Austen Chat: Episode 14

August 8, 2024

Jane Austen & Her Creative Process: A Visit with Collins Hemingway

Jane Austen pioneered and perfected quite a few literary techniques, and her novels mark a major turning point in modern English fiction. In this episode we chat with Collins Hemingway about Austen’s development as a writer and unpack the tools in her literary toolbox. Drawing on insights from his book Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New,” Collins shares his thoughts on her creative process, what she learned from novel to novel, and her mastery of innovative literary techniques. 

Collins Hemingway is the author of Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New," which explores Austen's development as a writer. His has also published articles on a variety of topics in JASNA's journals Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line and in Jane Austen's Regency World magazine. Other works include literary fiction based on Austen’s life as well as books on business, technology, ethics, and cognitive psychology. Collins is a frequent speaker at JASNA AGMs and has served as a JASNA Traveling Lecturer.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Collins Hemingway for appearing as a guest on Austen Chat! 

You can learn more about Collins and his work on his website: collinshemingway.com 

Listen to Austen Chat here or on your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms.  

Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published August 8, 2024. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Photo: Jane Austen Society of North America. Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. My guest today is Collins Hemingway, an author who has written both novels and non-fiction about Jane Austen. He's also written books on a variety of subjects, including business, technology, ethics, and cognitive psychology. His writing has appeared in Persuasions, Persuasions On-Line, and Jane Austen's Regency World magazine. Collins is a regular speaker at JASNA AGMs and has served as a JASNA Traveling Lecturer. His most recent book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a Style Entirely New, explores Austen's development as a writer in-depth. Collins is here to help us dig deep into Austen's creative process and unique literary techniques. Welcome to the show, Collins.

Collins: Thank you for having me, Breckyn. It's great to be here. You've got some great guests before me, and I hope I don't mess up.

Breckyn: You're going to be great. This is going to be fun. Well, to start off, we're going to play an Austen version of "Would You Rather." In preparation for this interview and thinking about your book, I've been thinking a lot lately about how Austen wrote every single word of her novels by hand and what an arduous process that must have been. Since you're a writer, would you rather have to write everything by hand with a quill, but you still get to use the internet for research, or still get to type in a computer, but you have to look up everything in hardcopy books? 

Collins: I would absolutely learn how to use a quill pen. I live in Central Oregon, about 120 miles away from the nearest university library, and I do have access to the University of Oregon's some online databases that are helpful. But if I had to go find books somewhere and not be able to use the internet, it would be really hard. It would have easily added a year or more research time to the three novels and the one non-fiction book that I've written about Austen.

Breckyn: Okay, so let's get started. Why did you come at Austen's work from the perspective of the writing craft? And what did you learn from that approach?

Collins: I'll go back to Mary Lascelles's wonderful work on Austen that she wrote in the early 1930s, where in her introduction, she says something like, "I hope there's still something new that can be written about Jane Austen." So, 90 years later, all of us who are trying to seriously look at her work are still trying to figure out what can we say that's new. Another several hundred books, thousands of articles, presentations, a wonderful podcast like yours—all this great information is out there. What can we say that's new? And in reading all the criticism through the years, I realized the only place I think I can add something different would be as a writer, because I've been a practicing writer since I was 17 years old and worked my way through my senior year of high school and all of college as a writer. Sports writing, by the way. Not Jane Austen writing. And in reading the criticism, I just felt there wasn't any one book or author who had covered Jane Austen from soup to nuts, if you will—covered all her techniques in-depth, showed what she learned with each book, and so on. Certainly, there's been great research in particular things like free indirect style, where Joe Bray and John Mullan, Margaret Doody, and others have written about that in-depth. Jocelyn Harris has done a wonderful couple of chapters in her book on Persuasion, where she breaks down the original reconciliation chapter and shows how Austen improved it so much in the final version. So, there are some individual great works.

But often what happens, you'll see someone mention a particular technique and then move from there to a broader point, like political stuff or sociological stuff or literary history. I go another way, which is to then show how that technique actually impacts the reader in reading of the work, not in the broader issues around the work. I felt that was an approach that no one else had covered in-depth, and I hope that I write something different that people will want to read. Like Mary Lascelles, is it really new? I hope so. We'll see.

Breckyn: Yeah. Anyone who writes on Austen has that editor on their shoulder constantly questioning, is this new? Is this worth saying? That's what you always have to wrestle with as a writer. I think you've done some really amazing work. I love that you're getting into Austen's toolbox as a writer. For modern readers, it may be hard to realize that Austen was doing anything revolutionary, but your book starts off with two quotes from contemporary reviewers of Austen's novels: one by Walter Scott and one by Richard Whately. They both comment on this new style of novel that has arisen that's more realistic and it deals with ordinary life. Can you talk a bit about what novels were like during Austen's time and how she was so different?

Collins: Well, the first thing to note is they—both those comments and a few others from more modern critics—write as if that shift to a more realistic fiction happened by itself, and Austen was standing there and noticed it and took advantage of it. It was, in fact, Austen that made the change. The technical term for novels when Austen was starting to write is that they were a hot mess. You're talking about basically amateur productions by amateurs, some of whom, like Richardson and Fielding and a few others, were very talented, but there were no conventions. There were no plots. There were vague generic descriptions that could have been of anything or any place. There were wild coincidences to tie up stories because there was no coherent storyline. You had characters that were either exemplars, like Sir Charles Grandison—the faultless one who never changes, never grew as a result—or were monsters like Montoni from the Gothic novel set. Novels were like a teenager's room after a bad weekend.

Austen came in and cleaned it all up, regularized it, rationalized it—made it rational and systematic and more thoughtful. But then she— even after creating that rational structure around the novel—she went a step further and got into her characters' minds in a way that no one else had before, and to some extent, no one's done a better job of since. So, that's the difference. It was a blinding change. She was a pivot point in the history of the novel as an individual, not as part of a movement or a school or ideology or anything else. It was just one brilliant writer who figured a lot of stuff out on her own.

Breckyn: I love that she starts with a novel that is situating itself in the milieu of novels, right? Northanger Abbey is a direct reaction to all the Gothic novels and is playfully making fun of it. She's clearly in conversation with writers around her, but then that's a jumping off point for the rest of her novels. You have a whole section on description and how it measures Austen's growth as a writer, and you talk about Northanger Abbey in that section. How does Austen's handling of description change over time?

Collins: She begins as a beginner, and her early descriptions—like in her juvenilia there's very little, almost none, except one or two bits in the later pieces. Northanger Abbey, there's almost none; there's some, but not a lot. As I say, a young precocious author—you expect to see some good description, and there's some good, but you expect there to be bad description or no description as well in places, and that's true, too. It really was a question of her, over time, growing up and learning, again on her own, how to write good descriptions. For example, in chapter two of Northanger Abbey, we see this great description of Bath, which is: "Catherine was all eager delight—her eyes were here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking environs." Page 19. That's it. That's all the description we get of Bath.

Some people actually say that that was deliberate; it was a conscious economy of style. There was no reason to describe Bath because everybody knew Bath. It was a great watering hole. All the Great Set went there, though by Austen's time not so many of the Great Set were going there anymore. But if that were true, then why do we also see weaknesses of description in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, though the latter went to a lesser degree? And then what do you do about the fact that the next time we bring characters into Bath in her last novel, we see something totally different. Here is her description in volume 4, chapter 2, as Lady Russell and Anne Elliot come into Bath, and we see Lady Russell hears the noises which belong to the winter pleasures, and her pleasure, or her responses, become more positive. Her spirits begin to increase as they ride through "the long course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden Place, amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens." I mean, look at those details. Look at that. You're there. You know exactly what's going on, right? And I love the way she uses the language of the "bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men, milkmen," and then the "ceaseless clink of pattens." You can almost hear the steel pattens clanking on the pavement.

But Anne Elliot, who's next to her in the same carriage, she doesn't see that. She sees something totally different. She persists in "a very determined, though very silent disinclination for Bath; caught the first dim view of the extensive buildings, smoking in rain, without any wish of seeing them better; felt their progress through the streets to be, however disagreeable, yet too rapid; for who would be glad to see her when she arrived?" Okay, wow. So, on the first one, we see great detail. The second one, we see in the same paragraph an emotional description. In other words, it isn't just tall buildings, blue sky, green trees—a flat objective description. We're seeing Bath through her emotional state of loneliness and knowing that no one's going to want to see her. So, Austen does something that—not just more depth and detail in growth over the six novels, but also the ability to write it from the observer standpoint as opposed to an objective third-party narrator kind of thing. And that's very sophisticated description writing.

Breckyn: I want to talk—because you already mentioned it—about free indirect discourse, because Austen is well known for—she didn't invent it necessarily, but she did really pioneer it, and I would say perfected it. It's a style of narration where the thoughts and opinions of a character are blended into the third-person narration, like you were describing the way that Lady Russell sees Bath versus the way that Anne Elliot sees it. They're both projecting their interior lives onto the exterior landscape. Can you talk a bit about how Austen uses this tool in her novels and maybe some examples of where she really displays her mastery of the technique?

Collins: Oh, yeah. It's great. And as I say, some other folks have written about it in-depth and done a wonderful job. Joe Bray talks about it in-depth, particularly with Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth is going around seeing the different things inside the house at Pemberley and seeing the portraits of the family, and you go in and out of her mind and the narrator's mind there. The other famous one is the one in Emma, and I'm going to quote a couple from Emma, where the group is making their way up to the picnic at Box Hill, and Emma has already managed to insult Miss Bates, and everyone's griping at each other. They're hot; they're tired. Then, all of a sudden, we get this statement: "When they all sat down, it was better; to her taste a great deal better, for Frank Churchill, who grew talkative and gay, making her his first object." And a few more things about him looking at her and reacting to her and so on. The question becomes, who is speaking? Is it Emma? Is it the narrator? No matter how you look at and parse that sentence and the rest of that paragraph—even though there are pointers that say this happened to Emma or was said to Emma as if you're on the outside—that phrase is actually inside her head. So, you're both seeing it in—both at the same time. And that's the mastery of free indirect style.

Collins: And I use that, or "FIS," to describe any technique where we get this blend of the narrator and the character. Sometimes there's a real marker for it. For example, the phrase, "It would not do." That's often a statement in the middle of a paragraph that could be either the narrator saying that or the character saying that. John Mullan talks about the use of the word "must," where even the word "must" by itself can indicate Emma must do something, and then we're suddenly in Emma's mind. Other times, you're just in the character's mind. There are a variety of ways to get in there, but you can often see the marker coming when you have this indefinite transitional sentence.

The one that I love the most of all the ones in Austen is what I call a double FIS, which is also in Emma. Maybe not surprising because there's a lot of it there. There's a long stretch where she's trying to decide what her feelings are about Frank Churchill that—as I read it—are all in free indirect style, going in and out of her mind. But this one is actually near the end of the book, when she is just telling her father that she's going to marry Knightley. And usually, free indirect style is a shift between the narrator and the character. In this one, we're shifting between Emma and her father, back and forth, in a long paragraph. So she just tells him—and I think it's in chapter seventeen, but it's near the end of the book; I think everyone can find it—that she and Knightley are going to marry. And it just says, "Poor man!—it was at first a considerable shock to him, and he tried earnestly to dissuade her from it. She was reminded, more than once, of having always said she would never marry, and assured that it would be a great deal better for her to remain single; and told of poor Isabella, and Miss Taylor.—But it would not do." Here, though, we shift back, not to the narrator but to Emma. And now we're in Emma's mind: "Emma hung about him affectionately, and smiled, and said it must be so. . . ." He must not class her with Isabella and Mrs. Weston because they were taken from Hartfield, "but she was not going from Hartfield, and she would always be there. . . ."

And so, we go on and on as she hits one persuasive comment after another, and then she shifts over to Mr. Knightley, and, "Did you [sic] not love Mr. Knightley very much?" Well, he "could not deny that he did, she was sure.—Whom did he ever want to consult on business but Mr. Knightley?" And this about Knightley. And now we think, okay, we've got him convinced. But suddenly we shift back to Mr. Woodhouse again. Would he not always want Knightley to be on the spot? "Yes. That was all very true. Mr. Knightley could not be there too often; he should be glad to see him every day;—but they did see him every day . . .  Why could they not go on as they had before [sic]?"

So, we not only go back and forth between Emma and Mr. Woodhouse, but then in his own mind, he's going back and forth, momentarily convinced and then not convinced, momentarily convinced and not convinced. Then further on, it says, "the idea was given; time and continual repetition must do the rest." So, they know they're going to have to keep working on him. That's an example of just a marvelous play of the writer having fun going back and forth between those two characters, and—to me—is the richest example of free indirect style in Austen's novels.

Breckyn: I've never really thought about it, but the free indirect style is almost necessary to the plot of Emma because a fully third-person omniscient narrator would know and see all, right? And we would know from the beginning that Frank Churchill is a manipulative liar and that Mr. Elton is really in love with Emma. But if you really come to Emma never having read it, never having seen any of the movies, her thoughts are so blended with the narrator that you can be deceived along with her your first time through. It's that free indirect style that blends those thoughts together that makes the lines hard to draw—that really makes that whole conceit possible.

Collins: Right. And there are other odd things, too. There's an earlier example when they're at the dinner and it's starting to snow. Susannah Fullerton, the president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and a great Austen scholar in her own right, makes the point that we see Mr. Elton's fuss—sorry, Mr. Woodhouse's fussing about the weather—in free indirect style. He's afraid it's going to snow too much. They're going to get stuck, or they're going to be in the ice and slide off the road, and all this kind of stuff. She makes the point that if he says it—if the narrator had said it, as you just made the point, or if Mr. Woodhouse said it out loud in a real dialog, it would sound perfectly reasonable. But because we're in his head, somehow she's able to pick up that anxiety, and we realize it's more in his mind that it is in reality. It's another example of Austen just getting into the mind of her characters in a way that had never been done before—never mind to the excellent degree that she does, but it hadn't even been done before. 

Breckyn: I could talk about this for a long time, but I do want to talk about a few other techniques because you go over so many of them in the book. I like what you say about Edward Ferrars in your book because he's always seemed like an incomplete character to me. We get some idea of his kindness and his charm when he visits Barton Cottage. But it was never clear to me why Elinor first fell in love with him at Norland, because we get so little of their interactions there. But you say that it's because the first draft was an epistolary novel—which, for people who don't know, it's a novel of letters—and those letters can provide a sense of distance from the characters, and so that's why Edward Ferrars is blurry in the first half. Can you tell us more about that?

Collins: When I was first going through the novels and trying to figure out how to write about her writing style, I did want to talk about description, because I had figured out before that she did grow. Then I get to Sense and Sensibility and realize there are no descriptions of any of the main characters. But there are a lot of descriptions of all the minor characters. I would say they're serviceable; they're not necessarily what we heard in some of the other examples, but they're perfectly fine. Why wouldn't she be describing the characters? And I realized that in an epistolary novel, you wouldn't be describing people you already know. And if Elinor and Marianne are writing each other or writing to other people who already know these folks, you wouldn't describe anything—a character like John Dashwood or Fanny, who are not described at all in the first couple of chapters, except by their dialog. And you wouldn't need to, because people would already know that. And it was like, ah, okay, I got it. And, so, all we see of Edward is three or four comments—mostly, I think, from Marianne—that probably are left over from the letter format where she's just saying, here are the different things that I don't like about him, basically, as opposed to showing him in action.

And here I would refer to the 1995 movie, where Emma Thompson, as the screenwriter, has to give Hugh Grant, as Edward, a bunch of stuff to do so we can see why Elinor fell in love with him. He's interacting with Elinor; he does a little reading, which we don't see in the book, though we see Marianne comment on the reading. And then she has him playing with Margaret, which is nice because we see her character develop a little bit, too. And we go, okay, that's why she likes Edward. But none of that's in the book; there's nothing to give us any handle on him until much later in the book when he actually shows up at Barton Cottage. And I think that's because of that original style that—when she translated it or transformed it, whatever the right word is, to third person—she just didn't give us enough of Edward on top of what was already there for us to really see who he was. And contrast that to the very end of the book, where there's this great scene where he's doing all these funny little mannerisms: snipping the scissors case and wandering out into the field when he realizes Elinor still loves him and all that. Wonderful scenes there at the end, compared to what happened early—which I think is the result of the leftover epistolary as I talk about it.

Breckyn: I think that's really interesting. That's an insight that I've never heard before. So, we've talked about description, and we've talked about free indirect discourse. What are some other literary techniques that Austen is particularly good at, and where do we see them in the novels?

Collins: Well, as I said to start with, she effectively created the character-based plot. In other words, in Pride and Prejudice Darcy is rude to her and all the other women, which leads her—Liz—to believe all the lies that Wickham says, which then leads her to reject Darcy in a dance. And then later when she does dance with him, basically give him all these verbal jabs. That whole misunderstanding—or not even a misunderstanding, but Darcy's rude behavior—sets in motion all the events of the first half of the novel. Whereas in the older form, different people would have—there would have been coincidences, there would have been people robbing them in the middle of the night. Coaches would have been stopped. It would have been all kinds of stuff, or the characters would have gone in 20 directions, and then there would have been some huge coincidence that brings them back together. Every time the characters come together or go apart, it's because somebody has a real human behavior. That was new. And that, to me, is—a lot of people would say Austen cared about character more than plot, but her plots were based on character, so there's no way to separate it.

And she was the first one to really write, from beginning to end, cause-and-effect actions by behaviors—which is much more believable than what we see with Scott and everybody else who was still writing in that old romantic style. Her descriptions are better. Her building of scenes in Mansfield Park—she does a great job in every single scene of building out the whole scene. I call it "scene blocking" after the dramatic term where the director puts everything up there on the stage that the characters need to use and whatever. She does that in Mansfield Park in a way that she hadn't done in the earlier novels. All of these different things that she builds out, all the different elements of novel writing to a degree that had not been done before. But all of these things are in service of bringing the characters alive and getting inside the minds of the characters. To me, we see that first in Pride and Prejudice, where most of the first half of the book, or 60 percent of the book, is terrific dialog. It's almost all stage-like dialog until we get to Pemberley, and then everything changes. And now we see a lot more thought, a lot more typical scene descriptions as they walk around and they visit with Darcy and whatnot.

But the first time we see in Austen—we have thoughtful characters before, but this is the first time we see a character actually cogitating. And this is when Elizabeth, after seeing Darcy in the day, is now—she's lying in bed two whole hours trying to go to sleep, and she can't. And she's trying to figure out what she feels now after Darcy showing that he's still a nice guy or still cares for her, apparently, and so on. And she says—it's several long paragraphs where she says she certainly did not hate him. No, that had vanished a long time ago. She felt respect for him because of his qualities. She had moved into a somewhat friendlier nature by his disposition. She felt gratitude, especially since he was forgiving all her petulence and acrimony and rejecting him and all the unjust accusations and so on and so forth. She walks through all these things. But then she doesn't just go like all the other heroines of the period: oh, he loves me, therefore I love him. We're done. No, she says she understood he still felt love, ardent love. She respected, she esteemed him, she was grateful.

She felt a real interest in her welfare. But then she wonders how much she wished that welfare to depend on her and what it would mean for the happiness of both of them if she were to bring on the renewal of his addresses, which would be very easy by the right word or look or whatever. So, she doesn't just fall into his arms. She's still trying to figure out what her real feelings are. And of course, that leads us to want to stay tuned because we don't know if she still doesn't love him or she loves him but can't admit it. But it's just this idea that she still doesn't know whether she wants him to carry on and keep courting her. That is just so different, again, than anything that had happened before. If it was Harriet Byron in Grandison or any female character—once she knew the hero loved her and had to wait for the hero to say he loved her—then she could be free to say she loved him and would immediately. But not our friend Elizabeth. She's still very independent, still trying to figure things out. We've never seen anything like that before in English literature.

Breckyn: It's so funny. I just read this morning the line in Northanger Abbey, about Catherine Morland going to bed right after she has first danced with Henry Tilney. The author or the narrator can't comment on whether or not Catherine Morland dreamed about him because it wouldn't be proper for a lady to have dreamt about a man before she knows that he dreamt about her first. It's like another joke about that, about the man has to declare first, and then the woman can fall right in love.

Collins: But here's the great thing, though—and this is where you do see these brilliant little zaps that Austen does—"she danced in the sedan [sic] chair all the way home." Right? That one line tells you all you need to know about her emotional reaction. And that's what she does do well. And she often is very precise, and she can say in a sentence what it would take another writer a paragraph to say. So, in that extent, I agree with various critics who call her a contractive writer. She sometimes does have that one phrase that just sums it all up.

But if I can give you one more example, which is later about—again, in many different ways she gets into the mind of a character. And this one, in Persuasion, I give four or five examples, again, that are just mind-blowing to me. And this one is—Anne is sitting at Molland's with her eyes out for Wentworth, and it's raining or has been raining during the day. And the example is: "She now felt a great inclination to go to the outer door; she wanted to see if it rained. Why was she to suspect herself of another motive? . . . . She left her seat, she would go; one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half, or always suspecting the other of being worse than it was. She would see if it rained."

In other words, she didn't want to admit that she wanted to really go see if Wentworth was walking by or whatever. But if you think about that, she's describing the mind splitting in two and then arguing with itself. When you look at that, who else has done something like that? Certainly no one before Austen, and I don't know how many people after Austen have done that.

Breckyn: Well, and that's a good transition to Mansfield Park, because Fanny is always doing that. She's always watching everything around her, and arguing with herself, and watching herself watch people. It's very much a novel, an internal novel, a novel of observation. In your book, you talk about the marvelous complexity of Mansfield Park, but also about penetrating the "mist of obscurity." What did you mean by that?

Collins: Well, first, I know from other podcasts that you feel like both critics and maybe the author don't always treat Fanny very fairly. And I have to admit, there were times when I was a little bit harsh on Fanny in my own mind. And then a few years ago, John Wiltshire, in one of his essays, said we really need to remember that Fanny is an abused child. She was neglected and abused in her first 10 years or so of her life in the Price household. We saw what that was like. And then she's been neglected or abused by the Bertrams as a whole, abused by Mrs. Norris, in particular, for another eight years. No wonder she lives in her own mind. And I've been much more sympathetic and open to her as a person since having that realization, which was not mine, but John's, and I thank him for that. When you think about 18 years of just getting the crap beat out of you emotionally—that's hard on a person. And she responds by going very deep inside herself, the only place she can be safe, if you will.

And so, to me, Mansfield Park is the book where Jane Austen now knew she had the literary chops to write the great English novel. And I think she set out to do it. It's complex in every definition of the word. It's got a lot of complex plots. I count 13 total subplots, and these are intricate puzzles that not only have to work of themselves, but they have to fit together with all the others so we all come to the same—the stories all end more or less at the same time. We've got these complex characters. Fanny, of course, is very complex, more so than I think people think. And the Crawfords and Edmund—I wouldn't say he's particularly complex, but his situation is complex. Sir Thomas is often painted as this very harsh patriarch, and he is in some ways, but he also—when he has the right information—is always good to Fanny. And we have Mrs. Norris, who's just a wonderful devious character.

Breckyn: She's evil. I just want to jump in. You mentioned that I stick up for Fanny a lot, but I have refrained from saying much about Mrs. Norris, but I think she is truly Austen's only villain. She's Austen's only completely evil person. That's why I think she's so interesting, but she also makes me so angry because she's cruel. She enjoys cruelty. She's sort of a sadist.

Collins: Yeah, I agree with that. Absolutely. There's also complex dialog. If you put, say, Pride and Prejudice, which has great dialog, next to Mansfield Park, you see Mansfield Park's many more sentences, more convoluted sentences, much more complex speech patterns for everybody. Crawford talks about Sir Thomas being long-worded, but everybody in the novel is long-worded. And the same way with complex thoughts. We occasionally get into the minds of other characters, in fact, much more so than we do in any other Austen novel, which is part of the complexity. She has us go around the table at the card game and shifts point of view 10 or 12 times in one of the scenes. It's just marvelous to see her move in and out of various characters' minds.

So, there's that complexity, and then the complex thoughts of the various characters—but especially your dear friend Fanny. She never has a simple thought. She never just says, oh, I'm mad. She goes back and forth between her Christian beliefs and morality and her very human anger, frustration, shame—whatever it may be—and never resolves those things internally. That's, to me, what is marvelously complex about the novel and what is wonderful. But unfortunately, Austen kind of overdoes things. To me, there's a repeated a loss of momentum. First one is when Fanny comes home from Portsmouth. She's home from exile. She's been proved right about Crawford. Everyone recognizes that she's the moral center of the novel. This crowd is all around her. Now, in Portsmouth, we saw everything from Fanny's point of view, and we see her reacting and responding. But when she gets home, instead, we go around the room and we see everybody else for five pages. We see Lady Bertram. We see Susan, Fanny's sister, who's come along with her. We see Mrs. Norris simmering in her anger and disgust at Fanny, and being—Fanny now is the top dog, and she's not. And we kind of lose Fanny completely, just like we lost her early on because no one noticed she was on the sofa. But now she's the center of attention. Everyone considers her the real heroine, but we lose her, right, in that key moment of her return. And we don't see—when we finally get to her, it's more of a reportage than the emotional, psychological response that we see in the Portsmouth scene.

And then we have something you pointed out—the flat ending at the very end. Fanny doesn't get her reward. I think that's your actual words. And she doesn't. I mean, she's gone through all this grief and all this waiting and seeing all this stuff happening, figuring out what's going on. We, instead, get this 13-page summation of all the other characters and their future and what's going to happen to them. But all we get is the line of Edward—or Edmund, I'm sorry. I get Edmund and Edward confused because they're both—

Breckyn: They're similar.

Collins: But he just decides one day he likes one pair of eyes instead of another, and that's it.

Breckyn: It's so frustrating!

Collins: Yeah, I call it a conclusion without a climax, because compare that with Elizabeth and Darcy or with Wentworth and Anne. They get their emotional payoff. And poor Fanny, who's been through more grief than anybody else, never does. And so that's why I say there's this mist or murk over the novel that—we lose track of Fanny at moments when we don't—and, therefore, I don't think we appreciate her as much as we would if a lot of this stuff got cleaned up. But that's just me as one reader.

Breckyn: No, I think that that's fair criticism. Some listeners might not like to think that Jane is anything less than perfect, but you dissect some of her weaknesses in your book, like you talked about Mansfield Park. You mentioned Persuasion as well. What are some areas of that novel that you think Austin could have improved on?

Collins: I think the problem with Persuasion is that Austen didn't really finish it. She solved the main problem, which is the reconciliation scene in the original one she wrote, which we are fortunate to have—was a terrible first draft. But even brilliant writers write terrible first drafts. The question is, do you fix them? And in this case, she does a wonderful job with the new scene at the White Hart, where Captain Wentworth and Anne make an emotional connection without talking to each other, which is very interesting in itself. But these other subplots are just—they don't hold together. Like Mrs. Smith—I mentioned with Mansfield Park it's really hard to get all the subplots to work out in the right order. And the long Mrs. Smith chapter comes after the big concert scene. And so, in the long Mrs. Smith chapter, where she's telling Anne about all the bad things—first she doesn't tell her, and then when she realizes it doesn't make any difference, she does tell her all the bad things about Elliot. And then a lot of other stuff in there, too. All that stuff needed to be handled earlier for it to have any meaning, because by the time we get to the end of the concert scene, Anne has made her mind up.

In fact, her only goal is to make sure Elliot doesn't screw things up. She uses more elegant language than I do to describe that. But that's pretty much Anne's mindset. And so that has gotten out of sync. The Mrs. Smith storyline has gotten out of sync psychologically with the main storyline, because you could see that the concert scene might have ended with Wentworth leaving in such a way that Anne might maybe temporarily be drawn back to Elliot thinking, well, Wentworth is not going to stick around or whatever. He's just too angry. And then Mrs. Smith's chapter would make sense. But when she realizes that Wentworth is jealous, which could only be because he still loved her, it's over for everybody else, and especially Elliot. So, that's an issue. And then Lady Russell. She's been probably the third or fourth most important character in the novel. She's there in the second chapter, trying to give the family good financial advice to keep them afloat. She's been Anne's surrogate mother, and Anne even says she's a parental figure at some point for the entire—her entire life since her mother died so young. And she set up the original conflict with Wentworth back when Anne was seven or eight years younger.

And so, we see all this building up. And then we get to the point where  Lady Russell does or does not see Wentworth on the street there in Bath. And a great scene where she says she was looking for some curtains but didn't find them, but maybe saw them or didn't; we don't know. But then we never see her again. She's just described. And then at the very end, those two subplots are wrapped up in a way that I don't believe, as a reader, and they're both summaries. Again, they're quick summaries rather than direct scenes. And with Lady Russell, it's not even that. It's—Lady Russell must learn what she must do. It's this weird speculative summary rather than a real scene. And by this time, the conflict between Wentworth and Lady Russell is so strong the reader wants to see them together—either to have a big fight or to reconcile or say, hey, bygones be bygones, whatever. And again, to go to the movie version, there is about a 30-second or 40-second scene where the captain—they actually resurrect a little bit of the lost chapter, just briefly, to get Wentworth and Lady Russell together. And you can see from that interpretation that they're not going to be friends anytime soon. There's going to be some work that has to be done. And I think that's what the reader wants for that subplot.

But Austen's health was failing; to go and do another major revision—because, you know, some of the other critics have pointed some of these issues out—not to the degree I think I do, but similar problems. But they talk about polishing and cleaning up and fixing a few things, like it's cleaning a teenager's room as opposed to rebuilding half the house. But that would take another major revision, which is part of the novel-writing process. Even late in the game, you can get to a point where you realize you've painted yourself into a corner or whatever. And I think that those are things that Austen could have fixed, but would have needed some work that I don't think she felt like she was going to be able to change, because if she didn't get it done, she'd end up with a mess instead of this novel, which is great by itself without the subplots. And so, I think she just made a calculated decision not to spend another three to six months trying to fix it.

Breckyn: This has been so fascinating because I'm an editor by profession, and so the way that you're breaking it down into its disparate parts—and we can move this around, and we can improve that, that's the way that I like to approach literature as well. So, I think that's really fascinating. We have to wrap up, but I just want to end with talking about how you've written three novels about Austen, The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen, volumes one through three. But you wrote them before you did this deep dive into Austen's creative process. So, how has studying her techniques changed the way that you think about your own writing process?

Collins: Well, first, I have to say that I could not have written the non-fiction had I not written the fiction first. Because by trying to write a trilogy set in the same time, same conventions, the same language, the same food, all the same paraphernalia—and also telling a love story, though trying hard not to copy anything Austen did—I ran into somewhat similar problems. Every novelist runs into practical problems like the ones we just discussed, and you have to figure out a way around it or start over and go another direction. And that made me very sensitive to the problems that Austen was working on and dealing with, and I began to become more aware of it and aware of them. And once—so when the novels were done, I went back—I'd already made some notes of writing issues, either good or bad, that I wanted to explore further in non-fiction. And I went back and read each novel very carefully, made detailed notes, sometimes 25 or 30 pages for each novel, about writing issues and strategies and structure. And that became the outline for the non-fiction. So, I couldn't have written a non-fiction first and done, I think, as good a job if I hadn't tried to do the fiction using similar kinds of things—including the epistolary, which is its own funny little thing that's hard to use and succeed with it.

Now I look back, and I'd say the main thing is I tried to get into my characters' thoughts in an organic way without trying to do anything special, and I hope I did. It's always the reader who has to judge that. But then, coming back to Austen and really looking hard at her work and seeing the new and different, unique ways—like one or two of the things I've mentioned—that she's gotten into her characters' minds that were different than anything I tried. I mean, I'm just sitting here marveling at it. She's doing this in her mid-30s, and I'm twice her age plus, and I'm still doing less than what she did then, 200 years ago. That's probably the main thing—just getting a better practical sense of how she got into her characters. Because it's not just, oh, she had a good structure, or she writes good paragraphs, or descriptions hold together. She's bringing these characters alive, and she's doing it, in some cases, so subtly, we don't see how. I'm hoping that I show a little bit of how she actually pulled some of those things off.

Breckyn: This has been a fascinating discussion. I feel like I was back in a college English course, just breaking down Austen. This was really fun. Thanks for coming on the show today. Where can listeners learn more about your book and your other work?

Collins: I do have a website, collinshemingway.com: two "Ls" and an "S" in "Collins" and one "M" in "Hemingway." I've got 60 odd blog posts on Austen in the Regency period. The last two or three have been about the book, the new book, and how it got to be written.  

Breckyn: Great. Thanks so much, Collins. 

Collins: Thank you for having me, Breckyn. I appreciate it.

Breckyn: Now it's time for "In Her Own Words," a segment where listeners share a favorite Austen quote or two.

Abby Laber:  Hello. My name is Abby Laber, and I'm a member of the Massachusetts Region of JASNA. Here's my sentence. It comes from Emma.

"He was not an ill-tempered man, not so often unreasonably cross as to deserve such a reproach; but his temper was not his great perfection. . . ."

What a succinct, elegant put down. His temper was not his great perfection. We're talking here about Emma's brother-in-law, Mr. John Knightley, who gets testy with her father, even petty at times. Maybe he deserves this put down. But the sentence is doing some other work. Jane Austen could easily have said John Knightley had a bad temper. But instead, she primes us for something positive with the word “perfection.” I don't know about you, but I am often annoyed with Mr. Woodhouse. He's self-absorbed, not to say narcissistic, hypochondriacal, of course, and sometimes he bores me. If I were in the parlor, I would be playing the role of Mr. John Knightley. So, it's a relief to have him doing my dirty work for me. And the sentence is doing another favor, too. This one for Emma. Because, flawed though she is, her great perfection is how good she is to her father.

Breckyn: Hello, dear listeners. I just wanted to ask you a favor. If you've enjoyed listening to Austen chat, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and leave a comment saying what you like about the show. The more positive reviews we get, the more people will see and hear about the podcast, and the more Austen fans will find to join our community. Though Emma Woodhouse may have disagreed, I side with Mr. Weston. One cannot have too large a party or too many Janeites. Also, just a reminder to follow JASNA on Facebook and Instagram for updates about the podcast, or to send us a line at our email address, podcast@jasna.org, if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.

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