00:02:58.040I'm so excited to talk to you about this research and for everybody to hear about what you're talking about in your book.
00:03:03.780Can you explain, however you explain this to people usually, what's your book about?
00:03:08.380so like the the sort of elevator pitch version is like what does what does the me too movement have
00:03:14.740to do with jane austen and then also like what storytelling has to do with our consent activism
00:03:20.080how have things actually changed from the past how are they much closer to the past than we
00:03:26.200might like them to be and how do we still use storytelling as like a key tool in talking about
00:03:31.420consent and i think what's really well i read your book and i found it also fascinating and
00:03:36.240part of what was interesting to me as well is you're talking about several books that I personally
00:03:40.400I've heard of, but I haven't read. So you're kind of explaining, I mean, there's a lot of spoilers
00:03:44.160in your book for people who don't want to be spoiled for books from like 300 years ago. But
00:03:50.360just the way that you explain the plot lines and what's happening in them, I'm just like,
00:03:53.960oh my gosh, what happens next? But also the way that now, as well as then, you can learn things
00:04:01.480about a society and what a culture is like by looking at the fiction that they read and what
00:04:05.880how they tell these stories you know facts you're going to find maybe you won't find this in like a
00:04:10.880list of court cases maybe you're not going to find out what people were really up to but in a novel
00:04:15.060you can see there's a reason why they wrote this story and then there's there's a reason why people
00:04:19.380act the way that they do in this book and it can speak to what society was maybe like and that's
00:04:24.060what I find really interesting in terms of your work and what I'm trying to do this season talking
00:04:29.220about the Regency era and people think of it as this time where everybody was so well behaved
00:04:34.200and everybody there's you know there's such etiquette and there are all these rules and
00:04:38.820everybody obeyed them all the time but that's just that wasn't the case and you look at so
00:04:42.760many examples in your book about how that wasn't the case actually can we start by just talking
00:04:48.000about the book Pamela because I feel like that's kind of the you say in your book it's the the
00:04:54.880first modern novel or something like that or it's it's an early it's an early it's an early novel
00:05:01.700it's by Samuel Richardson and it was incredibly incredibly popular at the time it's probably like
00:05:08.900my least favorite novel that I read from that time period just because of the plot but what it does
00:05:15.520is it takes this sort of story of a young virtuous girl who goes off to work as a servant in this
00:05:25.180master's house and he starts sort of pursuing her sexually and she is very virtuous so she's
00:05:31.820not interested and he kind of gets increasingly determined that he is going to have sex with her
00:05:39.460and he kind of ends up kind of enlisting the help of this madam to his housekeeper to kind of help
00:05:45.220him uh restrain pamela and have his way with her and then she's so good that he can't go through
00:05:51.280with it um and her morality saves her and uh subsequently he then decides oh actually i should
00:05:57.860i should probably try and marry her instead which is just that's that's why i don't get on with it
00:06:02.400so well because it's it doesn't feel like a happy ending to i think to our sensibilities it's a novel
00:06:09.080told two letters so it's one of these epistolary novels and it gets really quite weird because
00:06:14.720pamela's writing these letters and she's sending them out but she's also having to hide them and
00:06:19.720so she kind of tucks them all into like her bodice and she keeps them like very close to her skin
00:06:24.240because you didn't have a lot of private secure space in the 18th century but then her employer
00:06:30.280finds them and he's holding them and thinking about how they've been like warmed by her skin
00:06:36.140so that's creepy in its own way but then you're holding the book that is in theory the letters
00:06:41.040so there's this kind of weird chain of um kind of body contact through the through the pages
00:06:48.280but that novel it kind of bridges for me between the novels that we kind of tend to think of
00:06:54.780as being like active plots about and stories and characters and these sort of conduct manuals that
00:07:01.800the 18th century had which were these kind of guides on how to behave you know you you might
00:07:07.660give it to your young female relative and she could read it and learn important lessons about
00:07:12.020how she was supposed to be dutiful and how she was supposed to be obedient and so Richardson
00:07:16.520started writing Pamela and the kind of aim at least in theory was a guide on how to write good
00:07:23.040letters so you would read Pamela and you'd learn how to write letters well because letter writing
00:07:28.680was kind of a huge part of how people communicated and how you got news and entertainment and things
00:07:33.700like that so you wanted to be able to write a good letter but it kind of morphed along the way
00:07:38.800into this story um that ended up sort of in i guess it's hard to say about like what he intends
00:07:46.180for it to be but pamela as a character is is incredibly moral and kind of unrealistically
00:07:52.120so she's this paragon of behavior and it is her goodness that saves her and she's in theory like
00:08:00.940rewarded with what she deserves by then getting to marry this wealthy man even though he is not a
00:08:06.880great person it's something that the time period also didn't necessarily take seriously so while
00:08:13.360the book was incredibly popular it also had a huge number of parodies so there are books coming out
00:08:19.400called like shamala and things like that that are all about this sort of conniving devious very
00:08:25.040knowing girl like out to snare her master and use her wiles to kind of trap him into marriage
00:08:31.680so it wasn't something that the 18th century necessarily went oh yes this is like a totally
00:08:37.700plausible thing but it sets up um Richardson's kind of next his big his huge novel Clarissa
00:08:46.820which is sort of a real cornerstone for talking about consent and novels in the 18th century
00:08:52.080well and i do want to talk about clarissa absolutely not just you said his big novel
00:08:57.480but you describe it in your book it's just like it's a doorstopper of a magnum opus but um in
00:09:03.680terms of pamela and the fact that it was really popular i found that really interesting and i did
00:09:08.200an episode a bit ago with alexander vasty talking about like regency era sex education and what did
00:09:13.660And how did young women learn about sexuality, the threat that sex can pose from certain men? And a lot of it was from these novels. So Pamela, the fact that it was popular, that could, I found that interesting in the context of, I think, for people who don't research the Regency era, but people who watched season one of Bridgerton will remember that the character of Daphne didn't know what sex was.
00:09:40.860um and so people feel like wow can you believe that back then people didn't even know what sex
00:09:45.680was and it's like well maybe some people didn't but anyone who read a novel would have and a lot
00:09:50.800of people read these novels so do you know what cross-section of society who would have read these
00:09:56.880novels was it mostly wealthier people or i guess that's who would be have the time to read a novel
00:10:01.100really yeah and and you know would have the education to be kind of more literate like
00:10:07.820literacy rates weren't universal in the 18th century as well I think you had a lot of like
00:10:13.900the nobility reading it you'd have a lot of the gentle kind of more middle upper middle section
00:10:19.800reading it so you know people would put quotes on their fans and then be like wafting them across
00:10:23.760the ballroom so it's but books are expensive in this time period so you do have to be able to
00:10:29.140either afford them or afford to like be joined to a circulating library or something like that
00:10:33.960I love the idea so I'm just picturing the the quotes written on fans that's so much like now
00:10:38.740people get a sweatshirt or something you know or they just have their like phone case has like a
00:10:43.820quote from their favorite book like it's just people have always read a book and wanted to
00:10:48.300to let everybody know I've read this book and I like it and everybody needs to know that
00:10:52.160that just reminds me of today a little bit and also the same kind of posturing like maybe I
00:10:57.860haven't read this book maybe I have but if I if I if I'm carrying it around the park it'll look
00:11:03.100like I'm really intellectual and I'm like in with the zeitgeist and I know what's going on
00:11:08.100that kind of popularity feeds on itself as well that's true and so Pamela was the it book of of
00:11:15.680that point but then Clarissa you were saying is uh you know I read your book so I know what happens
00:11:22.720in Clarissa it's like quite uh ongoing saga it's quite a lengthy series of of perils of Clarissa
00:11:31.100that she goes through. So set the scene. So Pamela is popular and then Clarissa comes out
00:11:37.620and that's even more popular, clearly. Clarissa is about 33% longer than War and Peace. It was
00:11:44.600the longest novel ever published in the English language. It's absolutely huge. And so she does
00:11:49.860have a lot of things to go through in that many pages. I think we were talking about what lessons
00:11:55.700you might learn from the novels. And I think what we see is that Pamela as a book kind of tells you
00:12:03.920that if you're really good, you'll be fine. And I think Clarissa is really interested in this
00:12:09.340question of actually, or this issue that you can be really good and not be fine. And also that you
00:12:17.460can be slightly less than perfect and still deserve to be fine. So Clarissa is like Pamela.0.89
00:12:26.020She's very virtuous. She's got a bit more spirit than Pamela in some ways. She's kind of caught in
00:12:32.040this impossible situation where she's got a family who don't appreciate her and are trying to marry
00:12:36.900her off and a suitor who she doesn't want to marry but is starting to seem like the better option
00:12:42.800than her family because her family have decided she needs to do exactly what they're telling her
00:12:46.980and they're locking her up and they won't let her out0.98
00:14:07.780It's an interesting one because you do have a few times where he's sort of in proximity to her and thinks about raping her and decides not to at that point.
00:14:20.720And that's quite interesting, like having just talked about Pamela and her goodness kind of putting off her employer.
00:14:26.580because Richardson's really clear in Clarissa that although Clarissa's trying to say all the
00:14:32.360right things to kind of make Lovelace back off, Lovelace is making the decision of whether he
00:14:37.040attacks her or not. And at that point he decides he's not going to, but it's very explicit in the
00:14:42.620text that she can't say magic words that will make this okay, which I think is such a powerful thing
00:14:48.440when we do think about novels as an educative tool. Like it's something we don't like to think
00:14:53.460about that in a scenario where you're being attacked the only person who can make the decision
00:14:59.400about what's going to happen is your attacker and it would be much nicer if there was something you
00:15:04.460could say or do that would keep you safe but there isn't um what Richardson goes on to do with
00:15:12.360Clarissa is she does end up being raped by Lovelace but she is drugged unconscious at the time
00:15:19.320this is really interesting from a legal perspective because in 18th century law
00:15:26.500rape required like the utmost resistance so it wasn't enough to prove that you had resisted to
00:15:33.820show that you weren't consenting you had to prove that you had resisted enough which made the like
00:15:39.200the burden of proof really difficult in a court of law for all sorts of all sorts of ways people
00:15:44.280would like to pick holes in victims' arguments. But you had to prove resistance for it to count
00:15:50.560as rape. And with Clarissa being unconscious, there is no way you can say that she's resisted
00:15:56.100because she's drugged, she's out cold. So you can't say that she has technically performed
00:16:02.520resistance correctly, but also it's very clear that she hasn't consented and she has been raped.
00:16:09.280So Richardson is kind of highlighting here that there's a real flaw in the legal system
00:16:12.700and in the way that that resistance requirement is problematic.
00:16:17.820I think that's just such an interesting stance for a book to take
00:32:54.360Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust.
00:32:59.360Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.
00:33:07.280But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins.
00:33:11.600This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.
00:33:14.780Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job.
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00:33:43.820See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.
00:34:13.820And everything they learned getting there, it's yours for the taking.
00:34:27.440Well, and that's where I think that people might look at this time period and say like,
00:34:30.580oh, things used to be better because there was less.
00:34:33.900You could see the evidence of the fact that there was less court cases for sexual assault,
00:34:37.700meaning that there was less sexual assault, which is part of where people might think,
00:34:40.920oh, things were nicer then, things were kinder then, they were gentler then. It's like, no,
00:34:44.720people just, people didn't report things and people weren't believed. That doesn't mean they
00:34:50.140weren't happening. And that's why I think it's really interesting. The combination, the way
00:34:54.100that your book looks at, here's what people are putting in novels, which is either instructive
00:35:00.440or makes people think about stuff that they've heard happen to other people or things that they
00:35:05.820know are going on. And when you combine that with, here's what's happening in the court case,
00:35:09.420It's completely different because the novels are these gray area, these kind of where somebody knows their attacker and maybe it ends up in a marriage, which happens in several of these books.
00:35:21.640But I was wondering if you could talk a bit about you get into some of Jane Austen's books, which I think people often think about is that's the everybody's well behaved and everybody's nice.
00:35:33.580And let's just kind of let's enjoy this book.
00:35:35.620And there is, and that's like, they're, they're lovely books. And that's kind of what they're for. But at the same point, you have, there's, you know, the risk of like somebody being treated like a fiance to somebody who they're not engaged to, for instance, and how that can become a scandal. So like in Sense and Sensibility, for instance, can you talk about some of the issues that you bring up in your book about that?
00:35:57.780yeah i think one thing you get a sense of is what risks and what threats the authors are treating as
00:36:06.480understood by their readers like they're sort of like what's a what's a an assumed level of threat
00:36:12.900so like if we were reading a contemporary book and someone's like walking down a dark alley
00:36:17.620uh on their you know after a a trip to the pub or something and they're in a short skirt like if
00:36:24.320you're watching that on a on a tv show you're kind of reading cues as to okay there might be this
00:36:29.560thing might happen because i understand this language or this like visual language of telling
00:36:34.880me this bad thing is going to happen and you see across a lot of these novels how easy it was to
00:36:41.500kind of disappear people in the 18th century almost like you don't have the same kind of
00:36:47.840network of finding people so if you get pulled into a carriage and run away with a different
00:36:54.980part of the country unless someone is able to go and physically look for you or like has a really
00:37:00.920good network of people already in in the right area you can just be vanished and it's something
00:37:07.900the tv show harlots does a really good job of kind of showing like that danger of just kind of your
00:37:15.500how transient almost everything is because it's purely physical you know your your body can be
00:37:22.880taken away very easily your money can be taken away very easily because it's it's these coins
00:37:28.700in your hand um and i think when by the time we get to jane austen you see um something like sense
00:37:38.520and sensibility has we get the sense of like oh here are eleanor and marianne and they live in a
00:37:44.640nice big house and now they're having to move to a smaller cottage and this is you know in many
00:37:50.440ways this is like a step down for them you know they're having to market and like buy their food
00:37:57.040carefully they're having to think about the fact that the chimney smokes but they also do still
00:38:01.080have servants and they still are not working day to day so they are still fine but they are kind of
00:38:08.360in that in that way but you see that here's what losing your fortune can look like and it doesn't
00:38:13.400look that bad. But then you have a character like Eliza. We see Eliza, who is Colonel Brandon's
00:38:20.080ward. She is part of this kind of history of women being mistreated and abandoned by men and0.79
00:38:26.680the repercussions of that. So her mother was left kind of pregnant and without financial support
00:38:34.500and ends up dying of poverty and of disease and leaves her child, Eliza, to Colonel Brandon to
00:38:40.880look after and so he raises her and treats her as his ward and then she ends up kind of falling
00:38:48.380into a similar storyline that her mother did in that she is also made pregnant and abandoned by
00:38:55.540in this case Willoughby but she's not going to die in poverty because she has a protector so
00:39:02.860you see like a slight improvement on on her situation from her mother's but without Colonel
00:39:09.400Brandon being there she would you could kind of extrapolate it she she would be in a horrendous
00:39:15.980situation and actually one of the things that you see in the novel is that Brandon doesn't know
00:39:21.480where she is for quite a lot of the book he knows that she ran off with with Willoughby
00:39:27.280and he's been looking for her and he's been trying to find where she's got to and it's
00:39:31.860only at a certain point he gets a letter that tells him where she is
00:39:35.100so she's disappeared on him and thinks thought you know that she was set up and was going to be
00:39:41.980married and was going to be fine and then turns out uh he wasn't planning on going through with
00:39:48.940that and he's run off to now find himself an heiress so i think you see through their kind
00:39:56.060of mother and daughter storylines the way that it can go really horribly wrong and the fact that
00:40:02.980our characters our like central characters have more protection around them it helps us kind of
00:40:09.920feel like they're safe but if Marianne had like continued running off with Willoughby they're not
00:40:17.580eloping but like they are acting like an engaged couple everyone thinks they're engaged she's not
00:40:22.340too fussed about propriety like as far as she's concerned they're getting married so what's there
00:40:26.800to worry about and if you were to ask her about it she'd be insulted on both her behalf and on
00:40:32.660Willoughby's behalf that you would think so poorly of him. And if she had kind of just gone
00:40:39.240slightly further than she should, she also could be in this kind of same position as Eliza, where
00:40:44.740yes, she has her mother and her sister around, but they are also, you know, they rely on family
00:40:53.180to a certain extent for support, as well as the inheritance from their father. You know,
00:41:00.840she would be just as vulnerable as, as Eliza would be, but she does have her sister kind of
00:41:07.860there trying to, trying to protect her and probably would be there making some like very0.89
00:41:12.320practical plans if they had to, to, to deal with this. It's not that far off from being a possibility
00:41:18.980for her. So yeah, I think you do get this sense within Austen. Same with them. There's a moment
00:41:26.600in Mansfield Park where one of the characters runs off a married woman runs off with a man who
00:41:33.140is not her husband and her sister immediately elopes because her sister has gone right if this
00:41:40.220gets out I'm never getting married I will be ruined you know so I need to go and make sure
00:41:46.620that I'm married to someone before there's there's an issue um and so you don't really know at that
00:41:54.520point how much she actually wants to like it's a character she's sort of flirted with before it's
00:42:00.900not like you don't think she hates this man but there is also you've got to ask yourself how how
00:42:05.980much that would have been what she would want to do if there hadn't been this sort of immediate
00:42:12.340time crunch on the situation as a kind of quite pragmatic like this is to keep me safe this is
00:42:20.660what I'm going to do situation well and what happens with oh I was just thinking with both
00:42:27.660Marianne and with Eliza is what happens in so many of the the novels that you summarize or you
00:42:34.340discuss in your book is that the man makes it seem like they are going to get married to get the
00:42:40.720woman to usually to to have sex with them and then so in in those circumstances it is sort of
00:42:47.440it can be seen as sort of an instruction or a warning to young women who are reading these
00:42:52.180novels. Like just because a man is acting this way, doesn't mean he actually means it because
00:42:58.140that's someone like Eliza thought that she was getting married and this is why she did all these
00:43:03.600things and to find out that you're not. And there's other, other much more dramatic situations
00:43:09.660of that and other novels that you get into in your book of people just really putting on a
00:43:15.640whole pretense to make it seem like, oh, this is, of course we're getting married. And of course we
00:43:19.140love each other. So, I mean, I don't know as much as anyone reading a novel or watching a TV show
00:43:23.740today. Although I do think there is something to be said for myself, at least like I learned a lot
00:43:29.160about dating etiquette and stuff just from watching, you know, Dawson's Creek or whatever,
00:43:36.200like you watch people in these situations to sort of familiarize yourself with like,
00:43:40.600what are these situations going to be like? So I could see that these novels would give people
00:43:45.300this leads me to my other question which is just I wanted to talk a bit about the book Ophelia
00:43:49.880and the concept of what could happen to a person who like that character in Bridgerton
00:43:57.820who doesn't know anything about anything and how the parents could think well this is going to
00:44:04.800protect them it's going to keep them innocent but actually it just sets them up to be taken
00:44:08.640advantage of in other ways because they don't understand what sexual threat is could you
00:44:14.080explain a bit i just thought this book was so bananas i just want you to explain it a bit to
00:44:17.960people it's it's a really funny book and it's deliberately funny which is is nice when you have
00:44:24.800a lot of like slightly more depressing subject matter so the history of ophelia is this very
00:44:31.600bonkers novel where there's this young girl who is raised in basically complete isolation she grows
00:44:37.880up just with her aunt somehow the two of them run a farm together just the two of them they don't
00:44:43.040ever seem to do any like farm work they're just reading philosophy books and somehow the farm
00:44:48.020runs itself but when the story starts a man appears and it's the first man that she's ever
00:44:53.800seen and her aunt is very suspicious because her aunt has met men before and she doesn't like the
00:45:00.380way that he is looking at Ophelia and Ophelia can't understand why her aunt thinks why her
00:45:08.240aunt is being incredibly welcoming so her aunt has basically educated her about morality and
00:45:13.820virtue and the right way to behave but she hasn't taught her anything about vice and she hasn't
00:45:20.260taught her anything about she's basically doesn't want to corrupt her mind with any negative
00:45:24.800information so Ophelia kind of is confused why her aunt isn't being like open arms welcoming to
00:45:33.040this stranger but you know she doesn't think that much about it and then the aunt shoes the stranger
00:45:38.500away and kind of says on off you go and he leaves comes back in the middle of the night and abducts
00:45:43.940Ophelia because that's a normal thing to do um so he he's thrown her over his horse he's riding
00:45:49.780off with her and there's this very clever kind of dialogue that she has with herself so the book
00:45:57.460itself is a series of is like a big letter from Ophelia now a married lady in the in the future
00:46:04.540writing to someone to tell them about her story and so she's describing what she was thinking
00:46:12.720at the time that she was very naive so you can kind of get this sense of now knowing more but
00:46:19.620then knowing nothing and she's sort of running through why someone could possibly have abducted
00:46:25.380her in the middle of the night and she's going, well, I don't have any money, so it can't really
00:46:29.760be robbery. And I don't have any enemies, so it can't really be revenge. So I don't know why
00:46:35.580they're doing this, but I am scared, but I don't know why I'm scared. And so they dance around this
00:46:43.360thing of, you know exactly what she should be afraid of. And you can see that she doesn't
00:46:50.020understand anything about sexual threat but also that she's sort of innately virtuous enough that
00:46:55.840she is scared even though she doesn't know why she should be like she can't think of a reason
00:47:00.040why she should be but she is and so you get a lot of this throughout the book of her having
00:47:05.320the right reactions emotionally to things um as like an innate response but what you end up with
00:47:13.800is this girl being kind of placed into fashionable society with no idea what her behavior signifies.
00:47:23.000And so the guy who's abducted her doesn't want to marry her. He doesn't believe in marriage,
00:47:27.700but he'd quite like to kind of keep her on the side. And so in order to do that, he knows he
00:47:32.520can't tell her that it's not normal because she's too moral for that. So he pretends to her that
00:47:38.500he's acting as a guardian and looking after her and that this is very normal and he restricts her
00:47:44.360access to meeting other people so that no one else can tell her that it's not normal and along the
00:47:50.480way um everyone else that she meets believes that she is his mistress because she's so open and so
00:47:58.580friendly and so warm with him um she's not doing any of the like proper behaviors that you're
00:48:05.740supposed to do she's too familiar so her behavior is kind of confirming to everyone that she is this
00:48:12.400kept mistress even though she's actually not doing that she doesn't understand what her behavior
00:48:17.640signifying the book kind of sets up this really interesting it kind of poses this really interesting
00:48:23.960like point about how if you get to a point where you are like the the absolute most innocent you
00:48:31.460could possibly be this kind of parody character you cannot resist properly and show disinterest
00:48:38.240properly because you don't understand what it is you're supposed to be trying to resist
00:48:42.480so she's never doing or saying the things to put him off because she doesn't get that she's
00:48:48.900supposed to be putting him off because she doesn't understand that there's a thing that might be
00:48:52.160coming that she's not putting off so you kind of have this um it does a couple of things it's just0.93
00:48:58.760just really fun so she you have first that like this character is ridiculous like she's completely0.87
00:49:03.540absurd like nobody is that naive and innocent and so um you can't pick her to pieces and and fault
00:49:12.520her for any of her actions because it's farcically perfect but it means you move away from let's
00:49:19.320critique the woman in this scenario and it means you kind of have to focus on this guy who's
00:49:25.340abducted her and is keeping you have to focus on his choices and his decisions and see him as
00:49:30.760bearing the responsibility so that's fun in its own in its own way that it's kind of moving the
00:49:35.940conversation past what did she do and more going towards well what did he do you also then have
00:49:42.900this this sort of truth that when like that you you have to have a certain amount of knowledge
00:49:49.800to be able to keep yourself safe because you need to know what it is you're trying to keep yourself
00:49:53.700say from and what things are socially seen as sort of signals and it's something that is was
00:50:01.660really interesting to me thinking about consent more broadly because we tend to think I tend to
00:50:08.100think that we have consent that we do with words where we used to think like oh she said no um he
00:50:14.380said he didn't want to and then you have consent through behavior so where we say oh well or she
00:50:21.320danced with him twice at the ball so that shows that she's interested in him and that's obviously
00:50:27.000a more a more regency specific example but we also have things like oh well if you if you had0.74
00:50:35.000dinner on the day if you let them pay for dinner then you're probably going to want to have sex
00:50:39.060with them on the date kind of we have our own sort of little ways of of reading behavior that
00:50:45.800are more ingrained than we think they are and one of the things that i think is really terrifying
00:50:52.360about about the 18th century is that a lot when you break it down a lot of the behaviors
00:50:56.940that are seen to show kind of consent and willingness um they're also usually the feminine
00:51:06.240behaviors or the ones that are coded as like properly female because a lot of the
00:51:11.500appropriate female social response is obedience acceptance like doing as you are told by someone
00:51:21.800else and there aren't that many ways of saying no or kind of self-asserting that are considered
00:51:30.060proper um and i think when we kind of now have more of these like sort of say incel groups or
00:51:39.320online and alt-right people talking about wanting to go back to a different time. Sometimes what
00:51:45.740that means is they want to go back to a time when it was harder for someone to say no or where if
00:51:50.320you performed the right steps of behavior then you would kind of unlock this prize because you've
00:51:59.020hit the right sequence of buttons and therefore what comes out is someone who says yes. But actually
00:52:05.380a lot of that behavior is it was all kind of coded as consenting and one of the things I looked at
00:52:12.380in in the book was sort of some more kind of present day or more recent legal theory
00:52:17.180and just kind of philosophy around consent and making like is it can you make reasonable
00:52:24.420mistakes to think that someone's consented but get it wrong and how does that how you know how
00:52:29.260does that fit in and there was a study that was talking about how people are more likely to
00:52:36.120misread consent if it's if someone's like refusal of consent is done softly or equivocally they're
00:52:43.960more likely to assume that it's not really a kind of a put-off and if they've got a if they've got
00:52:50.880an interest in the outcome as well like if there's an answer that they want you to have
00:52:55.920they're more likely to interpret your behavior as signaling that answer. So we kind of see that
00:53:05.920even now we read people, we're more likely to read people's behavior as agreeing with what we
00:53:13.620want it to be and to misunderstand it as being a maybe rather than a no if they're not being too
00:53:21.400forceful and we know that it's not necessarily safe to be like particularly explicit in turning
00:53:28.320someone down because that's not all that's not necessarily a safe thing to do and it can make
00:53:33.640people angry it can increase the level of violence in the situation you're in so you kind of get this
00:53:39.580real just like very messy scenario where a lot of what how you are supposed to behave isn't safe
00:53:48.960anyway because it sort of all it all stems comes back to this like compliance obedience
00:53:54.800framework but if you don't know what your risks are you really can't of you know there's no way
00:54:03.020to navigate that remotely okay because you will just perform all these behaviors of acceptance
00:54:08.160and obedience that will look like you're then completely on board with what's happening but
00:54:12.720you don't understand what's happening I think that's what part of what really I appreciated
00:54:19.720about your book is just sort of the looking at this 18th century situation like the both in the
00:54:26.980novels but then also in the courts and things and then looking at what people are up to today and
00:54:31.740how I do think that part of what you were just saying you know where people wish they could go
00:54:37.180back to a time when it when they think things were more black and white it was more clear what
00:54:41.800was happening you knew how a man was supposed to behave at a party and how a woman was supposed
00:54:45.960to behave at a party and everybody understood what those behaviors meant but what your book
00:54:50.540really shows is that no one ever really did like we if we think we want to go back to a time when
00:54:55.520things were more cut and dry it's like well it wasn't it's just you kind of you think that it
00:55:00.480was because there you knew that there was this code of expected society but there's so much
00:55:06.220wiggle room within that and like you said so much of that code was just women being nice
00:55:10.320and saying okay that wasn't that didn't mean that they meant it that didn't mean that they0.97
00:55:16.540wanted it like it's yeah i don't know just something about how people like to dress up
00:55:21.360like it's the regency era which i have nothing against i think it's lovely i think it's a fun
00:55:25.780thing to do but to imagine that things were at all better than they are now i think a lot of it
00:55:35.600comes down so we're talking about like adaptations and watching things on like like bridgerton or a
00:55:39.560lot of the like the austin adaptations and i love them and i think they're great but i i also think
00:55:45.240that's how we picture the time period and the thing is that if we all went back in time we
00:55:52.040probably wouldn't be those people we'd probably be the people like washing their clothes and
00:55:56.380cleaning up the horse poo off the roads and like fixing things and doing the laundry and
00:56:02.240doing all the manual work because the bracket of society that is those people we still have a
00:56:09.040bracket of society that is the very rich today it's just that you know we don't think of it like
00:56:15.020that so we look at the protagonists in the adaptations and we identify with them but
00:56:18.920they're not who we would be and I think one one of the things that people look for in that or a
00:56:25.680simpler time is that it's the kind of the the chance to wear nice clothes and go to dances
00:57:28.980even if we were let's let's say we were going to be Elizabeth Bennett you know we are in a small
00:57:36.540village where we've got kind of a couple of friends and they're the main people we see and
00:57:43.160we can't really see that many more people because we're geographically limited unless we kind of
00:57:48.300pack off pack up our trunks and kind of go and spend weeks and weeks and weeks in our friend's
00:57:54.260house like going so you're going to go a smaller social circle around you than you might um have
00:58:00.700now we don't have the same like ability to communicate over distance as quickly you if you
00:58:07.400don't like the circle of people you're stuck with you are still stuck with them um it's going to be
00:58:12.660cold in your house you know you're going to have fires to heat it but you can't just whack the
00:58:18.240the radiator on you've got if it once it gets dark you're kind of limited to candles so that means
00:58:23.860that you know gets dark quite early in the uk you're going to be if you want to read or you
00:58:28.540want to sew or you want to do something it's either going to be quite expensive to keep the
00:58:32.480light going or you're going to be uh really like squinting and and you know focusing on that if
00:58:38.900you've got any kind of health issue you know like a lot of so so many health issues particularly
00:58:45.120around like women's reproductive health are just not recognized at this point and they're not known
00:58:50.280about or allergies anything like that you're gonna be just living in a much less company you know
00:58:57.180you get you can't just pop to the opticians and get glasses as easily as you can now and you have
00:59:02.320to be able to afford them and you have to be able to yeah it's just there's a lot of the day-to-day
00:59:08.240that you don't write into the novel because it's that it's the normal day-to-day thing in the same
00:59:13.760way that you know a contemporary contemporary romance might not explain all the like realities
00:59:20.620of living today unless it's also focusing very specifically on you know like being in a terrible
00:59:30.160flat or something like unless that's the foot that's a key focus of the book it's just going to
00:59:34.080be living today or you might look at it and go oh the internet and takeaway foods available at
00:59:40.880at your beck and call and you could be warm and you have enough clothes and you've got vaccines
00:59:45.980and so you know you might be looking from the past and seeing all these kind of this wealth
00:59:49.460that we have of having spices on your food and and having dental hygiene that that's you know
00:59:56.280good and having medical options that don't require a leech to like drink half your blood
01:00:01.120it's it's great but then they don't they wouldn't understand what it's like having your boss call
01:00:08.560you constantly um when you're supposed to be off or like deep fakes and ai and the kind of
01:00:16.960rabbit hole of the internet they that that wouldn't be something you'd intrinsically know
01:00:21.180but you do know if you live in this time well that's why i think that your book is so valuable
01:00:26.060because what you're doing is like your title says like reading between the lines you know the stuff
01:00:31.300that the people reading the book all just inherently know but we don't so just to sort
01:00:36.400of say, this is like you were saying, you know, like if we're watching the opening of CSI and
01:00:40.680the person's walking down the dark alley, we all know those risks. So to be reading one of these
01:00:44.960books, like everybody reading it would know if you, if you run away with a man or if you're,
01:00:51.740if you go to meet him in the woods at night, like, here's what that means. But to me, I'm like,
01:00:55.060okay, go into the woods at night. Sure. Like it's, I think it's so valuable what you've done to sort
01:01:00.060of explain sort of the context of all of this, but then also the way that you put it within the
01:01:05.520context of the actual you know court records and stuff i just think it's so valuable i think it's
01:01:11.100such a important book and thank you so much for talking with me about it no thank you for having
01:01:17.320me on it's it's lovely to get to chat so if you want to keep up with zoe she is on social media
01:01:27.840she's on instagram at the zhm underscore writes if you just look up zoe mickey she is there and
01:01:35.140she's got lots of events coming up or she has been doing various events talking about this book
01:01:39.640being on other podcasts and stuff and i think it's such a valuable important thing to braid
01:01:44.480into our understanding of the regency era both just for this season of this podcast but for all
01:01:49.900of us in general i think there's really lovely things like she was saying in the interview about
01:01:54.880imagining going back to to a historical time period and how nice and lovely it would be
01:01:59.800And for almost everybody, you'll probably not be that lovely except for the mega wealthy, really.
01:02:05.680But there's nothing wrong with thinking about that and loving to read books and imagine this in a romantic way and watching movies like that.
01:02:12.020But I just think when one starts to conflate that beautiful vacation version of history with what it was actually like, that's where you get a slippery slope of people wanting to return to certain gender roles or to certain amounts of women's power and agency.
01:02:27.760because it's not knowing the truth or more of the truth of more aspects of history, I think just is
01:02:34.680only a good thing in general. And I think this book is so well-written and so interesting. And
01:02:38.160it's also parts of it are really funny, like when she's talking about the Ophelia book.
01:02:42.460Anyway, everybody should read it. You know, we're coming up on a gift-giving season. This
01:02:47.160would be a fabulous gift to give to anybody. Another fabulous gift to give to anybody would
01:02:50.640be my book, Rebel of the Regency. What? The Regency era? Is that what you're talking about
01:02:55.340it, Anne? Maybe. My book is called Rebel of the Regency, The Scandal Sec of Carolina Brunswick,
01:03:00.620Britain's Uncrowned Queen. It comes out in February. So you might be like, how can I give
01:03:04.340that as a gift? It doesn't actually exist as an item. Well, you could give to somebody as a gift,
01:03:11.100a pre-order of the book, or yourself, give yourself the gift. If you go onto any of the
01:03:15.580major book ordering websites, you should be able to order a copy. Or if you go to my website,
01:03:20.620revel of the regency.com all the links are there as well so you can pre-order it and then you give
01:03:25.740somebody a little slip being like i owe you this book you know like when you're a kid and you gave
01:03:29.880your mom as a present a book of like coupons for hugs kind of like that but also if you do pre-order
01:03:35.780it you do get stuff that you could give to a person as well for instance so when you pre-order
01:03:41.180the book and just you know send me a message to show me the the evidence the literal receipt