The Jane Austen Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating the 250th anniversary of the author's birth. In each episode, we'll explore a different aspect of Austen's personality by asking leading researchers about one of her novels. Along the way, we will visit places important to Austen to reveal a specific aspect of her life and the time in which she lived. In episode 5 we look at what kind of writer Austen was and what we can learn about her views on her profession in the pages of Northanger Abbey.
From a young age Jane Austen had high literary ambitions. Her early works, known as Juvenilia, are varied in subject matter and reflect her wide reading taste. As well as stories parodying some of her favorite novels, such as Samuel Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), there are also witty interpretations of essays by the British politician Joseph Addison and the writer Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary.
She even tried to write her own history of England. In this short text, 15-year-old Austen proudly declares herself a “biased, biased, and ignorant historian,” eschewing dates and presenting information from historical fiction such as Shakespeare's plays as fact.
Although she was always a writer, she was not published until Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811. By the time of her death in 1817, Austen had published four of her six novels and had earned almost £700—a modest fortune, but enough to provide a measure of independence for an unmarried woman who was otherwise dependent on her brothers.
However, Austen's tomb in Winchester Cathedral does not mention that she was a writer. Publishing anonymously and disliking literary celebrities, she remained a little-known writer during her lifetime, despite periodic and reluctant contacts with London literary circles.
Her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey, written in 1799 but published posthumously, clearly reveals her views on writing and reading books. This is the story of Catherine Morland, whose love of gothic fiction distorts her sense of reality. It is filled with Austen's defense of the novel, which at the time was considered frivolous women's entertainment. It also reflects on her youth in a parody of gothic fiction, a genre Austen deeply loved and which is reflected on the bookshelves in her Chawton home.
In the fifth episode Jane Austen's paper trailNaomi Joseph visits Jane Austen's House in Hampshire with Louise Curran, a teacher of 18th-century Romantic literature. Curran is an expert in letter writing, novel development, and a literary celebrity.
In the lovely red brick cottage where Austen wrote and edited all six of her novels, Curran explains why Austen shunned the limelight: “I think you can see it in the kind of writer she is. I think there's a tension in her when she's actually writing these novels that she wanted to write, which required, as she put it, these three or four families in a rural village, and she was involved in these sorts of little things.”
Later, Anna Walker meets with two more Austen experts – Catherine Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at Oxford University, and Anthony Mandal, lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University – to find out what Northanger Abbey reveals about Austen's professional life.
As Mandal explains: “A decade [Austen] published during the heyday of women's fiction. This was a period when there were more women writers than men… but the reputation of the novel was very low. It was seen as a distracting form of writing, especially reading. It was a waste of time. It prevented you from being an obedient daughter, wife or mother.”
Austin was not convinced. Sutherland explains that the writer was “extremely ambitious about her talent, and she saw the novel as a moral force as well as a form of entertainment. And that's what Northanger Abbey is essentially about… the power of the novel not only leads you to misinterpretation, but ultimately, if you become a good reader, leads you to make wise judgments about the world around you.”
Listen to episode five Jane Austen's paper trail wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want even more Austin, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles on the anniversary.
Disclosure Statement Catherine Sutherland, Louise Curran and Anthony Mandal do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic position.
The Jane Austen Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker, with reporting by Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior Producer and Sound Designer: Eloise Stevens; Executive Producer: Gemma Ware. Works by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.
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This article has been republished from Talk under Creative Commons license. Read original article.
