Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading

What does colour sound like? Join the National Gallery for a new series of their podcast Stories in Color, here from Curators, Scientists, Historians and Artists who uncover hidden mysteries across the spectrum. Travel back to a time when a blue pigment found in the minds of Afghanistan cost more than gold, and fast forward to the present day to hear about the rivals hunting for the blackest shade of black. With vivid storytelling and unexpected discoveries, listen to Stories in Color from the National Gallery wherever you get your podcasts. In their close reading series on satire, Clair Bucknell and Colin Barrow trace the development of satire over more than 400 years from Erasmus's praise of folly to the novels of Muriel's spark. Through writers including John Dunn, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde and Evelyn War, they ask what satire is, what it does, and why it's been such an enduring literary form. This week we're bringing you that episode on Jane Austen in which they look at Emma as the high point of Austen's satire of character. You can listen to the full series now and to all our other close reading series, looking at literature from ancient Greece to the present day on the Close Readings podcast, and you can get 25% off a 12 month subscription by using the code Emma25 at checkout when you followed a link in the description. Welcome to the eighth episode of the London Reveal Books close reading series on satire with me Colin Barrow. And with me, Clair Bucknell and Stake Holland we had the delightful task of talking about Jane Austen's novel Emma. Yep. But before we start, a little recital. Two gentlemen, most elegantly attired but well-turing in their blood, was what first struck our eyes. We approached, they were Edward and Augustus, yes, Deris Marianne, they were our husbands. The fear shrieked and fainted on the ground. I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes and on regaining them, we're deprived of them again. For an hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation, Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. And that affecting passage comes from the pages of one of Jane Austen's earlier surviving writings, a little novella called Love and Friendship. And it's Friendship with E before I because at the age of 14 or so. And I think this is a tremendous reassuring fact. Jane Austen found spelling a bit of a challenge. Yeah, you really feel like the take for us all. Yep. Love and Friendship, it's a real hoot. And we strongly recommend to anyone who hasn't read it and wants to meet more Austen in their life. It's full of fainting on the sofa. Endless, improbable coincidences. Shaft, imprisonment, long lost children. That fantastic description of a coach crash that you just heard. Your tragic and untimely death, then you can shake a stick at. And Austen really was more or less an infant when she wrote that. And you can tell that she has a tongue already so far in her cheek it's coming out of her ear. Yeah. And it is basically a satire on later 18th century romantic fiction. And I suppose one reason why it's such a great place to start today is because it suggests that Austen's career began pretty much exactly where we ended our last episode. And Lawrence Stern's Tristan Shandy, that is with the novel as simultaneously a vehicle for intense sentiment. So all that passionate fainting and running mad? Exactly. And at the same time a form that's dominated by an uncontrollable urge to satirize its own conventions. Yeah. So as you heard, the big recurrent joke of love and friendship is that the passions, the passions with the capital P are so overwhelming that, you know, every time they strike the sensibilities of the de heroines, Laura and Sophia, they tend either to fall in love or pass out or, you know, both. So Laura marries a man called Edward, whom she comes to a door in the course of a 30s recon conversation. As one does. As you do. And then an angry relation threatens to repossess the house and Edward has to go to London. In vain, did we count the tedious moments of his absence? In vain, did we weep? In vain, even did we sigh? No Edward returned. This was to cruel, to unexpected a blow to our gentle sensibility. We could not support it. We could only faint. So Sophia, and this is, I think the first of many spoilers, uswolder alerts in this episode, Sophia dies as a result of too much fainting. You know, it's very cold on the ground if you continually lie on it. And she warns Laura on her deathbed to avoid the same fate. My beloved Laura said she to me a few hours before she died. I think warning from my unhappy end and avoid the imprudent contact which had occasioned beware of fainting fits. Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreeable, yet believe me, they will in the end if too often repeated and at improper seasons prove destructive to your constitution. My fate will teach you this. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Run mad as often as you choose. But do not fate. Lovely. You note the way their syntax there sort of collapses into a series of dashes because that you weaken fate and passionate for false sentences. Passion and fainting, an instant love affairs and rapid onset death is all the excellent stuff. So that's how Jane Austen began. And that is really handy for us because in this episode we're going to talk mainly about Emma, which is to state the blinding the obvious, a later and infinitely more sophisticated novel. But we're going to present it as belonging to a largest tradition of satire. We're probably ought to start though by saying a little bit about the general shape of Jane Austen's career and sort of where Emma sits in that career. But a distant reading before we get done, close reading, you're referring to her? Well, we have done that before. Yes. So in that, those juvenile writings, Austen is doing her absolute level best not to be serious about anything in a sort of, you know, comics, a terrible vein to stern and Tristan Shandy, you know, she's all about fending off the task of writing about feeling as Baba Everett says, you know, by any means possible, by jokes, parodies of style, emotional undercutting, etc. And she might have gone on like this, but she didn't. Her six published novels instead take on that task of writing about feeling, you know, they are novels of courtship and domestic life in a way that the juvenile fiction just can't and bring itself to be. Yeah. And I suppose the traditional view is that these six novels fall into two groups of three and there's an early, more or less, sportive and satirical ones, which Austen began in the 1790s and then revised before publication. So that would include Northanger Abbey, which she finished writing around 1803, in which Catherine Morlin's expectations about life are formed by Gothic fiction, which is helpful. Sense and sensibility, which came at much later in 1811, which sort of puts pressure on that idea of the passionate, sensitive heroine through Marianne Dashwood, and then Pride and Pregidus, 1813, which you know, I think we would say is already breaking out of that supposed early phase, but you know, which with the allotment of Lydia Bennett, you do have that same eruption of passionate sensibility. Yeah. And so, I mean, like most literary simplifications that division into two groups of three sort of helps. It describes the general direction of Austen's career, but it breaks down the moment you start thinking about it. So, you know, the mature three Emma Mansfield Park and persuasion, which was published posthumously in 1817. I think do have a more over ethical dimension than the earlier, not unless they're also less overtly sportive and satirical perhaps than the earlier ones. But even they, in pretty much every sentence, you can get that ripple of mockery and also self-mockery, actually, that is supposed to be a feature of the early writing. So, love and friendship never really goes away, does it? Thank goodness. Yeah. And you know, actually, Northanger Abbey, one of the supposed early ones, although it does have those sections that poke fan at Gothic novels, was published posthumously, along with persuasion, and clearly Austen had revised it. And yes, it's a satir and Gothic fiction, but it was sort of backhandedly endorses Gothic and the paranoid view of the world that Gothic teaches you to have. So Catherine Molland thinks that her host at Northanger Abbey is a wife murderer from a scary novel, but actually it sort of turns out that he is the next best thing in real life, you know, a quite nasty, avaricious dad who only wants his son to marry money. And so he angrily threw it. And so, Northanger Abbey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes, he angrily kicks her out of the Abbey. So, that novel-based vision of the world that she has turns out not to be, you know, entirely false. And so that sort of melts down that easy division between an early three and a late three, because even that sportive early book is already sinking its teeth into the union between man, woman and avarice, which was your average 18th century upper middle class marriage. So in a bit, we will talk in detail about Emma and go under the bonnet of Jane Austen's prose. Yeah, I mean, under the bonnet is a good one, isn't it? I stole it actually from my friend Henry Power, but it is a good one. It's worth stealing. And if you read more or less any sentence of Jane Austen, you can hear, I think, a sort of austere regency bonnet itself discipline and restraint, but always there's sort of flashing out from underneath the bonnet, a little winks and stabs, which are all more visible for that decarous frame of the bonnet. Yes, so I think that image of these sort of sharp, critical glances flashing out from between the regency bonnet is a good one to have a mind as we move forward. But before we go under it, let's stay above it for a moment and try and get wider fix on where Austen comes from. - Okay. So if we throw out the notion that Emma is the first novel in the serious later phase of Austin's career, and we've got something to put in its place, I mean, can we point to a set of general concepts behind the novels that might help people make sense of them and perhaps give us some kind of anchor for, well, they're endless, ironically subtleties. - I think I am, we can do that, yeah. Well, let's start with the belief held by people who don't really like Austin and don't get her, that she's a sort of prem regency spencer whose main and only skill was detecting, you know, minute tremors in the fabric of society. - I will quite happily press the destruct button on that view. - I mean, we should say upfront that she was very good at the minute tremors stuff. So take this paragraph from Emma on the death of her, wealthy old woman called Mrs. Churchill, who nobody likes, but you can't say that aloud. It was felt as such things must be felt. Everybody had a degree of gravity and sorrow, tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends, and in reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least 25 years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point, she was fully justified. She'd never been before admitted to be seriously ill. They equated her of all the fancifulness and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints. - Miss brilliant, I mean, her death indicates that she wasn't just annoying people I pretended to be ill, and I suppose it's a bit like Spike Milligan's tombstones. - Yeah. - As I told you I was ill since that's what tombstones are. I mean, Austin could play up to that view of her work as just a matter of precise social miniaturism, though, couldn't she? I mean, she does it in the passage that everyone quotes from a letter to a nephew in which she contrasts her nephews strong, manly sketches to her own little bit, to and she's wide of ivory on which I work with so finer brushes, produces little effect after much labor. - Yeah, but her work also continuously shows an awareness of larger things going on the background. You know, the way that even if your subjects are small, they're always shaded by the language and concerns of the wider world. - Yeah, and she's sort of sending herself up, isn't she, in that letter, to an nephew? And when we talked about Tristan Shandy, we had a lot to say about the way in which miniaturism could actually expand out into the world. And she is the heir to that aspect of Tristan Shandy, I think, as well as to so much else from that normal. - I think that's right. I think the reach of her miniaturism is surprisingly wide. So in Emma, there's a discussion of the practicalities of hosting a ball, you know, minute, that suddenly goes, you know, in this unexpected direction. Mrs. Weston proposed having no regular supper, merely sandwiches, et cetera, set out in the little room, but that was scouted as a wretched suggestion. A private dance without sitting down to supper was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women. - Sandwiches, et cetera. You just imagine how dry they are, can you? - Yeah, yeah. - But an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women. Well, you know, a really obvious thing to say about Jane Austen is that she was born in 1775 and that makes her a rough contemporary of wordsworths and colleges. Thomas Paine's, the rights of man, was published in 1791 when she was 16. Mary Wilson Crafts, vindication of the rights of women appeared in 1792 when she was 17. And she wrote Love and Friendship in the same year as the French Revolution was going on in the background. So she's right in the middle of all those revolutionary ideas and revolutionist thinkers. - And on another front, she was clearly listening to arguments about the question of plantation slavery, the slave trade by this point had been abolished but plantation slavery not. As you can see from its background presence in the plot of Mansfield Park, so Thomas Bertram has a plantation and a tiger and he's always away dealing with complicated troubles in the West Indies. And as the daughter of a not very wealthy clergyman who was dependent on others, Austen was in a position to look at the sort of rapidly expanding wealth of Regency England from a quite skeptical place. So she grew up surrounded by all these revolutions in thinking. - So as feminist philosophy, political revolution, dramatic economic change, poetic revolutions in the Lurical Ballads, all way more exciting than our own benign daydish. - Yeah. And so you can think of her as knowing about all these things and some of them intimately, her brother Francis fought in the Napoleonic Wars and became an admiral and then letting them seep into her fiction at the edges. But she was also someone with a basically conservative temperament. You know, she accepted the fact that the circumstances of the world were the way they were. However absurd or nonsensical, she may have found many of those sort of conventions of the day. You know, she wasn't like Worston craft or Godwin or Shelley imagining sort of wholesale social alternatives. - And you wouldn't see her on the barricades, probably. - You wouldn't see her on the barricades. There's a very good book on Austen, called Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation by Barrett Tandon. And he says, "If she had to take the world as it was, that did not stop her remaking it in an art which consistently gets the better of situations of which there was no getting rid." - Yeah, I like that. Consistently getting the better of situations that you can't change is often what she does in her errands, do too. So perhaps you could see her fiction as the product of a kind of collision, and it means still staying very high at abstract level, but a product of a collision between a sort of passionate romanticism, a belief that love and sentiments have a life of their own and a potentially rebellious and uncontrollable, which you see going on in France, just over the water. And that's combined with a strict realism about the material and moral and financial basis of marriage, sort of what you've ultimately got to do. And I think in a way as satirical or ironical tone of voice is perhaps the best and maybe even the only way of reconciling those completely reconciling forces, isn't it? - Yeah, I think that's right. That's a good example of this in a letter to her sister Cassandra that she wrote in January 1796 when she'd been flirting with an Irish barist or called Tom LaFroy, probably around the time that she was drafting Pride and Pradgettus. So Tom LaFroy had visited her family home for a bit and was as penniless as Jane Austen herself. So she probably couldn't have been expecting much more from him than a bit of fun and flirtation, though harm in that. Anyway, she wrote to her sister, "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." - You love to get a letter in email from Hollywood. - Yeah, I mean. I think those two sentences are so brilliant because they fused together the two person eyes that Jane Austen was perhaps the only person to have conjoined perfectly. She manages simultaneously to be the sort of made and aunt disapproving made and aunt and the rebellious niece having fun. So she's using that made and aunt vocabulary, profligate and shocking and then pulls the rug from under it because all they did was they sat there a bit and they danced a bit and they had a nice evening. - Yeah, a lot of nice time, yeah. So this is someone who wrote within awareness that the all these romantic and rebellious energies are exploding around her, but not necessarily for her in her life. She died young two years before the publication of the first parts of Byron's Don June, which is the subject of our next podcast. - He thought it already. - But there are times when you sense she, you know, you might think she belongs to a different century or more universe. So all those, um, sultry, bionic, flotatious men in her novels, The Willoughby's, The Wickham's, The Henry Crawford's, you know, they don't come out that well from it, you know, let's say that. - She's actually fascinated, though, isn't she by The Willoughby's and The Wickham's? And also the kind of emotional escape and social disruption that they can bring. And in that respect, they are a major engine of the fiction even if the individual characters are presented as being basically CAD. And she's also acutely realistic about the fact that men like Willoughby with all their bionic posturing and so on. They want to do the Don June thing and be mysterious and seductive and pull lots of birds. But they also, ideally, ultimately need a wife with 20,000 pounds in order to support their rakeish lifestyle. So you get a constant pull between passionate sensibility and a kind of monid realism, which usually wins out. - Yeah. There's another sort of textbook feature of romanticism that she displays if we're continuing to hover above the bonnet of river. - Absolutely hover, you know. - And that is the novel's emphasis on generational differences between the young and the old. And typically the old don't come out of it very well, quite right, too. So in Love and Fringe, which, as we know, is pure satire. She takes the parents versus children trope to extremes. Do you want to read this passage? - Absolutely, but it's a pleasure. So Sophia, as you'll remember, is one of the two fainting heroines in the novel. "Convinced as you must be from what I've already told you concerning Augustus and Sophia that there never were a happier couple. I need not, I imagine, inform you that their union had been contrary to the intonations of their cruel and mercenary misspelled parents who had vainly endeavored with obstinate perseverance to force them into a marriage with those whom they had ever abhorred. But with a heroic fortitude worthy to be related and admired, they had both constantly refused to submit to such despotic power. So we have despotic parents who cruelly refused to support their children's passionate, romantic, rebellious attachments. And there's a suggestion, I suppose, here, too, that maybe the prudent parents, in this case, are right and the sentimental children who are in the wrong, but you do get that sense of generational difference." - Yeah. "In her mature novels, fathers and mothers are often self-indulgent, and usually they fail to teach their children how to behave." well either by letting them get away with anything or by being too severe on them. And the former that getting away with anything is two and a big way of Mr. Bennett's in pride and prejudice. And of Colin's personal favourite character in all of literature, the frail and clueless Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father, who's always worried about the cold and addicted to gruel. So these were all the sort of failed to dads of her fashion. Fail dad's, I mean it's so hard being a father, Claire. It's so harsh. Anyway, I got to make a confession. Do I? I have a deep admiration for all the Boston's father figures. I mean, they sound, aren't they? I mean, they hate parties. They want to stay in when the weather's nasty. In fact, they all are staying with me. It's quite good too. They like being in their libraries. They hate it when the young people have fun or profitably leave windows open or perform in plays. But you know, despite my admiration for the older generation that she probably slightly despises, I would agree that her fiction does have that sensitivity to intergenerational differences. And I think it's analogous to the way that we're now attuned to generational gaps in attitude between, you know, sort of Custby boomers like me, I think probably crusty boomers like me, as she's a bit more accurate really, and Minnett Niels like you, who are sort of free and exciting and have a lovely time in life. That's fun. That is it. That's what we're known for. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. It's people born in the 1740s or 50s don't really shine in Jane Austen. That's sort of older generation. She was very much a child of the 1770s a very different time. And you know, she can see in her generation a whole range of self-indulgent vices and lots of toxic wealth and free-spiritedness. But it is typically people like Mr. Knightley or Mr. Darcy who are only a little bit older than her. And it's not a lot older who have their moral compasses aligned like Austen's. So, and here I risk being ultra literally literal minded, but you know, that's how I am. Mr. Knightley is 37 in 1814 when Emma is set. So he's only a few years younger than Austen. And I think that's one factor that contributes to his overall air of knightliness and goodness. Yeah. While we're thinking about the historical period in context, we should say something about the economic background here. No calling wake up. This was important part of my very major defil thesis. Okay. No, it's all work. GDP per capita in England. You've got to say it with a straight face. Come on. GDP per capita in England was stable throughout the 18th century until you'll be interested note about the year of Austen's birth and then it shoots up. Is it really striking feature of the graph, actually? But do you do it? It's with our notion of you. Yeah. And that is largely because an accompanied by the sort of growing taste for luxuries, T, silk, etc. And you know, I'm not going to talk about inflation, but fine. Yeah. It also matters. It's material realities. These are the key in the novel. Right. Who she is not just seeing revolutionary ideas, but also she is seeing money, new money, new styles, new fashions, new vices, new nice things that you could eat and drink, sexy carriages, baruch landals, etc. Yeah. And those carriages are usually markers of ostentatious wealth, which instantly triggers a stirrical response. Yeah. It's a bit of like saying someone has a range rover. You know, you kind of know which bin they belong. Yeah. Yeah. Not the recycling bin, I think. But to stay a moment with money, your favourite subject, it is worth remembering that Jane's brother Edward, who will come back to, I think, when we talk about Frank Churchill in America, because similarities there. But her brother Edward was in the 1780s adopted by the Austen's wealthy childless relatives called the Nights. And like Frank Churchill, he changed his surname to Knight, so he could inherit a whopping house at Chauten. So from 1809 onwards, and that's exactly the period during which Jane Austen's novels were published, she was living in a cottage on her brother's estate. So what that means is that throughout this period, she's seeing money, and by our standards, a lot of it every day, while not having it very much of it herself. And that situation, you know, close to on the outside of great visible wealth, is a perfect position for which to develop a satirical vision of what it might mean to be rich and you know how the rich behave. So you know, think of, to take a modern example, Nick Guest, who's in Alan Hollinghurst, novel line of beauty, in the 1980s, he is literally a guest in the houses of the wealthy, faturite elite, observing them as a sort of insider outsider. And that's become a widespread fictional trope, and that means salt burns, another instance of that insider outsider living with the gay rich, or not so gay rich. And Charles Ryder in Bride said, I suppose is another. And I think Jane Austen is sort of right at the start of that insider outsider perspective. Anyway, I think that's enough of Jane Austen from above the bonnet. We need to say a little bit more now about how all of that contextual detail, that economic background, the GDP, how it plays into her particularly delicate form of social satire, because she's not, to put it crudely, the done kind of satirist who struts around London deploring contemporary vices, and she's not the swift kind of misanthropic satirist who hates all humanity, based on sort of what we view in my as I see it. And she's certainly not the Rochesterian swaggering, shagging kind of satirist either. So, you know, what kind of satirist is she? We're going to get that says. I think that battle between the sort of passionate and the material sensibility and wealth, that is the foundation of her kind of satire. So her satire is all about people being pulled in different directions by emotional and economic forces. So, you know, she's keen to send up people who are over obsessed with wealth. Who talk about nothing but GDP and baruch landals? I didn't know you're talking about yet. But at the same time, she recognises that women in particular need some wealth and some support in order to live, because they can't work. So she's sort of keen to give weight to romantic love and even sexual desire, but she sees it as, perhaps she making people do absurd and either socially destructive or self-destructive things. Those forces are pulling against each other. Yeah, yeah, but the key I suppose is the amazingly delicate way that she articulates the satirical pull between different forces and the way she does that in her language. Because any one of those forces can tip top-bel over into self-parody or into moral danger or whatever it might be. But the language just pulls them all together and keeps them woven into an intricate web. Yeah. And despite my very compelling economic explanation of her affection. I was compelled. Thank you. I think the reason that many other people would want to read it is because it's sort of constantly playing verbal games around that material base and those games are delightful. So there are some specific words, in fact, that we could zoom in on here. I suspect you might have words in mind. Well, Colin, the words "interest" and "interesting" are particularly, you know, interesting and interesting. So "interest" was a major player in that late Georgian Regency of vocabulary. It's a sort of word that people passed around all the time and they brought out to describe all sorts of different social transactions in their lives. And interesting is my words. I sort of charge the underlying words when I'm reading all these days. I highlight them in my ebook or whatever. But interesting just swirls around so much and it does so much work. Sometimes it means a leering or even sexy and sometimes it means materially valuable as when someone has an interest in a piece of land or a big house or whatever. And you often don't quite know which side the word is on. Yeah. And that's because it often can convey those multiple senses together. So someone can be described as interesting because they have lots of money or because they're intellectually fascinating or they're gorgeous or a bit of all three. And that sort of shiftiness in the word is something that dates from roughly just before Austin's time. So during the later 18th century, interest moves from those particular economic and legal contacts that have been in to this point in which you know your interest as an objective thing. It's your share in something or your concern in something. It shifts to a much broader subjective field. So interest becomes used to describe something with a propensity to concern you, to attract you, to draw you in, to interest you. So if we look back for a moment of sense and sensibility, you know, there Jane Austen is I think sort of working out her own vocabulary and she's playing with the instability of certain words which will become useful to her later fiction. And interesting actually is a key word in sense and sensibility. And one bit that I underlined in the novel, as I've read it again, is the masterly description of Marianne, who's the passionate sister to the sensible Eleanor, the description of Marianne as interesting. So she was sensible and clever, but eager in everything. Hasoros, her joys could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting. She was everything but prudent. So there being interesting is in opposition to being prudent. It's an entirely spiritual or intellectual or romantic kind of interest that Marianne generates because of course, she, like all the other Dashwood girls, has no money at all and so can't offer interest in the way that a spinstor with £20,000 could interest a man who was low enough to be motivated by such base material concerns. And Marianne's mother, El Svaran the novel, is it's grateful to Willoughby when he rescues Marianne after a fall, you know, as she would be to anyone, but you get the feeling that she's especially grateful to him because the influence of youth, beauty and elegance gave an interest to the action which came home to her feelings. Do you love it when someone comes home to your home? Yeah, it doesn't these days for me, but yeah, basically Willoughby is hot. hot, hot as Hades. But then we discover he's also potentially rich and so Willoughby later becomes interesting in a more material sense. Since Marianne is a reader of books, Willoughby seems to her like the most interesting kind of fictional hero. His personal and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favorite story. Every circumstance belonging to him was interesting. His name was good. His residence was in their favorite village and she soon found that of all manly dresses, a shooting jacket was the most becoming. So his name was good. He had a great house and snappy clothes and man is really seriously interesting. And we have another example from Love and Freedanship. You're a bit obsessed here, Clown. I'm really loving it. But this time with a negative form, disinterested. So Augustus and Sophia slashed a fire, essentially admirably disinterested because they never think about that grubby thing money, translation, they don't pay their bills. They exalted creatures scorned to reflect a moment on their pecunary distressors and would have blushed at the idea of paying their debts. Alas, what was their reward for such disinterested behaviour? The beautiful, two-ells Augustus was arrested and we were all undone. So Austin is sort of saying here that sometimes people should think of their financial interests and stop trying to be interesting and all the other more fun but less from the narrative ways people can be interesting. And just to take us back from this very interesting digression to Emma, the topic Claire, you don't remember, I was this podcast. There's an absolutely perfect fusion of the dispassionately material and the erotically fascinated sense of the word interest. When Mr Knightley says of Emma, "I have a very sincere interest in Emma." Is a beller, who's Emma's sister and Mr Knightley's sister-in-law, is a beller does not seem more my sister has never excited a greater interest. Perhaps hardly so great. There's an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma. I wonder what will become of her. I wonder. But at this point in the novel we don't know that Mr Knightley is in love with Emma and he maybe doesn't know it either or possibly isn't quite yet in love with her but he will be. So interest here. Sorry, sorry, sorry everyone yet. Interest here is a big flag that maybe Mr Knightley's sort of paternal concern for Emma may turn into or mask something more. That's peculiarly interesting. So that perilous equipoise between the erotic and the material is in some ways the key origin point of Jane Austen's style and it comes through in the delicate usages of interesting that we've been exploring. But I suppose another fact we ought to bring into our view of Austen Satta in general is reading that great evil. Yes indeed. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the act of reading to Austen's novels. As we've seen she starts off by writing these self-conscious parodies of other sentimental fiction. And throughout the six novels there is a very distinct and of its time sense that if you attempt to apply the conventions of fiction to real life well that will screw things up for you. Yes I have found. And the old Madame Bovery problem, Boston would not have got it the Madame Bovery problem. She would have come to it via the very longstanding and quite annoying 18th century debate about the evil effects of reading fiction unimpressionable young minds, particularly female minds. The idea was that if you read novels as a young woman you would forget yourself and your duties. You know you'd be carried away by all that heightened language. Stream emotions, all the scenes of seduction. So one, Regent's you, churchman said that novels carried a turbid stream of vice over the morals of mankind, polluted girls hearts and debased their intellects. So you know, a very rational stuff. Yes, very sensible. I do myself love a turbid stream of vice. So in sense and sensibility, Mary and Dashwood has learnt from books as well as from her sentimental nature, I suppose that emotions are the pathway to happiness. And that's why she finds Willow be quite so interesting and that's why she is made quite so miserable by falling in love with Willow be because he's a sort of fiction of her own invention. Yeah. And in Northanger Abbey Likewise, we learn that Catherine Molland has been intraining for a heroine since she was 15. She read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventual life. So bits of popetchly at this point, which is a nice joke because it both means that she's in the habit of applying fictional conventions to life and that there's a part of her that sort of satirically suspects that she is the heroine of someone else's novel. Yeah. And there's another side of the women who reads books issue for Austin, which I suppose we should also mention. Yes. So one target of the satir in sense and sensibility is Lady Middleton, the brain dead wife of Sir John Middleton. And he is the relation who invites the dashes to stay when they lose all the money in the cottage on his estate in Devonshire. So they're in poverty under his wing as it were. It's the shades of Austin's. So generous but also quite exclusive. Right. Yeah. In my cottage. Yeah. But Lady Middleton who Colin has described as an icy vacuum of a woman. Nothing that's an accurate description of that. Yeah. But at one point Austin sort of imputes or transcribes her thoughts about the dashboard gels. Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton's behaviour to Eleanor and Marianne. She did not really like them at all because they neither flattered herself nor her children. She could not believe them good-natured. And because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical. Perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical but that did not signify. It was censure in common use and easily given. And that final sentence means what exactly? Basically that satirical is a common insult. So common that you didn't need to know what satirical meant in order to call people it. Maybe what she means is sort of, you know, a bit of a survey, a bit of a sharp, not easy or socially complacent a bit too clever. Red books. Red books. So character and Emma calls Mr. Knightley quite a humorist which is sort of good for you make me feel uneasy and I'm worried that you're laughing at me. You are quite a humorist I suppose, Claire too. But the bit you just read out, does suggest two things, doesn't it? I mean one that's for Austin being satirical is something that women can do. It's really important. And two, that a lot of people regarded it as a necessary consequence of reading in women. Because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical. Right. So I think we've put together now a nice recipe for Austin's brand of satir. We're cooking with gas. A lot of different forces are converging in this satirical recipe. So to start with, you've got that acute awareness of generational difference and economic social difference. GDP. GDP. And you've got to add to the part that early interest in sending up novelistic, novelistic conventions. And I suppose two are a sense that there's a line between fiction and real life which is permeable but you cross it at your paracel. Yes. A genuine attraction sometimes with some parody thrown in to sensibility and the potentially overpowering force of sentiment. Yeah. And that's a powerful flavour in the brew. And it's there in Marianne Dashwood's love for the wicked Willoughby. Yep. And presiding over all that is of constant awareness which is described as prudence when characters in the novel display it, the fact that money matters and that it will motivate it will hold in check the romantic components in the fiction. So interest. As cash. Really, yeah. And that's also the gender question, isn't it? Because I suppose Austin often seems to be suggesting that being a woman doesn't exclude you from feeling passions but it often excludes you from acting on them. So perhaps observing, or to put another way of reading and writing fiction that probes and satirises conventional manners, that is the main form that female agency can take. If we're being really optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So with all of that in mind, as our recipe for Jane Austen and you could try it at home folks, let's turn to Emma which I always think is her best book by a mile until I reread the others and then I think they're the best ones and then I reread Emma and I think it's the best to get. Perhaps we should just remind readers, listeners, readers, viewers, where we're multi-media, whatever, listeners, roughly what it's about. I would say one word, it's about mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps also misreadings. So Emma is in several ways pretty unusual, isn't she, among Jane Austen's herons, because for one thing she gets a book title or to herself which should tell us something about the power she has over her own little world, because pride and prejudice is not called Lizzie, is it? Karla on Lizzie. It's a good, yeah. I think she made a good choice not calling it Lizzie. Emma's 21. Which is significant because it means that in theory she would not need her guardians consent to marriage. Yeah. So she's grown up and she's well off and she's not living in a cottage on the estate of a rich relative, but she's living in the fairly substantial Hartfield, the principal house in Levy, Highbury, a small provincial town 16 miles from London, we'll tell that very precisely, where she lives with her queryless and valetude in the area and father, who is of course the hero of the novel, entirely sound on the undesirability of parties, they perhaps likes, grew a little bit more than I do. So Emma is someone at the centre of her own small universe. You know, she's not dependent on richer relatives, like the Dashwoods. She's not in a family whose future depends on making good marriages. the Bennett's, she's not the ward of much richer people like Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. She is blasé about marriage because she's well aware she says this, that almost any marriage she entered into will likely mean less freedom than the freedom she now enjoys as mistress of Hartfield. And that's because of her father, allowing her to be there. Yeah. I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want, employment I do not want, consequence I do not want. So she's about as autonomous and independent as a young lady could have been in Austin's day. Yep. Yep. And much of the satire that we've been reading over the past few months has been in some sense written from the margins of things, hasn't it? I mean, done struggling for preferment at court and then at church and Pope excluded by scotholicism from all kinds of things. And then the perennially unfavered gay who was miserable and got the wrong job throughout his life. And Austin often writes about characters who occupy those sort of economically or socially marginal positions, which are akin to the position she held really. But who can turn their satirical gazes on worlds that they're not quite part of. But I think with Emma something new is going on isn't it? I mean, it's very hard for Emma to think critically about hybrid because she's the queen of hybrid in effect. I mean, she is inside it looking out rather than outside it, looking in. And she's also powerful. So satire from the margins has a hard time making things happen. I mean, in some ways, the fury of the satirist is being excluded from. The impotence. Yeah, making things happen. But Emma has has real agency. And the sort of mistake she makes have major consequences for the people in her world, you know, within that small world, but big consequences. I think all of that centrality and just general material well-being makes a feel that she can be as if the author of a romantic novel of her own. And it would be called Emma. Yes, yeah, yeah. So Catherine Maulin, we said earlier, has sort of dim awareness of being the heroin of someone else's book. The Emma has this very conscious aspiration to author other people's fates. And she's described at one point as an "imaginist". Such a good word for her. Yeah. So, you know, Austin is sort of implying that she has pretty high levels of self-satisfaction. Yeah, yeah. So we're back with the idea, perhaps, of reading as having an intrusively satirical effect because it makes you want life to behave in the way it does in novels, which typically life refuses to do. And, you know, satire works off to get that gap between expectation, hope, more latitudes and reality. And reading, though, sort of makes you an "imaginist" who can't accurately understand the motives of people around you because you're projecting their stories into the future. You're writing the stories for them and you're imputing motives to them that they don't necessarily share. Yeah. And I think it's notable in that respect that Emma only reads certain kinds of things. So the very judgey Mr. Nightleess, as at one point, Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was 12 years old. I've seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through and very good lists they were, but I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry impatience and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. In other words, she doesn't want serious improving stuff. She wants fancy. She wants novels and romances. So fueled by that reading, Emma thinks she can make romantic matches. And before the novel opens, she has set up her former governess, Miss Taylor, in a good marriage to the sort of genial squire, Mr. Weston. So she naturally thinks, next job, that a very pretty but not very smart orphan from a local school called Harriet Smith, parentage unknown, must be the daughter of a person of substance. Obviously. As you know, that's how things go and novels. And that therefore, Harriet must marry the sort of shiny new local clergyman, Mr. Elton, and that he surely must be attracted to her. So, Miss reading or making mistakes in reading the world around you is really what the novels about or exploring. And I suppose it's significant that the social world of high-bree is very small, very stable. Everybody thinks they understand each other and it's a bit like an Agatha Christie closed room mystery in its way or a very small stage set of stage sets because there's a handful of grand houses, there's Hartfield, and then there's Mr. Knightley's house Donwell, or Dunwell Abbey, and there are some less grand houses that the grand people call and descend to visit. And there's a main street, isn't there, with a single shop. For folds, yeah, that everyone visits for everything, it's where you, but you know, and the social life of the place, and it's pecking order, a completely established. And Emma is Stugbaugh with Mr. Woodhouse. He's lovely, right? Yeah. He's given us creep time and Mr. Knightley. Yeah, and Mr. Knightley is 16 years older than her. So since the loss of her governess Mrs. Weston to marriage, she really haven't got any real friends and none around her own age. And what happens then in the novel is that new people arrive in this closed world and to begin with, they're unknown quantities. And because of the fact that they are unknown quantities, they generate enigmas, and I suppose potential plots as well. Yes, which the novel either takes up or doesn't, yeah. So there are lots of moments actually in the novel where characters are given literal puzzles or riddles or enigmas which have to be deciphered or read. And these are sort of associated often with the enigmatic new arrivals in hybrid. So early on Mr. Elton makes a charade or riddle to, while away, those boring long-winter evenings, the solution to which is caught ship, which Emma sort of parted deciphered, but she assumes that it refers to the he's a imaginary courtship of Harriet, whereas really spoiler. Hence the fact that he fancies her. Yeah, and I suppose one of the mistakes Emma makes throughout is to think that people are like puzzles, people, you know, just you've got to work them out. And if you clever enough, you can solve them or find the key to them. And usually those around had turned out to be, well, more complex and also more straightforward than she thinks they are sometime. And you know, they can be just in it for the money, plain and simple, Mr. Elton. At other times they do things which are completely unpredictable and she doesn't really know what's going on. Yeah. The Mr. Elton misreading ends in a real debacle in which he proposes to Emma in a carriage. Which was a very good place to propose to someone in this period if you were in the proposed mood because you you were briefly alone with your beloved. You were away from the prying eyes of family and friends and you could be there without breaking any rules of decorum. Yeah. And if everything went tits up, it does. It's so elegant and you're phrasing. Yep, tits up. Tits up. Well, it does with Mr. Elton's proposal to Emma. You would just have to hope that the carriage driver shot. But I would actually propose, Colin, that Elton has the proposal seen happening in a carriage for more reasons than that practicality one. So in 18th century novels, the kind that Austin read, carriages and coaches are often vehicles, ha ha for plot. And that's because their places where unpredictable and often potentially awkward things can happen. So if your character is traveling in a public coach, you can have them encounter all sorts of strange people who then set off new avenues for the plot. And that's what happens at the end of love and friendship. Laura, pause, passing stage coach on red to Edinburgh. What does as you do? And as it grows light, she can suddenly see and she sees that all her fellow passengers, in fact, all her long lost, nearest relatives and connections. As they always are. Yeah. And I suppose that because journeys don't always go as planned. And this podcast is sponsored by Avanti West Coast, which has 1.6 stars on trust pilot reviews because none of its journeys ever go as planned. The carriage trope is a means by which plots can be sort of re-rooted because things go wrong. Stage coaches crash or turn over. And you can think of those modes in Hogarth that center around halted or broken down vehicles. So, you know, Tom Raikwell, the Raik's progress, his coach gets stopped by the forces of the law while he's on route to St James's. And that gives rise to a whole satirical spectacle. The whole host of very bad things. Yeah. And I not to press the point, but there is a very good example yet again in love and freedom. I'm not a true believer. You can wear anything. You're bonnet at this point. There's a whole hive of them. It was from the passage we read right at the beginning. The husbands of the two heroines are killed in a tragic, but actually in the end, quite convenient road accident. Their their fayton is overturned in the street very shortly after they get married. Then in Francis Bernie's novel, which Austin read very closely, "Evelina," something 78. The heron, "Evelina" finds her carriage held up at gunpoint by two highwaymen, except one highwaymen. It's actually her, "Rakish would be lover seclement willopy into skies who, you know, takes the opportunity to get inside the carriage and proposition her." Yeah. And just to drag you back. That is the immediate, Evelina is the immediate model for what Austin's doing in Emma with Mr. Ellsons' opportunistic proposal in the carriage, isn't it? And I suppose it's also not a coincidence. It coincidences it that Willoughby is the name she gives to the sexy rake in sense and sensibility, and she is steeped in Evelina. Yeah. So, carriage is. So all that to say, the carriage as a site of seduction motif was really big in the later 18th century, which you can tell by the fact that when Casanova. Yes, Casanova. wrote up his racing memoirs in 1790s, he pretended, Thank you for your time. the case that the majority of his famous sexual encounters and seductions had taken place in carriages, or because of fortuitous, he broken down carriages, and it seems that he wanted to make his memoirs as racially as a novel, and he knew in certain a novel motif, a carriage here and there, would achieve that. So you're suggesting to pull us back to Emma, that with Emma and Mr Elton Austin is doing the sort of favourite thing of sending up a novelistic convention? Well, I think that already by Barney's time, in the 1770s and definitely by Austin's time, carriages are such an established bit of business that you would always be using them in at least a semi-tangent cheekway. OK. So when the high-women appear in Avelina's companion exclaims, "Don't say we shall be overtur." "Shall we not?" "Shall we not?" And then Edward, before he dies in love and friendship, says, "I fear I have been overturbed." Well, I mean, Jane Austen isn't quite doing that, is she, in Emma. I mean, I don't see the same tongue in cheek element there, but it matters for the novel's ethics and for Emma's moral development, that she should find herself wrong about Mr Elton's romantic motives in such a dramatic way and be confronted with the real harm that she's doing to poor Harriet Smith, you know, she's desperately in love with Mr Elton. So she's forced up against the truth in that intimate space and the carriage. So the carriage is the way of almost literally sticking Emma's face into it, how wrong she is. Yeah. So it introduces Emma in this like, as dramatic possible way, to the idea that she has been in her words in a most complete era with regard to the intentions of others. You know, Mr Elton is prudent, he's interested in his courtship, he wants her and her cash and status, not the romantic orphan Harriet Smith. And then another thing happens there, you said, two things, couple of things. Yeah, couple of things. Well, we said a few minutes ago that Emma believes that she can be the author of other people's romantic lives. And I think what the carriage episode suggests is that she isn't. It tells us, and it should tell her, but it doesn't, that she's at the mercy of novelistic conventions. She's not in charge of them. She's part of a novel, with all the tricks the novel has on hand to swerve and for its characters, of course. You know, it's not that the episode is some sort of little knowing, satirical dig. It's not Austin saying, here's a clever joke, you'll get a few reading novels about carriages, but it is a sort of satire Emma's expense and at the expense of her authority. Okay, yeah, so the convention of the carriage sort of traps her. Yeah, well, I've enjoyed my little excursion. Should we talk about the other new arrivals in high, Rubyon, Mr Elton? Yeah, okay. So first, that is the glamorous Frank Churchill. Yep, and he's Mr. Weston's son, and so the stepson of Emma's newly married ex-governess, and his name is Frank Churchill, not Frank Weston, because as a little boy, he was taken into the care of his dead mother's family, the Churchill's, and now stands to inherit their large fortune by virtue of having taken her name. Yep, and he appears at a time that curiously coincides with the returned hybride of the secretive Jane Fairfax, who is a sort of long-running social nemesis of Emma's for no good reason and niece of the poor, but for a gentile Miss Bates, who is one of Emma's hybrid neighbours. And Jane is the ward of a wealthy London family, the Campbell's, but as everyone knows, she will soon have to give up her nice life and become a lowly governess because she has no money. Yeah, and she's clearly more beautiful than Emma's. Yes, clearly. That's sort of the point, and Emma and the car are bare that fact. And we're repeatedly told that Jane Fairfax is smooth and cold and cautious and suspiciously reserved and generally hard to read. And Emma actually uses that keyword in Jane Austen "Elegant", which is always a barbed term that barbs both the person that's used to describe and the person using it very often, actually, because she's Emma's being bitchy really and calling her elegant. And Miss Eamn is also very often willing to offer opinions that are clear, shall we say, to a fault?" says of Jane. "I do not accuse her of want of feeling. Her sensibilities, I suspect, are strong and her temper excellent in its powers of forbearance, patience and self-control. But it wants openness. She's reserved. More reserved, I think, than she used to be. And I love an open temper." So she is a human enigma, ripe for misreading. She is a riddle, quite a riddle, Emma says at one point. So why has she not accompanied Mr and Mrs Campbell to Ireland to visit their daughter? The recently-wed Mrs Dixon, who's supposed to be her best friend? What exactly is the nature of her relationship to Mr Dixon, the new husband? And who has ordered an expensive piano for her mysteriously, which has been delivered to the humble home of Miss Bates? "Srivy Mr Dixon and Frank has mysteries about him too. Why does he go all the way to London to get his hair cut? You know, not something you do in the region seeing, then because 16 miles, heck of a long way." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "And anyway, later on the novel, there are more riddles, aren't there? I mean, there's the alphabet game in which Frank and Emma collude to embarrassed Jane Fairfax by spelling out the word Dixon in letters, which are profoundly cruelty to do. Then on the disastrous trip to Box Hill, which we're going to talk about in a minute, even the genial Mr Weston tries to make a conundrum or verbal puzzle. Which two letters spell our perfection?" And the answer, of course, is M-A or M-A though Emma, characteristically, needs to be told the answer. "So riddles, puzzles, wrong answers, they all abound. But perhaps the main thing that sets Emma apart from Austin's other novels is the sort of intricate way in which we are made to misread what's happening, you know, almost as badly as Emma does." "Yeah, and that's really what makes it such an endlessly rereadable book, because it gives you hints about what's going on." You know, big spoiler, Frank and Jane Fairfax are secretly engaged and Frank is flirting with Emma to create a smoke screen in front of the engagement. But you know, the narrative stays so close to Emma's view of the world that you're made to share in her misreadings. And every time I read it, I'd see new things, and little winks and hints just, you know, over and over again, new ones. "Yeah, so you're more or less brought to go along with Emma's mistakes and yet part of you stands outside them." And more than that, because you sometimes think that Emma knows she's making mistakes, as though she's trying not to see what she knows is there. "Yeah." There's a nice example of that towards the end of the novel when Mr. Knightley is about to leave Hartfield for London. Before he goes, he sort of sees Emma's hand as if he means to kiss it, which is a thing that's quite out of character for him. And it at least gives a hint to us that perhaps he's more interested in her than he lets on. Emma, at least consciously, doesn't think so, doesn't occur to her. She thinks the gesture speaks perfect amity, which is for just mates. Just mates. But does this hint in Austin's prose that it's more the case that she isn't allowing herself to think that, and so some others subconscious awareness is sort of bubbling up and she's repressing it? They parted thorough friends, however. She could not be deceived, as to the meaning of his countenance and his unfinished gallantry. It was all done to assure her that she had fully recovered his good opinion. So she could not be deceived. So could not, because she's absolutely 100% right about his just wanting to be her friend, or does could not mean she's afraid of what might happen if she thought otherwise that it was more than a friend. And both those possibilities are there, aren't they? I mean, Mr. Knightley is a friend. Mr. Knightley is more than a friend. And they're both there for her, but she opts for the wrong one, you know, just a friend. Because she's not quite ready for what the right one might mean. She wants to shut it out. And I think the idea of her as having a subconscious as a result of this slippage between her perspective and the readers perspective, absolutely crucial to what Joan Austin is doing with the novel as a whole. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's especially clear to see in moments of literal reading in the novel. So early on Emma's protégé Harriet Smith is being courted by a really nice young man, a sort of solid young man called Robert Martin, who sends her a lovely letter declaring his love for her? And Emma's a bit of a snob and thinks that life is one big romance, so she tells Harriet that she can't possibly marry a mere farmer who hasn't read anything apart from the agricultural report. So I have read. Probably interested in GDP as well, but then the Robert Martin's love letter impresses Emma, nonetheless. Will you read the letter, Criteria? Pray too. I'd rather you would. Emma was not sorry to be pressed. She read and was surprised. The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have decreased to gentleman. The language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling. Even delicacy. Ealing delicacy. Delicacy of feeling. Yeah. So she proceeds to persuade herself at once that a letter can't possibly have been written by him. It must have been the work of one of his better educated sisters. Yeah. Emma's really good at persuading herself, but that is in every sense an interesting moment, because I'll stand to representation of Emma, willfully misreading that letter. Again, it allows Emma to have that sort of subconscious. She doesn't want to believe that Robert Martin is gentlemanly and likely to be a good husband for Harriet, but despite herself, she can actually see the truth. The qualities in his writing, but she suppresses them because it isn't the reality she wants to see. In a way, the mystery. reading is the satire, right? Which is directed at Emma Snobbery at this point. Yeah, yeah. And amazingly, we don't actually get the text as a letter at all, do we? I mean, we just get Emma trying to misread it and that allows a space to grow up between the readers and the heroine, which is a very narrow space because what Robert Martin actually wrote is filter through Emma's reading of it. We just see her view and we see her trying to push away what she knows to be true, but we don't have all the evidence that the text is the letter itself to enable us to know that she is completely wrong. So I suppose what we have here, potentially is rather deep-seated kind of satire on the novel as a form in which a character is making up a world, or the novelist is quietly picking that world to pieces from the edges and giving readers little glimpses of an alternative reality. So in that sense, we could say that Emma is in its way as much a satire on novelistic convention as something like Northanger Abbey, but it takes that satire a few steps further. It's not just satirising young women like Emma who think the worlds abays the laws of romantic fiction. It's sort of setting traps for readers who think they know more than Emma, but he also want this fiction to follow the general rules of romance. So you know, materialistic realism, which tells us that Harriet, because she's illegitimate, we'd be doing really well to marry the good sensible Robert Martin, is sort of tugging against romantic myth-making. Emma wanting Harriet to be the love child of an aristocrat who therefore should marry the elegant Mr. Elton. Those forces are pulling away at both Emma and the readers, and we readers by definition are tilted towards Emma's viewpoint because we must be people who like novelistic fictions we've just picked up a novel. Yeah, so we're pulled along by her. And I suppose Frank Churchill is a sort of classic instance of this, isn't he? I mean, because he's set up really as the romantic lead, the person Emma must marry because he's the glamorous man of about her age who comes from outside. He's rich enough for her, because like Jane Austen's brother, he's given up his own father's surname in order to inherit that substantial estate. There is this sort of telling, subrenus or a faciveness to the way that he's presented before he arrives that makes you think things may not be as simple as all that. Certainly when you're rereading it. Yes, anyway, rereading it. First time. I don't know. Yeah. Austen has this way of using the passive voice to describe what he has or hasn't done. And the main thing he hasn't done is show up in hybrid to meet his new stepmother Mrs. Weston following his father's marriage. And that's a bad thing. It's a really, really bad thing to do. It is, and it's described like this. His coming to visit head father had been often talked of but never achieved. Yeah, and it's really ambiguous because does had been often talked of. I mean, Frank himself often promised to come and then said, "Oh, actually, I've got to go to the races." Or does it mean that everybody else talked about his arrival as a certainty, but he never showed. There's a huge moral distinction between those two equally possible interpretations of that phrase, because the first of them implies that Frank Churchill is an unreliable and selfish brat really. Well, the second I suppose might just mean that Miss Bates and Co, you know, the hybrid gossip have been saying, "Frank Churchill, he's going to come." He's going to arrive soon, isn't he? Yeah. Passive and active matter in Austen. So it's rare that you dig, isn't it? If you look for it, you'll see it. It's rare for Emma and Contraste Frank to be made the subject of a passive verb, because the way in which the narrative comes through her thoughts means that we always see things from her active perspectives as she's shaping and doing. She's not being done by. And actually, one measure of her growing uncertainty about the world as the novel goes on is the higher frequency of passive verbs that Austen uses sort of in her vicinity. That's really interesting sort. Yeah. And in the Frank Churchill example, the pressure is put on the reader to judge what that passive phrasing tells us about this character. You've got to adjudicate between different possibilities. And I suppose that is part of what people mean when they talk about Jane Austen's irony, is it? Yeah, I mean, there's a big subject, but one aspect of it is that it's a kind of irony that gives you just enough reality to detach yourself from a character's fantasy world, but also gives you enough of the character's fantasy world to let you live in it too. So it's a kind of perceptual satire where you have the delusion and the reality at one at the same time. But I think it doesn't work if you find yourself as a reader sort of completely at sea. There has to be something in there of what the brilliant William Empson called energy of judgment as well as breadth of sympathy. So that means you're not just floating between possibilities and sort of post-modern sea of whatever nothing matters either will do. Yeah. So you've got to have some kind of investment. Yeah. And I think we can see something of that later on in the novel when Emma learns to her great disappointment that Frank has been called home to the awful Mrs Churchill and that as a result horror of horrors there will be no ball in highbury and no possibility of further flirtation with him. So Jane Austen says this there was no doing anything but lament and exclaim the loss of the ball, the loss of the young man and all that the young man might be feeling. It was too wretched such a delightful evening as it would have been and this is if we're given Emma's view of things via the order of the disappointments as they set down. So first she's sorry about the ball not happening big loss then for the loss of the man yeah middling kind of loss and then for his imagined feelings well you know it's all too wretched. Yeah so the reality is that she's clearly just not that into Frank Churchill. Although again she doesn't quite see herself. She doesn't quite see herself. Yeah. And Austen prompts us to see that in that order of syntax that her irony that sort of double-edged irony also lets Emma's fantasy perspective sort of coexist alongside the reality that it isn't allowed to displace it. We see more than Emma does at this point. Yeah. Thank you for listening to this extended extract from OnSatire. There's a lot more of this episode and 11 others in the series which you can listen to right now on our Close Reading's podcast along with all our other series covering literature from ancient Greece to the present day. To get 25% off a 12 month subscription use the code Emma25 that's Emma25 at checkout when you follow the link in the description.