00:02:57.980And so anyway, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Paula Byrne.
00:03:00.960And I'm going to pop back at the end with some more updates and some more information.
00:03:04.500so welcome to vulgar history a feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is ann foster and
00:03:14.320this is our regency era series where we're talking about people who lived well the regency era the
00:03:19.500dates are debatable but roughly the first part of the 1800s in england and the most famous regency
00:03:26.100era person to me is certainly jane austen and that's who we're talking about today and i'm so
00:03:31.320happy to have our guest, Paula Byrne, author of several books, including two nonfiction books
00:03:36.680about Jane Austen and a new fiction novel about Jane Austen. Paula, thank you so much for joining
00:03:41.740us. I'm happy to be here. I'm so happy you're here. I know Jane Austen has a real devoted fan
00:03:48.840base. So I want to make sure for this episode that where I'm doing everything correctly, I'm
00:03:53.900portraying this heroine appropriately to the legions of people who adore her. Could you tell
00:03:59.580me, I'm just curious to know, do you remember when you first read a Jane Austen book, how old
00:04:03.740you were? Yeah, I do. I was 14. It's a very funny story, actually, because I was at school
00:04:09.700and I had, you know how people say I had this amazing English teacher and they were just
00:04:14.400incredible and they changed my life. I did not have that. I had the opposite. I had an English
00:04:18.860teacher who said, I don't believe in you and I don't think you're suitable to do this. So I took
00:04:25.020myself to night school and when I was 14 and went to school at night and I read Mansfield Park with
00:04:31.480an amazing teacher and that's how I met Jane Austen when I was 14. Mansfield Park is your
00:04:36.100first Jane Austen is interesting I feel like most people Pride and Prejudice is a lot of people's
00:04:41.540first entry so that's interesting Mansfield Park is one of the the least adapted into film certainly
00:04:48.540but so at that point did you know like oh this is for me I'm going to read all of her other books
00:04:53.680I love this writer. Oh, completely. I was completely hooked. I was 14. And I just thought
00:04:59.680this is the best thing I've ever read. I mean, I had no idea that she would change my life in the
00:05:04.900way that she's changed my life. And I would spend the next 20 years writing books about her and
00:05:09.100talking about her and traveling the world. But I just knew instinctively, intuitively at the age
00:05:13.700of 14 that I was reading something that was very extraordinary. I'd like to go through today and
00:05:19.100with your assistance is to just explain, first of all, just sort of who she was as a person.
00:05:24.360I think Jane Austen is so famous as a brand, as an icon. People know the characters in her books,
00:05:30.240I think, often more than they know her actual life story. So can you set the scene for her
00:05:35.920family where she was born, where they lived? I mean, the extraordinary thing is for such a
00:05:41.440genius that she was a very ordinary person. She was a Claire Jimmins daughter living in Hampshire
00:05:46.840in england she was not rich she wasn't poor so she was sort of middle class really you know i
00:05:55.460use that term advisedly and was part of a big family family of eight there were six brothers
00:06:01.080two sisters so they were very intelligent clever read a lot and she had to really fight for her
00:06:07.320place in the family you know she had to be really funny and she's one of the younger right so it's
00:06:12.740she is yeah so just fighting for the the attention just you're so right and i think
00:06:18.120the younger you get in the family but also when you you're in a family of incredibly brilliant
00:06:21.980and clever people that's harder you said there's brothers and then two sisters and i know she's
00:06:28.360she was very close to her sister cassandra they were very close in age weren't they
00:06:31.500not so close in age there were five years between them um she was very close in age to her two
00:06:36.980brothers, Charles and Frank. So she was sandwiched between two brothers. So no, she wasn't close in
00:06:43.940age to Cassandra, but they were the only two sisters in a family of boys. So inevitably they
00:06:49.580would get quite close. And that's where I find it really interesting. So clearly, I mean, obviously
00:06:53.700Jane Austen is known for her writing, but just from what I've been looking up, most of the images
00:06:58.360that we know for sure that are Jane Austen were drawn by Cassandra. So clearly she was a talented
00:07:03.680artist that was where where she was drawn creatively were they were they a creative
00:07:08.720family in general or was this just a time period where people children were encouraged to pursue
00:07:13.660the arts yeah I mean I don't think Cassandra was a talented artist I think I think you're
00:07:18.260completely right that actually lots of people just drew people in the way that you might
00:07:24.220nowadays say I'll take a good photograph um I don't think she was particularly talented
00:07:29.420as an artist um it's shocking really that um only two sketches of jane austen survive
00:07:36.160by cassandra it's also shocking that there are many portraits of her brothers but not
00:07:41.260the most talented of the family who is the the daughter um jane um i don't think cassandra was
00:07:48.060talented at all but i think she was as as many girls were you that's what you did to be accomplished
00:07:53.780you just you just drew something but jane austen was the genius of the family clearly of all of
00:07:59.400these clever, fairly clever, but not super talented. But this was this one genius in this family of
00:08:06.640eight. In terms of this, this family, this accomplished family, and Jane herself being
00:08:11.940such a talented writer, what in the Regency era, where she's growing up in this, not, you know,
00:08:18.600super high class, not poverty stricken, but right in the middle, what sort of education was there
00:08:22.900for a girl like her at that time. So she basically was the beneficiary of her father's
00:08:29.440library. Having said that, she did go to school. She went to boarding school at a very young age,
00:08:36.140partly to make room for her father's pupils who were also in the rectory. So she went to school
00:08:43.740a couple of times and then came back a couple of times. But when we talk about education,
00:08:48.480it was not the education her brothers received. It was a very, very, very different kind of
00:08:52.660education. And by our standards today, it was very inferior. It was sent off to, she went to
00:09:01.720Oxford, she went to Southampton, she went to a few places, but it was more to keep her out of the way
00:09:06.500than it was to educate her. Her education was really via an incredible library and an amazingly
00:09:17.400talented family who I say not a genius like her but very talented so thinking writing reading
00:09:26.100that in a way is the best education of all surely. Today she's very well known as a writer but in that
00:09:33.700and today there's many women are well known as a writer but for her what as at a young age would0.99
00:09:40.300she have thought of that as a possibility for something she could do was there a role model0.96
00:09:44.380that she could look at as a woman who was a writer. Oh yeah, she was obsessed with Fanny0.69
00:09:49.860Barney and Mariah Edgeworth and they were writers, female writers who came before her
00:09:55.140and she adored their books. So I think they were definitely role models for the kind of
00:09:59.220writer she wanted to be. Because novels at this time, just to clarify for everybody,
00:10:04.680it wasn't the poetry was a much more acceptable sort of thing to read or to write as I understand
00:10:10.140it, especially for a woman. Novels were more just kind of like, you know, the paperbacks you buy at
00:10:14.780the drugstores. However, people saw all novels. Is that sort of correct?
00:10:19.300Pretty much. I mean, there were libraries. Circulating libraries were a new thing.
00:10:24.580So you could pay a subscription and then go to a library. And so lots of women1.00
00:10:28.400went to libraries and paid their subscription and got lots of books on that basis. There were also0.71
00:10:35.320a lot of women novelist writers early 19th century so she was the beneficiary of women writers saying
00:10:41.460we want to make novels our own this is a genre that actually we're good at because we're letter
00:10:47.360writers we write letters to our sisters we write letters to our cousins we write letters to our
00:10:51.120brothers and the novel begins with the epistolary tradition which is letters so for women they were
00:10:59.060just like well I write letters every day hey I can write letters in novels and that's how the first
00:11:04.320novels began and then new novels were like taking it one step further but what jane austen does take
00:11:09.920it to an even greater step well and that's i think a good a good point to talk about do we know
00:11:14.940like her juvenilia as it's called has been published you know the writings that she did
00:11:19.200as a young person so what sorts of things did she start writing when she really started taking
00:11:24.960this seriously well she didn't take it seriously when she was young because what was really funny
00:11:30.300about that was she did the opposite she took on these great giants of literature like samuel johns
00:11:36.120richardson and um all of these amazing male writers samuel fielding and and so she took on
00:11:44.420these giants of the novel form who were mainly male and she just parodied them and satirized
00:11:51.840them and she knew at the age of 11 or 12 she was better than them i really firmly believe that
00:11:56.320she absolutely thought fielding and richardson you might think you're great but i'm greater i
00:12:01.340really believe the age of 12 she thought that so we should never dismiss her early writings because
00:12:06.400she is taking on these giants and saying actually the way you present women as perfect beings is not
00:12:12.800realistic i will write heroines that are flawed and make mistakes and are not beautiful and that
00:12:21.120was going against this whole tradition of novel writing of which men were the main writers of that
00:12:26.720genre and saying journalists are saying it's ridiculous what you're doing no woman could
00:12:32.380ever live up to that it's not realistic women are real flesh and blood creatures and my my heroines
00:12:40.480are not going to be like samuel feeling the riches they're going to be different so she knew from a
00:12:46.820age of 11, 12, she writes this hilarious, hysterical parodies in her juvenilia, where0.97
00:12:53.940she takes on these giants and says, you're being ridiculous. Women don't think like this. Women0.99
00:12:58.240don't behave like this. Women don't have to be beautiful. Women don't have to be perfect.1.00
00:13:03.720So she's always ahead of the game. And what was her family's, how did they support her0.99
00:13:11.140in her writing i think i read that her her father was was championing her to some extent
00:13:17.240i think they were all championing her all of them because i think they knew they had a genius in
00:13:21.860their midst so her father bought her her first writing desk he bought her leather notebooks to
00:13:27.560write her juvenilia in i mean that someone who goes to the the bother of going into a shop and
00:13:35.060buying a leather bound notebook to give to your talented daughter because you actually believe in
00:13:40.400her. And you bother buying her writing desk because you believe in her. And then you write
00:13:45.440to a publisher in 1797 and say, I've got First Impressions, which is the early version of Pride
00:13:50.520and Prejudice. This is her father. And then her brothers, her brother Henry, writing to try and
00:13:55.960get her a book deal. Hugely important, let alone the women who later on when she, in 1811, when0.93
00:14:04.420she goes to Chawton and all the women around her say, we know you're a genius. We're just going to
00:14:09.500do the baking and do all the boring stuff because actually you're a genius. So yeah, absolutely,
00:14:14.400100%. Her family were utterly aware that she was completely brilliant and they facilitated
00:14:21.040the circumstances by which she could enable her genius to flourish.
00:14:26.000That's so, I'm so grateful that that's the family that she was born into in another circumstance.
00:14:31.400And I'm sure this happened. People with a similar genius who didn't have a family who wouldn't
00:14:35.040support them, we'd never know about what they did. So she started writing, she was writing these
00:14:41.500hilarious, you know, as a young girl, these kind of parodies that you're saying. So her first
00:14:46.000version of Pride and Prejudice, first impressions. So at that point, because of who she was as a
00:14:52.420young woman, she wouldn't be able to just send that to a publisher herself. So in order to get
00:14:57.140that published, it had to go through her male relatives. Is that right? Yeah, 100%. And so
00:15:02.580initially her father sends this first impressions i.e proud marriages and it gets returned by post
00:15:10.220like so it doesn't get anywhere but the fact is he writes and says this is like fanny bernie's
00:15:15.540evelina which is the great novel of its day it's very similar to this so her father george
00:15:22.180austin is trying to say to this publisher hey look this is the new fanny bernie little did he know
00:15:28.220she would outstrip Fanny Burney in a million ways but obviously that was declined um but the fact
00:15:35.040as you as you rightly say um that the fact that she had these people behind her was just people
00:15:42.440her father was incredibly intelligent um he was he went to Oxford a lot of her brothers went to
00:15:48.220Oxford they were really smart and for them to realize that she's actually better than all of
00:15:54.260them it's quite significant frankly it's not just like oh let's indulge this little girl's fantasies
00:16:01.720of being a fun writer this is she we've got a genius what do we do with this genius we have to
00:16:09.200help this genius and it sort of flies in the face really of because you know jenison's not a
00:16:14.060victorian she's a georgian and i think i think victorian fathers would not have been quite so
00:16:19.160quick to have supported Jane Austen as the Georgians were and it's all power to their
00:16:27.620elbow and I think sometimes we view history through a very distorted gaze as sort of women0.87
00:16:33.700were so put down and men were terrible well we have a circumstance here well no that's not the
00:16:39.040case we've actually got men saying she's amazing we're going to support her she needs to be in
00:16:43.100print we're going to do everything we can to support her so I think we need to be very careful
00:16:47.460about how we view history in terms of like weird gender you know polarization yeah I think that's
00:16:55.340such a good example and you said that really well it's to look at at a entire era of history and say0.52
00:17:00.240well all men were like this and all men were like this it's like well no everybody's living their
00:17:03.980own specific situation I was just thinking a few weeks ago I was doing an episode about Mary
00:17:09.580Wollstonecraft who did not have this sort of family support and that's like there's a few
00:17:14.080decades difference between when they were working but just she also had brothers and the brothers
00:17:18.440were also educated and she wasn't so just seeing the difference of two like extraordinary women
00:17:24.180um and Jane Austen was so fortunate to have the family that she was born into that's why I really
00:17:29.100like your question because I think your question is so important that you actually raised this
00:17:34.660question of what was the support and I think that's a brilliant question because a lot of
00:17:39.080people don't actually ask that question. And as I say, it's twofold. It's the support of women
00:17:44.660saying, we'll take on the domestic heavy loading, heavy lifting in order for you to do this. And1.00
00:17:50.660you've got the men saying, we'll support you. So I think that's just a really interesting and
00:17:54.460important question that you've raised. Well, and then I think also, so Jane Austen, she's
00:17:59.700in this era. Again, when we think about, when I think about part of what I'm doing in a series is
00:18:05.720what was the Regency era really like versus kind of how I've thought about it or how people might
00:18:10.540understand it. You think about the marriage market and even in a book like Jane Austen,
00:18:16.140The Pride and Prejudice, where the mother is so intent on marrying off the daughters.
00:18:19.960But you haven't even mentioned that yet at all, that her family is putting any pressure on her
00:18:24.180to get married. Yeah, there's no evidence that that happened, although when she did accept an
00:18:31.180offer of marriage in 1802 from um harris bigwether who was a friend of her sister of her female
00:18:38.920friends one can't help thinking oh gosh she does feel the pressure actually that there is a chance
00:18:45.780to put a roof over her mother's head and her sister's head and he was rich and i think for
00:18:51.940women in that position it would have been very easy for jane austen to have said um yeah i'll
00:18:58.040just do this I'll do this for all the wrong reasons but it would be the right reasons for my
00:19:01.800family and then she changed her mind and I think this is a really significant moment in any woman's0.90
00:19:08.160life where they might want to take what might seem to be the easy way of well I can just make
00:19:14.560this easy for myself I can just absolutely have all the money I want I can just I can look after
00:19:20.200my parents forever I can look after my sister forever how tempting and how extraordinary that
00:19:25.960she says, no, I'm not going to do that because it's not what I want to do. And if you look at
00:19:31.660all her heroines, they always have that moral centre of, yeah, but it's not what I want to do.
00:19:39.300Not in a selfish way, but just in a way of, can I live with myself? Can I live with myself if I
00:19:46.320just do this for everybody else? And that's why she is so extraordinary as a writer. And there is
00:19:53.120nobody else at the time writing novels who ever contemplate those issues of what does it actually
00:20:01.780mean for a heroine like Elizabeth Bennet when she turns down not just Mr Collins but Mr Darcy
00:20:07.840to say no I don't want that I'm poor and I don't have any money and I have no connections
00:20:14.280and I have no status but actually your proposal's so ungracious I actually would rather be alone
00:20:22.120who else is doing that let me tell you no one and her first published book is correct me if I'm
00:20:30.700wrong I believe it's Sense and Sensibility right and that was you were talking before about the
00:20:37.240novels were sort of epistolary and then they they changed and part of that was her influence so
00:20:44.060because Sense and Sensibility was first written as an epistolary her first version of it probably
00:21:13.780So they are very much novels before the turn of the century.
00:21:17.900um and jane austen grew up with fanny bernie and richardson novel of letters the epistory epistory
00:21:27.600however you're to phrase it and they were the great novels of the day and richardson did
00:21:33.500extraordinary things in clarissa with that novel of letters because he took it from just one person's
00:21:39.800letters to four people's letters and it was just it shifted perspective so much it was so extraordinary
00:21:46.800and so fabulous. And Jane Austen, because she admired Richardson so much and she loved
00:21:53.660all those novels, she started off in that form, which as I said to you before, when women write0.92
00:21:59.700letters, it's sort of an easy transition. But at some point it wasn't working for her. And I don't
00:22:05.120think she had enough authorial control. I think people like Fielding and then Richardson later on
00:22:11.700decided that as an author I want more control so Jane Austen ditched those early novel of letters
00:22:19.980if you like and decided actually this isn't working for me the novel's moving in really
00:22:24.820it's a new genre it's moving in really interesting directions but actually the novel in letters
00:22:30.460isn't working for me anymore because you're only going to get the perspective of the person writing
00:22:34.160the letters you don't have the omniscient author that is controlling the narrative and I think Jane
00:22:40.560Austin wants to control the narrative so I think she ditched that so she had the plot line she had
00:22:47.560the characters she had all of that but she just thought no I'm not not really getting control of
00:22:53.580this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to shift it to third person narration but then she does
00:22:59.900extraordinary things with you know free and direct speech so she sort of revolutionized the form0.68
00:23:04.020but I think so going back to your question Eleanor and Marianne would you just been letters between
00:23:10.300the two sisters first impressions would have been letters between the two sisters that was what
00:23:14.800and she's one of two sisters and she wrote lots of letters to her sisters so it's an easy form
00:23:20.160it's familiar not easy but it's familiar so but then at some point you can really see her thinking
00:23:26.520no I'm not I'm not getting what I need from this method I have to change the method I've got to do
00:23:33.980something that is really different so then she takes the basis of those novels and she changes
00:23:40.900them in in 80 in the early 19th century in the early 1800s when she's finally got a roof over
00:23:47.060her head the other women are taking on the heavy loading and the housework and she's finally able0.71
00:23:52.660to go back to those 1790s novels and do something different with them and so since insensibility0.69
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00:26:49.740it was a military library it was it was not what I don't think he'd ever published Edgerton ever
00:26:55.420published a novel before but she was so desperate to be published she had such faith in herself
00:27:00.700such belief in herself that she did so perfectly respectable reviews did it blow the world away no
00:27:08.240but Pride and Prejudice did and I presume that was the second book so that was the second book
00:27:14.620So Sunsensibility in 1811, Pride Crisis in 1813. And that was just sell out. And it was the most talked about novel. Sheridan, Richard Brindsey Sheridan, the greatest dramatist of his day, said it was the greatest novel. He just thought this was the cleverest novel he'd ever read.
00:27:35.680and it was almost word of mouth that it sold really well and people were talking about it
00:27:43.480it was it was the novel du jour like everyone was like oh pride and prejudice so since sensibility
00:27:49.280respected pride and prejudice like wow there's a there's a new voice here and how many well
00:27:56.660I don't mean what's the specific number but it was published as a lady but I know that some people
00:28:03.120knew the author was Jane Austen? And how did how did people find out her identity?
00:28:09.380That came much later, really. So much later on, I think after Mansfield Park,
00:28:15.960Jane Austen writes about, oh, people are sort of saying, is it me? And and then she says,
00:28:21.220oh, I write only for fame. And she makes jokes about this and says, oh, why not? Why not let
00:28:25.500people know about me? Because it's still the case that women. What's really interesting,1.00
00:28:30.080If you think of the Brontes, they pretended to be men or they had androgynous names like Corra, Acton and Alice Bell.
00:28:37.700So in Victorian times and George Eliot, it was like you have to be a male.
00:28:43.160And that's much later. And in Georgian society, I think it's pretty cool, even by our standards to say by a lady.
00:28:49.440It still wasn't saying, hey, I'm George Eliot or I'm Corra Bell or I'm Acton Bell.
00:28:54.260so I think in Georgian times even to say I'm a lady is pretty cool it's like saying I'm not
00:29:01.760ashamed to be a lady and then from from after Sense and Sensibility she says by the author of
00:29:08.680by the author of probably by the author of so she'd built up a fan base enough but she could
00:29:14.660then say I'm the author of she no longer has to say I'm a lady so it's it's really interesting to
00:29:21.600me that that actually say you know it's limited feminism in proto-feminism in a way but it's I
00:29:28.320think it's still pretty cool that women are like it's by a lady I didn't get after my name but I'm
00:29:33.040still a lady you know I'm not a man you know no I love that so people could read it they know well
00:29:38.240I I don't know who this is but it's a lady and there's yeah there's something cool about that
00:29:43.540and especially you were saying novels were so popular among women so for women to read a book
00:29:48.200by a lady I think is interesting but one person who did exactly you make such a good point that
00:29:53.760I think for a lot of women women write sorry borrow novels and buy novels on the whole as
00:29:58.680they do today it's a female genre so I think by a lady is quite good marketing I was just thinking
00:30:05.720one person who did know her identity was uh the future George IV the prince regent um who was a
00:30:13.160big fan of hers. He had a copy of each of Jane Austen's novels in all of his homes. His daughter,
00:30:19.460Princess Charlotte, was also a big fan of Jane Austen. Can you talk about how Jane Austen felt
00:30:24.660about the Prince Regent? Well, she didn't like him and she didn't like the way he treated the
00:30:30.160Princess of Wales. And she went, you know, pretty much on record, when I say on record, just in her
00:30:36.080letters, but very firmly to say, you know, she did not like his behaviour towards his wife.
00:30:41.640and she was not at all happy that he was a fan
00:30:44.960and that he wanted her to dedicate Emma to her.
00:30:47.780And again, she tried to wriggle out of it by saying,
00:30:50.700you know, oh, I don't think this is the right thing.
00:31:34.340So it was a difficult moment for her because she doesn't like him at all.0.84
00:31:38.060She doesn't like his morals. She doesn't like the way he treated his wife. She's a proto-feminist. But at the same time, she's got pressure from her publishers to say, this is an honour. So I see her wrestling with both sides of the problem, really.0.55
00:31:51.640and the I believe during this time period the the Prince of Wales librarian was was meeting
00:31:59.140with Jane Austen and suggesting stories that maybe she should write giving her ideas of the
00:32:04.240sorts of books that she should write and then she wrote I was just reading about this um sort of uh
00:32:08.780I don't know if it was a letter or something else but she sort of wrote a parody of the sorts of
00:32:12.080things that they wanted her to write can you explain that yeah plan of a novel so you know
00:32:16.840She gets this librarian, James Daniel Clark, saying, oh, you should do this and you should do that and you should write this story.
00:32:23.560And she is just completely brilliant because she says, I would hang myself if I wrote a romantic novel.
00:32:29.440She says, that's not I must go on in my own way or not at all.
00:32:33.600And it's just this beautiful example of someone who's slightly being bullied to do to write in a particular way.
00:32:41.880But she's absolutely firm in not allowing that to happen and saying, no, no, no, no, I'm going to write in my own way. It may not be for everyone's way, but it's absolutely my way. And it's just testament to her absolute strength of character.
00:32:57.140and as I say belief in her own genius that no man's going to come along and say can you write
00:33:03.520this romance about the Saxe-Colbergs and she's absolutely not going to do it she's like
00:33:08.160no I'd rather be hanged she makes this really funny joke and says I'd rather be hanged than
00:33:12.800write that kind of novel but it's I mean for a woman in the Georgian era despite what I said
00:33:18.900about the relative freedoms she's not Victorian it's still very extraordinary that she really
00:33:24.380stands up for the kind of novel she wants to write. And I think we all should be in complete
00:33:29.440awe of Jane Austen for the way that she says, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not
00:33:36.360going to write in that way. I'm not going to be bullied into writing what you think I should write.
00:33:41.340I am going to write in my own. It may not be to your taste and it may not be a lot of people's
00:33:46.080taste, but it's to my taste. And here we are 250 years later reading her. Well, actually, yeah,
00:33:52.960I know that's part of why I'm excited to be doing this episode is that it is
00:33:57.100the 250th anniversary of her birth coming up in December, right?
00:44:38.200you know, don't start with Mansfield Park,
00:44:40.360probably don't start with Madison Park because it's quite challenging just start with the way
00:44:45.200they were published um because you'll get closer to an idea of what she wanted the world to read
00:44:53.480about so start with the two sisters Marianne and Eleanor and then the two sisters and Pride
00:44:58.860and Prejudice and then the two sisters like two sisters are obviously a massive theme because she
00:45:03.400had this beloved sister so I would say just start with the way she so start with sensibility or
00:45:09.600Pride and Prejudice, either or, the other challenging ones can come later. So I would say
00:45:16.020100%, just do what she wanted us to do, which is like, this is where, well, I published these novels
00:45:24.600in this order. You could do a lot worse than starting and taking her advice on what she
00:45:30.680wanted to put out to the world. Well, thank you so much, Paula. It's been wonderful chatting with
00:45:35.820you today oh you've been amazing and your questions have been incredible thank you so much yeah thank
00:45:42.360you so much take care so paula's novel again as we mentioned it's called six weeks by the sea
00:45:50.760and that's available wherever you get your books from and what i think is also notable
00:45:56.140she mentioned in the podcast that there's only two two drawings of jane austen done by her sister
00:46:02.260Cassandra. And one of them is a drawing of Jane Austen at the sea. And that's actually the image
00:46:07.760that features on the, at least the North American cover of six weeks by the sea, which you should
00:46:12.200be able to pick up wherever. And you can learn more about Paula from her website, which is
00:46:15.900paulabyrne.com. And so the reason why we're doing this Regency era season is at least partly because
00:46:24.520I also wrote a book. It's called Rebel of the Regency, the scandal seg of Carolina Brunswick,
00:46:29.880Britain's uncrowned queen, who we mentioned briefly in this episode as well. Jane Austen
00:46:34.540supported her. Jane Austen did not like her husband. And so for all these Regency era episodes,
00:46:40.900I want to do a little segment I'll call Caroline's Corner, which is how does the person we're talking
00:46:46.180about connect with Carolina Brunswick, the heroine of my book that's coming out in February.
00:46:51.940And very directly, actually, as Paula mentioned. So Jane Austen wrote in a letter about Carolina
00:46:57.860of Brunswick. She said, quote, poor woman, I support her as long as I can because she is a
00:47:02.560woman and because I hate her husband. And Jane Austen's letters, a lot of them were destroyed
00:47:09.420by her sister Cassandra after she died. And potentially, most likely that's because it was
00:47:15.800like, if one of us died and someone was just like, could you delete my like DMs off my phone?
00:47:22.740Could you delete my Twitter account? I don't know, like my emails, like, because Jane Austen's
00:47:27.520letters to her sister were very, like she tried, she liked to make jokes. She liked being silly0.98
00:47:31.520in some of it. I think her sister knew if it was read later on, like would be seen as disrespectful,0.92
00:47:36.100especially to people in their social circle or in their family. So a lot of them were destroyed,
00:47:39.900but luckily not the one in which Jane Austen says, and I'll read it again because it's a fantastic
00:47:44.200quote, poor woman. I support her as long as I can because she is a woman and because I hate1.00
00:47:49.280her husband. And if you want to know who Carolina Brunswick was and why Jane Austen felt this way0.81
00:47:56.140and supported her so strongly, you can pre-order my book, Rebel of the Regency, The Scandal Seg
00:48:01.160of Carolina Brunswick, Britain's Uncrowned Queen, which will be available in February. You can get
00:48:06.360more information about my book at rebeloftheregency.com. And so another thing that we do
00:48:13.060on this podcast, when I remember to, is that we score the people we're talking about in four
00:48:20.560different categories, which is just sort of a nice way to wrap up a discussion, but also a way to
00:48:24.440sort of to see how everybody compares in this, these completely like random categories that I
00:48:29.880chose. And so the first, I want to score Jane Austen. And the first category that we score
00:48:35.040everybody on, on this podcast is scandalousness. How scandalous was Jane seen by people of her0.99
00:48:42.520place and time? Like, was she, was she a scandalous person in her time? And I would say,
00:48:47.240no, I would say her family, you know, things perhaps someone might've thought was scandalous
00:48:53.280about her like the fact she didn't get married or the fact she accepted a marriage proposal and
00:48:57.340then turned it down like her family was there for her like they were not scandalized by her it seems
00:49:01.240like as far as I can tell society was not really scandalized by her not everybody knew that she's
00:49:06.540writing these books but even if they did it's only a moderate amount of scandal like there's not
00:49:10.500nothing but there's such a small amount I'm just going to give her a one out of ten for
00:49:15.180scandalousness the next category is scheminess and so for somebody else for some sort of you1.00
00:49:22.520know queen in medieval times we might be like oh this person was scheming to invade this other
00:49:26.560country or whatever for Jane Austen the scheminess I think is more just like being able to to come up
00:49:33.840with books and find ways to get them published and stuff and even that I feel like there's
00:49:37.140definitely some scheminess there um in her looking at what what books were out there and what were
00:49:43.260they like and like sort of like Paula was describing Jane Austen was really sort of like
00:49:47.480coming up with new ways to tell stories and things like that even getting her books published
00:49:51.860her family was there supporting her. It wasn't Jane Austen and her personal, it wasn't just her
00:49:57.100tenacity and ambition that eventually got them published. It was people were there helping her.
00:50:02.320So it's not, I don't think she needed to be really schemey because people were there helping her,
00:50:07.100but there was certainly ambition, drive, cleverness. When you balance it a lot, I'm
00:50:12.620going to give her a seven for scheminess. Significance is absolutely a 10. Like Paula
00:50:18.560was saying. Jane Austen is second only. I don't know. I would say maybe first. Her and Shakespeare
00:50:24.480are up there in terms of just like people whose body of work are just so respected and seen as
00:50:29.840so brilliant and so genius. And even people who aren't big readers, people who don't know
00:50:35.520or don't care to know about history or literature, like, you know, the name Shakespeare, like,
00:50:42.060and I think, you know, the name Jane Austen and the fact that it's her 250th anniversary and
00:50:46.520we're celebrating her right now actually i want to mention too there is recently there's a statue
00:50:52.020of jane austen that just went up and unlike the statue of mary walton craft that went up a few
00:50:57.600years ago she's fully clothed um and it looks like her so just a sec the jane austen statue
00:51:03.600is at winchester cathedral and this is also where jane austen was buried so jane austen was buried
00:51:12.240in winchester cathedral she actually died in winchester in 1817 so having this statue there
00:51:19.680i think is it makes sort of if you're going for a jane austen pilgrimage go to winchester
00:51:24.840cathedral you can see the statue which again is fully closed unlike the mary wallston craft statue
00:51:30.820and then you can also visit visit her grave inside of the castle i'm just looking at winchester
00:51:37.260cathedral is announcing because of the 250th anniversary of jane austen's birth which is
00:51:42.020coming up in December. So they describe her just in terms of the 10 out of 10 for significance.
00:51:48.460Jane Austen is Britain's greatest female novelist. Her novels published in over 40 languages have
00:51:52.800been adapted for the widest possible audience across all cultural media. Her profile is global.
00:51:58.220Pride and Prejudice alone has sold more than 20 million copies, having never been out of print.
00:52:03.920There's going to be a special service at the cathedral, theater performances, tours,
00:52:08.020lots of stuff happening all this year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen and it's
00:52:13.260really I'm happy to see all of this full stop comma and semicolon I'm especially happy because
00:52:21.440there's been so many people we've profiled on this podcast who don't get celebrated to this extent
00:52:25.320and I'm just really happy when somebody actually is when a woman from history is recognized to
00:52:30.100this extent the fourth and final category that we score people on on this podcast is the sexism
00:52:34.840bonus. By which I mean, how much did sexism hold this person back? How much more might they have
00:52:41.000been able to accomplish without it? And for Jane Austen, I don't think sexism did hold her back0.99
00:52:48.300that much. Like she could have gotten a better education in school if she had been a boy, but she0.99
00:52:53.300made up for that by reading the books at home from what her father taught her and stuff. Like
00:52:58.460it didn't really get in her way from becoming this extremely significant, greatest, best-sellingest
00:53:04.560female novelist of all time and you know in a different context with a different family in a1.00
00:53:09.880different financial situation maybe she would have had to have gotten married for money and then0.96
00:53:14.400maybe she wouldn't have been able to write but that didn't happen like that would be a higher
00:53:17.080score for sexism so I don't think sexism affected her I mean obviously it did but not to the great
00:53:24.100to the detriment like obviously she wrote all these books and she did just fine so that gives
00:53:28.920her a total scandalousness score again the highest possible score would be 40 and she has got a score
00:53:34.240of 22. And just to give you some perspective on where, if you want to see all the scores,
00:53:40.140go to vulgarhistory.com. And there's a thing there that's like scores. And then you can see
00:53:44.640the scores that everybody got. So she's here with a 22. Interestingly, we usually talk about women
00:53:51.080on this podcast. Sometimes we talk about men. One of the men we talked about was Christopher
00:53:54.680Marlowe, who is Shakespeare's kind of rival. He's got a 22.5. So two English writers are there
00:54:02.100together. The French writer Manon Roland is also here with a 22. She lived during the French
00:54:08.520Revolution. We talked about her during the French Revolution season. So that's what Jane Austen is,
00:54:13.66022 out of 40 on the Scandaliciousness Scale. So we're going to be in this Regency era for a while,
00:54:20.760like at least until February or March, because my book comes out in February,
00:54:24.740rebeloftheregency.com is where you can pre-order the book and learn more about it.
00:54:28.680And also, if and when you do pre-order the book, which you could also get as an audiobook, of which I will be reading part of it, if you send me the receipt from having done that, then I will give you some treats, like a Carolina Brunswick paper doll sheet, as well as a free membership to my Patreon and or to my Substack newsletter, where I'm also writing about people from the Regency era.
00:54:51.400Because I think it's an era, you know, when I mentioned like Bridgerton, Jane Austen, like I think a visual might come to mind of like, oh, people at a ball, like here's what's happening. It was actually a wild time. And this actually comes up quite a bit in Paula's novel, Six Weeks by the Sea, which is about what if Jane Austen fell in love.
00:55:08.940But it also delves into things that are happening at the time, like the fight for the abolition of slavery.
00:55:15.400What was the situation like for mixed race people in England at the time?
00:55:20.360There's a lot of societal issues going on.
00:55:22.820They got quite close to a French Revolution type moment.
00:55:25.800The Regency era was lit, is what I'm saying.
00:55:28.400Fit check for our Regency era is going to be maybe the tagline for this season.
00:55:32.960Anyway, next week we're talking about another icon of the Regency era.
00:55:36.840And I'm excited for you to hear that conversation.
00:55:38.940and join the conversation on social media at vulgar history pod on most of the places
00:55:44.820and also patreon is has been doing more stuff where like you can join for free and just follow
00:55:50.540along and see my updates and i've been posting there a lot i'm at patreon.com slash ann foster0.98
00:55:54.700writer and anyway until next time my friends keep your pants on and your tits out0.97
00:56:00.300vulgar history is researched scripted and hosted by ann foster that's me editor is christina1.00
00:56:08.500Lumagi. Theme music is by The Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available
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