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Austen Chat: Episode 17

November 7, 2024

Jane Austen & Lord Byron: A Visit with Christine Kenyon Jones


Austen and ByronLord Byron is one of the most notorious bad boys of English literature. He had countless affairs, drank wine from a cup fashioned from a human skull, kept a pet bear at Cambridge, and fought for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire.  What could this Regency-era demigod of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” possibly have to do with spinster Jane, a country parson's daughter? More than you'd think, according to our guest, Christine Kenyon Jones. In this episode we discuss the parallels between Austen and Byron, Austen's references to Byron in her novels and letters, and how each may have influenced the other's work.

Dr. Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow at King's College London, focusing on the Romantic and Regency periods. Her books include Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations (2024) and Dangerous to Show: Lord Byron and His Portraits (2020). She has also authored several essays published in Persuasions and Persuasions On-line.


Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Christine for being our guest on Austen Chat! 

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Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published November 7, 2024. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn: 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 here to talk to us about one of the most notorious bad boys of English literature, Lord Byron. What could this Regency-era demigod of sex, drugs, and rock and roll possibly have to do with spinster Jane, a country parson's daughter? More than you'd think, according to Christine.

Dr. Christine Kenyon Jones is a research fellow at King's College London, focusing on the Romantic and Regency periods. Her books include Jane Austen and Lord Byron, Regency Relations, which came out in February of this year, and Dangerous to Show: Lord Byron and His Portraits, which came out in 2020. She has also authored articles in Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line. Welcome to the show, Christine! 

Christine: Thank you.

Breckyn: Okay, so before we get into Byron, we're going to play an Austen version of "Would You Rather." So, Christine, would you rather spend a dark and stormy night in Northanger Abbey or a sunny summer afternoon among the strawberry beds at Donwell Abbey?

Christine: Oh, a difficult question. They're neither of them quite as they look, of course, because we know the dark and stormy night at Northanger Abbey is about mocking the Gothic tradition in novels of this period. And Catherine goes to sleep eventually, but having had a real scare when her candle goes out, and she's found some papers in the cupboard which she's not able to read. But when she wakes up the next morning, of course, it's all gone away. So, it's not simple, of course. Nothing in Austen is ever simple, but it's a relatively straightforward mockery of the Gothic tradition and how even a dark and stormy night the next morning kind of looks okay.

I think the Donwell's Strawberry Outing is much, much more complicated, as you'd expect, because she wrote it 20 years later or something like that. And there's so much going on there. The dreadful Mrs. Elton, of course, trying to patronize everybody, including Knightley. Mr. Knightley, she calls him Knightley. And Frank Churchill not turning up, and everybody worrying about Frank Churchill not turning up. And the reason he hasn't turned up is because he managed to meet Jane Fairfax in the road after she was hurrying home, worried about what had happened to him, and they've had a row.

Emma is looking around Donwell and thinking, gosh, this might be a nice place where I could be a wife. It's not said in so many words. So, it's sunny on the surface, but actually everybody gets pretty upset by the end of that morning, isn't it? So, I guess, actually, I'd rather be in the dark and stormy night. 

Breckyn: Well, that goes along with our discussion of Byron today, right? It's a lot more Gothic, a lot more brooding. That's a really good point, though. I like that the Northanger Abbey—stormy on the surface, but actually nothing that sinister happening underneath, whereas it's the opposite with Donwell Abbey. That's really great analysis. Thank you for that.

Okay, Christine, for listeners who might not be familiar with him, can you give us a basic intro to Byron? Who was he, and why was he famous, and why is he still famous?

Christine: It's a big question. Yes, he is still famous, not as famous as he was in his time, I think, unlike Austen, who, of course, is far more famous now than she was then. He was basically England or Britain's best-known poet, I think. I mean, there's some rivalry for that with Walter Scott, as we know from Persuasion, where Austen talks about them together. But he was incredibly well known. He was published by John Murrays, who were the top publishers of the time. He was a Lord, of course. He was—his full title would be George Gordon Byron, sixth Lord Byron of Rochdale. He inherited the title rather unexpectedly at 10, when two of the other people who were in line to get it died. He was rather beautiful. You've probably seen portraits of him. He had lovely curly hair and a cleft chin and so on. He looked a lot like Hollywood stars of the '30s or '40s. He was incredibly intelligent. I think this is one of the things about Byron that's often forgotten—that he actually knew what people thought of him and satirized that. He had a disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, who was the niece of one of his favorite friends, Lady Melbourne.

She was fairly prissy, I would say, difficult in her own way, but virtuous. And the marriage fell apart after a year. He was already having affairs and things by then. And he went on to have masses of affairs. I mean, he had, I don't know, probably, well, I don't think it would go into the hundreds, certainly the tens. And he was open about them all. Eventually, there was one called "La Fornarina," the baker's wife. This was in Venice. Another one who was Marianna Segati, who was wife of the merchant of Venice, her husband being a Venetian merchant. In the end, he ended up with Teresa Guiccioli, who was somebody of his own class. She was Countess Guiccioli, and they actually had almost another marriage—a more successful marriage.

So, I think this idea that Byron was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, which is what Caroline Lamb, Lady Caroline Lamb, said of him—she had an affair with him early on, and then that fell apart. He didn't fancy her anymore, basically. She was vindictive from then on and wrote a novel, Glenarvon, in which she satirized him. Anyway, yeah, I don't think he was really mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

He was very attractive—great fun for people who knew him. Contrary, I would say, or—you didn't always know what you were getting from him. Anyway, he was very famous. He was a good poet, and I would say in Don Juan, a great poet. He was published by a very good publisher, and he was famous, famous, famous, basically.

Breckyn: Yeah. And like many of the romantic poets, just was like a comet, right? Just came on the scene, was bright, and then burned out quickly. So many of them, like Keats and Shelley and Byron—they died young. 

Christine: Yeah.

Breckyn: And so, that's why I said that—like sex, drugs, rock and roll. It's just they lived hard, they died hard, and they just left the flames in their wake. Byron, especially—all the lovers. Is it hard to separate the myth from the man, or is the myth really the man? Because we've got so many letters from all of his jilted lovers, and there's a lot of documentation of all this, right? And so, even though it sounds exaggerated or mythologized, a lot of it's just true.

Christine: It's more true than you might think, yes. I think in terms—in comparison with the other Romantics, actually, he lived a much, much more exciting and eventful life. Yeah, he was—Byron was a leading Romantic poet, but he wouldn't have called himself a Romantic poet. None of the Romantic poets would have called themselves Romantic.

Breckyn: Really? They didn't—

Christine: Byron would have called Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth "Lakers," because they lived in the Lake District. He would have called Keats and Leigh Hunt "Cockney" poets, because they lived in London, and you could tell that from the way they wrote. Shelley was a chap of his own heart, and they were friends. Shelley was the son of another aristocrat, so they were more alike. But they never thought of themselves as a group, and they never thought of themselves as Romantics.

Breckyn: Right, we have to remember that a lot of these terms and these delineations that we make are after the fact and with hindsight, right? Well, in your book, you discuss some fascinating parallels between Byron and Austen. You already mentioned one: they shared a publisher, John Murray. What kind of relationship did they each have with Murray?

Christine: Interesting. I think there were lots of class issues there. Byron, as an aristocrat, thought he ought not to be paid for his writing. The idea was that if you were really independent and you didn't get paid, what you wrote was more likely to be true. If you were being paid by somebody, it would almost sound as if you were being paid to say certain things. So, he didn't take any money at the beginning of the relationship with Murray. But when he went abroad and stopped being a member of the House of Lords and stopped being in London society, he started wanting lots of money, and he got lots of money. He probably got £20,000 out of the relationship with Murray, during their relationship.

Austen, of course, came to Murray after two, three different failed or very difficult publishers. Edgerton didn't treat her well at all. It's not clear quite how she came to know Murray—possibly through links through Henry Austen, or maybe she just thought, oh, he'd a good person to be published by. And oddly enough, in Persuasion, she has a Murray "oppositional thing," because the people who love Captain Wentworth, which is more than one person—they're following the Navy List to see what he's up to, and that's a Murray publication.

And while Sir Walter Elliot—he's looking at Debrett's Peerage all the time, which is where the aristocrats are listed, and that's another Murray publication. So, she almost alludes to the fact that she's going to go with Murray. She was obviously clinging to gentility. She was of sort of the lowest rank, being the daughter of a country—a deceased clergyman. She was clinging to gentility, and she published anonymously "By a Lady," you know—big claim. And then there she was with Murray, who was incredibly rich, incredibly powerful, but a tradesman. Publishers were tradesmen in those days. And so, she had a quite difficult relationship with him, and he didn't offer her the money that she'd hoped for when she went to him. And she ended up publishing on commission, which is, in effect, her paying for the publishing with Murray doing the bits that only publishers can do. So, it was quite a difficult relationship, but she did refer to him in the end as a friend, and it seems as if they got on better as things went on. Murray tried very hard to butter up his authors so that—be their friend, give them books. He lent her lots of books and was kind to her, basically, and that did a lot of good.

Breckyn: Was he the one that got Walter Scott to write the anonymous review of Emma? Did he do that for her?

Christine: Yes, he did—or rather his henchman, William Gifford, did. She was obviously pleased with that, although it didn't mention Mansfield Park, so she was a bit peeved about that. But Murray said—he said a rather rubbishy thing about her. He said "it wants incident, doesn't it?"—her writing—in other words, there's not enough incidents in what she writes. But I'm sure you can write a very good review of it, he said to Scott, and Scott did. So yes, he was good for her and good to her on the whole. And I think it's evident now that the money he offered her wasn't that little. She and Henry didn't think it was much, but several critics have said that if she'd accepted Murray's original offer for the copyrights, she would have been better off than she was.

Breckyn: Yeah. And so, Austen and Byron were also both in London at the same time in the 1810s. They were frequenting some of the same places and engaging in some of the same activities. Can you tell us more about their overlap there?

Christine: Yes. Well, there was one period in 1814-15, when Jane was in London for about a quarter of the time, which is a lot. Byron was pretty much based in London all the time. And the thing they really liked, both of them, was theater. And they both went to the theater a lot. They were almost at the Drury Lane theater at the same time, but not quite, not—you know, like a difference of three or four days apart. They shared a lot of the same tastes in actors. They both liked Kean, Edmund Kean, the new sensation of 1813-14, I think, who was small and not impressive, but actually a brilliant actor, and he brought in a new era of acting, and they both thought he was wonderful. There was a chap called Robert Elliston, who Austen also liked very much. He was one of her favorites in Bath. And Byron asked him to read a special ode that he'd written for the opening of Drury Lane.

So, he was another favorite. They both went to art exhibitions. They might just have been at the same art exhibition on the same day. And it was interesting because they were both looking for a picture that for them held a personal meaning. Austen was looking for a picture, as she said, of Mrs. Darcy. Yes. Of Elizabeth, once she'd been married to Darcy. She thought there ought to be a picture that looked like Elizabeth there. And she didn't find one, alas. But she had lots of ideas about why Darcy wouldn't allow his wife to be painted and then exhibited. And Byron was there looking for a portrait of his great friend, Lady Melbourne, Caroline Lamb's aunt by marriage. And it was one of her when she was very young—I think still a teenager. And he sort of flirtatiously said to Lady Melbourne, who was by now in her 60s, "No wonder they tried to make you look a little bit older because it would have been so dangerous to look at you at 17. You were so beautiful."

Breckyn: Such a charmer.

Christine: Yes. He's flirting like hell with a 61-year-old. But—so they both enjoyed looking at portraits. And they both liked to go to see animals in the Exeter Exchange, which was in The Strand. Byron was very close to animals, writes some very good stuff involving animals. Austen not, interestingly. I mean, there's absolutely no mention of any pets or anything being kept by her and her family—or rather there is by James Austen, but not Mrs. Austen and Cassandra and Jane. But anyway, she seems to have gone to the Exeter Exchange, which was an indoor zoo in a shopping mall with an elephant in it and possibly a whale. And definitely antelopes and cheetahs and all sorts of things. So, they both seem to have gone there. And, generally, liked being in London—the shops, the theaters, the Astley’s entertainment venue, which was an early circus-type venue. They both liked that.

Breckyn: So, they're kind of like ships passing in the night, right? They're so close so many times. But as far as we know, we don't actually think they ever met, right? We don't have any evidence of that.

Christine: No, I'm afraid we don't. Although it may be a spoiling the surprise. I don't think they did. I mean, they did live in areas of London very close to each other at different times. They were often only half a mile or a mile from each other.

Breckyn: Well, and they're sometimes moving in similar circles, even though you mentioned that Lord Byron, he's a peer, and Jane Austen's on the bottom rung of gentility. But another link that they have—a really important figure of the time—is Madame de Staël, right? Who was she, and what does she have to do with Austen and Byron? 

Christine: Yeah. She was a great personality of the French Revolution, really. She was part of the changes in Paris and France over that period. She was a great authoress. A particularly famous book, still now, I guess, is Corinne, or Italy, which was published both in French and in English by John Murray. So, all three of them were Murray authors. She visited England in 1813-14 and went to hundreds of soirées and things. And Byron met her actually on the first evening that she came to England and liked her, but felt that she talked too much. Sometimes she talked—what was it—snowdrifts or something he described it. She—Jane Austen was—Henry Austen reports that Jane was invited by a gentleman to go to a soirée and that as a special incentive—that she was told that Madame de Staël would be there. Now, that was a problem for Austen because Madame de Staël had children by several different men to whom she wasn't married. She'd had several different husbands who she'd been not very faithful to. And I think part of Austen's problem as a low-level member of society was that she couldn't afford to risk her own reputation. So as Henry says, sort of rather proudly, "oh, she immediately turned down the invitation." But actually, she might have liked to go; she might have gone. If she had gone, she might have met Byron there. So that is a pity.

Breckyn: Right. Another really close—almost crossing paths.

Christine: Another thing that actually—de Staël is alleged to have been asked about what she thought about Jane Austen's novels. And she said they were vulgaire or vulgar. And what she seems to have meant was that they were sort of small-minded, that they focused on little groups of people, which is exactly, actually, what Jane claimed to be doing—you know, three or four families in a country village. And that was exactly what Madame de Staël, who had very big ideas, didn't like.

Breckyn: I want to talk about that because I have really strong feelings about that. And I think that's exactly why we're still reading Austen later, and not many people are reading Byron. Byron feels very much of his time, and he does have these big ideas. His poems are set in Turkey, and in Greece, and in Italy, and they're all over.  And there's despots, and there's adultery, and there's just these big ideas, big feelings. It's this just broiling cauldron of emotion and of Orientalism, and all these exotic places and people. And it's too much. It's to the point where it doesn't really feel relevant to a normal person's everyday life. And I think so much of Jane Austen's success is that she can be transposed across time, across cultures, across geography. And that's why you get so many retellings of her work. That's why people keep remaking the movies, because it—even though she was just in a small country village, she focused on a few families—what she wrote about transcended her time, and it transcended her culture to speak to all of us, right? And it became universal in that way. And so, boo on you, Madame de Staël. I disagree with you.

Christine: No, I don't either. Absolutely not.

Breckyn: Yeah. And so, yeah, I want to—we'll get more into that later, but that's my little soapbox about Austen is great and actually does contain big ideas, even if the setting seems small. So, Austen—even if they didn't technically ever meet in person—she certainly read some of Byron's work, and she didn't seem terribly impressed, did she, Christine? What do we know about what Austen thought about Byron?

Christine: Well, the most cutting thing is when she writes to Cassandra and says, "I have read the Corsair," which was Byron's most famous poem—it sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication. So, "I've read the Corsair, and I've mended my petticoat, and I have nothing else to do."

Breckyn: I love that.

Christine: She dismisses him as being equivalent to mending her petticoat. But actually, she uses petticoats quite a lot in her book as a satirical thing. If you remember, Miss Bates is supposed to babble on about petticoats. And if you think of Mary Wollstonecraft being described as that "hyena in petticoats," you know, it was quite a pointed thing to bring in there. Byron, of course, would have been a bit peeved, I think. But he got a bit suspicious of all this business about 10,000 copies on the day of publication of something that wasn't even book length. She was comparing it with—the huge, with the minute. She also, as you know, in Persuasion has Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick talk about Byron and Scott.

Breckyn: I'm glad that you mentioned that because I have the quote. So, I'm going to read it, and then let's talk about it.

Christine: Okay, you read it.

Breckyn: So, it says, "For though shy, he did not seem reserved; it had rather the appearance of feelings glad to burst their usual restraints; and having talked of poetry, the richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the Lake were to be preferred, and how ranked The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos; and moreover, how The Giaour was to be pronounced, he showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other."

So, I actually laughed out loud when I read that because, in preparing for this episode, I found myself unable to pronounce quite a few of Byron's works. So, Austen and I seem to share that. We're on the same page there. But what I love about this scene is that we get a glimpse into Austen's philosophy. Do you want to talk—philosophy of reading and about her thoughts of poetry of the time?

Christine: Yeah, I think this is Austen actually starting to engage a bit with Romanticism, with, you know, very big emotions and how they're expressed, and so on. And she's making a big differential between the way Captain Benwick goes about it, which is to increase all his feelings of misery at having lost his fiancée by reading Byron and Scott and allowing himself to feel really miserable. But then, of course, he—not long after—falls in love with Louisa Musgrove, so we have to take that with a pinch of salt. Whereas Anne is working her way through a more genuine Romanticism, if you like. She's more discerning about what is romantic and what isn't—I mean, in our sense of romantic, as meaning associated with love, sort of thing, as well as their sense of Romantic. And I think that's a major theme in the novel. So, I think this is really quite a key moment when they talk about Byron and Scott. And it's interesting that she uses Byron in that context. So, even if she allegedly disliked it, he was making her think about what is romantic and what is Romanticism.

Breckyn: And what is its role and what is its appropriate place in our reading, right? It's clearly—she's not opposed to romantic poets. She read quite a few of them. She mentions them in her letters. Fanny Price is a great lover of poetry. But then we get the character of Marianne, who is similar to Benwick. Instead of having the Romantic poetry in its proper place, she—it bursts its bounds, and she engages too much in it. It's an overindulgence, and she isn't able to balance it. And I like how Anne gives Benwick this sort of assigned reading. She's like, how about instead of just a diet of hopeless agony, how about you also consume some moral literature, and maybe some essays, and so some things that will teach you how to restrain yourself properly, right? That's something that Austen is always advocating for: for duty, for self-control, self-governance. And so, I really like that scene in Persuasion.

Christine: I think it's a pity that Austen never—didn't live long enough to read any of Byron's humorous poetry. I think she would really have liked Beppo and actually Don Juan, which although it has a huge canvas, actually focuses on individuals and is very satirical and self-aware, very funny verbally, and so on. I think she would have liked that, but she was dead two years earlier before any of it was published.

Breckyn: Okay. I didn't know that. So, we know that Austen knew Byron's work, but did Byron know Austen's work? What have you uncovered, Christine?

Christine: Well, I'm not sure that it's me who's uncovered it, particularly, but it used to be thought that he hadn't read any of them, and there was no evidence that he'd ever owned them and so on. But in particular, Andrew Nicholson looked through the sale catalogs of Byron's books. There were three different times when his library of books was put on sale. And he discovered that Byron did, in fact, own first editions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. So—and he probably was sent Persuasion and Northanger Abbey by John Murray. He was in Italy by the time they were published, but Murray sent him a big bundle of books then, and it seems likely to me and to Byron's most famous editor, Jerome McGann, that he did read those two.

I think a particular thing that he—well, two particular things that he owes to her—One is that ability to have conversations where it looks as if nothing much is happening; you know, everybody's chatting on. But actually, they reveal the personality of the person and lots of unconscious revelations in a conversation. There's a particular one—shall I just read this one?

Breckyn: Yes.

Christine: This is in Beppo, when Beppo, who's the husband, turns up, having been completely lost and assumed dead for several years. And his wife, in the meantime—Laura, his wife, has in the meantime taken up with somebody else, of course. And then Beppo suddenly turns up, and he's all dressed up as a Turk. And she says, "Bless me! Your beard is of amazing growth! How can you to keep away so long? Are you not sensible 'twas very wrong? And are you really, truly, now a Turk? With other women did you wive? Is it true they use their fingers for a fork? Well, that's the prettiest shawl—as I'm alive. You'll give it me? They say you eat no pork. How many years did you contrive to— Bless me! Did I ever? No, I never saw a man grown so yellow! How's your liver?"

Breckyn: It sounds like Miss Bates.

Christine: Exactly. Yeah. And several of Austen's characters do this—reveal things to us by being unaware of what they're saying. So that was one thing that I think he probably might have learnt from Austen and uses very well. And another one is, I think he might have read Northanger Abbey, and he has a scene in Don Juan—at the end of Don Juan—where it's in Norman abbey. And Juan is the young ingenue; he's still a very young man, and he's visited at night by various figures. One of them is certainly the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, who wants to seduce him. But actually, the night before, he's been visited by what may be a real ghost, and he doesn't—Byron doesn't actually say whether it's a real ghost or not. But that seemed to me very similar to some of the things that Austen is doing in Northanger Abbey—playing with the Gothic. It'd be nice to think that she may have taught him that.

Breckyn: Yeah, so certainly, even if we don't know Byron read them for sure, because we don't have anything in his letters, Byron and Austen are steeped in a lot of the same ideas. They're in London at the same time. They're consuming a lot of the same media. They're maybe going to similar parties or talking to similar people. And so, it's really cool that you've uncovered a lot of these parallels in their work. Just while we're reading quotes, I wanted to share this quote that I came across from Percy Shelley. It was in a letter to Mary Shelley, something that he said about Byron. He said, "He has read me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine.—It sets him not above but far above all the poets of the day; every word has the stamp of immortality.—I despair of rivaling Lord Byron, as well I may; and there is no other with whom it is worth contending." That's great, right?

Christine: Gosh. That's Shelley being very nice, isn't it?

Breckyn: I know.

Christine: Not many people dared to be so praising of it. Because everybody thought, Ooh, there are dodgy bits in it where there's too much sex, or rock and roll, or whatever. But Shelley goes all out for it, doesn't he?

Breckyn: Yeah. And I think that really encapsulates what a lot of people thought of Byron and why his legacy continues today. Because even with all of the crazy biographical details, there's no doubting that he had talent, right? He was a fantastic poet.

Christine: Genius, I would say.

Breckyn: Genius, which is what I would say about Jane Austen as well.

Christine: To her, too. Absolutely.

Breckyn: Well, I just wanted to—one thing, as I've been brushing up on my Byron in preparation for this conversation, because I did have an—I was an English major, and I did read some of him, but I was like, oh, I don't know anything about The Corsair. Quick, Wikipedia! But anyway, a lot of his themes—they remind me of Austen's juvenilia.

Christine: Yes.

Breckyn: And so, I do think it's interesting that Austen—you know, everyone thinks of her—if you've only ever read her published novels, you think of her as this quiet and restrained—and this country parson's daughter. You need to go to the juvenilia to get the full picture of Austen. Because, like Byron, there's alcoholism, there's adultery, there's murder—she goes beyond the bounds of England, there's things taking place in the Orient, and all this kind of stuff. It's much wilder. It's much more "juvenile." It's these unrestrained feelings, and emotions, and actions. But then that turned into a mature author who shows incredible restraint and precision in her prose later. And so, I wonder if you had any thoughts about that. It just seems like Byron and a lot of the other Romantics never grew up, right? They're still doing these crazy, insane juvenile thoughts and feelings, and then they kind of burn out, and they die young. And—whereas Austen, I think, matures in her art. But maybe—I'm clearly biased towards Austen, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

Christine: Right. That's interesting. I think they did live in very different milieux. Byron was a peer of the realm. He had money. He could afford to say and do what he liked. And the Regency period was very, very different from what came after. I mean, what came after was the woman being the focus of the home and the angel in the house, somebody called her. So, there was much more restriction on women after Austen and Byron's period. Austen did really well in managing to stay within all the conventions, as you say, as she grew up. She learned to work within those conventions. And you can still tell from her letters that her actual spirit was much wilder and more romantic than that. But she opted to stay within the bounds of decorum and so on. Byron wasn't really interested in that. He wanted to shock people. He also, to be fair to him, wanted to preach or plead for liberty for various peoples: for the Italians who needed to rid themselves of the Austrian occupation of their country, and the Greeks who wanted to be free of the Ottoman Turks. And he did a lot of practical, heroic work for them. 

I mean, he hid a lot of weapons in his own house in Italy, and he went to Greece, and as you know, died in Greece. So, he did grow up. He definitely did grow up. He was very mature in some ways. But he didn't foresee, I don't think, as Austen did, that manners were narrowing, if you like, becoming more precise and so on. And I think it's brilliant how she foresaw that, and that enabled her to survive all through the nineteenth century when women were considerably repressed. And Byron didn't foresee that, I don't think. I think he was further out from it. I mean, she'd learned it by being a clergyman's daughter and so on. He'd never had to learn it.

Breckyn: That was an interesting biographical detail that I didn't know about Byron—that he went and joined the Greek Revolution, and he went and helped the Greeks fight for independence, and that's where he ultimately died, right?

Christine: Yeah, he died of fever in Missolonghi in Western Greece at 36.

Breckyn: Yeah, this has been a really great conversation. Is there any last thing that you—was there anything that surprised you or delighted you in your research that we haven't touched on yet?

Christine: Well, I was pleased to discover that they were very distantly related to each other. It's only by marriage, and it's because Byron's great aunt married somebody who was related to Jane Austen's mother, distantly. But the family concerned were Musgrove, or Musgrave, actually. Musgrave, that's right. We know, obviously, that Austen used that name, so she may have been conscious of this link. I don't know. She never refers to it. It also means that both of them were distantly related to Annabella Milbanke, who became Byron's wife. And Byron didn't know that he was distantly related to his own wife. So, we know more, and Austen may have known more than they did, which I was fascinated by. It's not, in a way, surprising because the world was much smaller then. The world of gentility and aristocracy was much smaller then, and most people were probably distantly related to others. But it was really nice to be able to trace that. And there's a very elaborate family tree in the beginning of my book, which people can look at if they really want to.

Breckyn: Well, and it's also funny, considering, as you said, he was distantly related to his wife. He also later probably fathers a child with his own half-sister, so he wasn't too concerned about—

Christine: Yes, we haven't mentioned that, yeah.

Breckyn: Well, we didn't get around to it. But I mean, even at the time, it was very common for cousins to marry each other. There was a lot of interrelation going on. But this has been really fascinating, Christine. I didn't know about many of these links. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Where can listeners learn more about your book and about your other work?

Christine: Well, it's published by Bloomsbury. If you go on to Bloomsbury's site, it's called Jane Austen and Lord, Regency Relations is the full title. I've had a couple of articles in Persuasion, as you say, one about them both being John Murray authors. So, there's an article there that people could look at as well.

Breckyn: Well, yeah, look it up, everybody. Thanks so much, Christine.

Christine: Thank you. Thank you. It's been lovely.

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Breckyn: Okay, everyone, it's time for another serving of JASNA news. In case you haven’t heard yet, our 2024 Young Filmmakers Contest is a wrap! This year’s winners have been revealed, and we've invited Erika Kotite, the chair of JASNA’s Young Filmmakers Contest Committee, to share the details.  Thanks for joining us today, Erika! 

Erika Kotite: Hey, thanks for inviting me! It's my pleasure to announce the winners of this year's contest. These great films, which were created by the 2024 Young Filmmakers Contest finalists, premiered at a special screening and awards event during our annual conference in Cleveland on October 17th, and the names of the first-, second-, and third-place winners were revealed there as well. Before I reveal them here, though, I wanted to make sure anyone who wasn't aware knows that this annual contest is free and open to all amateur filmmakers and Austen fans up to the age of 30.

This year's assignment was to create an original short film of five minutes or less inspired by Jane Austen, her world, her novels or letters, or adaptations of her work. A panel of distinguished judges in the filmmaking, literary, criticism, and academic fields selected the winners. So here they are. Anatolia Kozinski of East Sound, Washington, won top honors for her film, 2024 Meets Mr. Collins. Daniela Bond of Los Angeles placed second with an short animation called A Novel, By a Lady. And Bernadette Santos Schwegel of Chicago took third place for her film, Darling Child. All of these films were warmly received by the audience, and you can watch them on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/@jasnaorg, or just go to our website at jasna.org and look for the Programs section.

We love seeing how new generations of Austen fans interpret her works and her life. So if you're a young filmmaker 30-year-under, it is not too early to start thinking about next year's contest. Janeites everywhere will celebrate Austen's 250th birthday in 2025—a perfect time to show how Jane Austen inspires you. The winners will receive generous cash prizes and feedback on their films from the judges. And a new thing for 2025 is you don't have to live in North America to enter— but your film's dialog does have to be in English.

Check out all the contest details on our website. You can also see them in the links that will be in the show notes. You will find a link on the website that you can use to sign up and receive the contest entry form and guidelines, as well as periodic emails with contest news and lots of ideas and inspiration. There's no obligation to submit a film, and you can unsubscribe from the emails at any time. The deadline for film entries is June 20, 2025, so I would start creating right now!

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

Emma Kantor: Hello. This is Emma Kantor, proud but not prejudiced member of JASNA's New York Metro Region. I bet you'd expect that my favorite Austen quote is from Emma. But in the spirit of Jane's irony and misdirection, I'm going to share a quote from Northanger Abbey instead. Here goes: "provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she never had any objection to books at all."

I love how the narrator lovingly pokes fun at Catherine Morland and her taste for Gothic novels. Then again, why should she be ashamed of reading for pleasure? This is just one of the delightful metafictional moments in the book, and I think there's a way in which all of Austen's novels are about reading and misreading and rereading. She teaches us to be better readers in a perfect marriage of story and reflection.

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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 we'll 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.

As a final reminder, JASNA is now on YouTube! So be sure to follow us there, as well as on Instagram and Facebook, for updates about the podcast and new episodes. And if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us a line at our email address, podcast@jasna.org. 

[Theme music]

 

“I am fond of superior society.”

Pride and Prejudice