Austen Chat: Episode 19

January 9, 2025

A Close Look at Austen's Genius: A Visit with John Mullan

Happy 2025! This year marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday, and we are delighted to kick off the celebration with professor and author John Mullan as our guest. This month we delve into passages from the four novels published during Austen's lifetime and discuss what the details reveal about her genius as a writer. Join us for this fascinating and insightful episode (and get a sneak peek at one of our plenary speakers for the 2025 AGM in Baltimore)!

John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at University College London. Specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth century literature, he is a frequent guest on radio and TV and lectures widely. He also writes on contemporary fiction for the Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. John is the author of The Artful Dickens, What Matters in Jane Austen?, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, and How Novels Work and has edited the Oxford World Classics editions of Sense and Sensibility and Emma as well as a number of works by Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. 

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to John for being a guest on Austen Chat!

Listen to Austen Chat here, on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms), or on our YouTube Channel.

Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published January 9, 2025. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Photo: © Paul Musso. 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. Happy 2025, listeners! As many of you know, this year marks Austen's 250th birthday. Huzzah! JASNA will be celebrating all year long with special guests on the podcast. Here today to help us kick off this year of celebration is professor and author John Mullan. John is the Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature and Head of Department at University College London. He is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and has published widely on that time period. John is a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a literary journalist. He writes on contemporary fiction for The Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. His books include How Novels Work, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, The Artful Dickens, and of most interest to us: What Matters in Jane Austen? 20 Crucial Puzzles Solved. Welcome to the show!

John Mullan: Thanks very much, Breckyn. Good to be here.

Breckyn: Okay, John, you have been a plenary speaker at multiple AGMs and have presented to several JASNA regions, so I know you are a favorite speaker of many of our listeners, and I'm so glad to have you as our first guest for Austen's 250th.

John: Well, that's very kind. Can I just say JASNA is my favorite audience?

Breckyn: Oh, wonderful.

John: Because instead of putting up PowerPoint slides, all I have to say is, just imagine volume 2, chapter 3, Mansfield Park, and everybody in the room, I can see opening it in their heads.

Breckyn: We're there. We're all there. You're starting with such a high bar already. You don't have to lay any groundwork. I just did my first presentation at the AGM in Cleveland, and it is so fun talking to a room full of people who know exactly what you're talking about already.

John: Yes, indeed.

Breckyn: We can do deep dives, which we're going to do today. Let's start with an Austen-inspired round of the game Would You Rather? This is how we start our episodes. John, would you rather have Mrs. Bennet for a mother or Lady Catherine de Bourgh?

John: For a mother or a mother-in-law?

Breckyn: For a mother, yeah.

John: For a mother. Well, I think I take my lead from Elizabeth Bennet herself. I think, although you're choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea, it would be even worse to have Lady Catherine de Bourgh, because Mrs. Bennet you can sort of maneuver around, and also, you know, now and then she'd retire to bed because of her nerves, wouldn't she? You could get on with stuff. Whereas Lady Catherine de Bourgh would be, as we say in Britain, in your face all the time, telling you what to do, and you'd be having to fend her off, and that would become exhausting and wearisome. You can see that in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth has a modus vivendi, doesn't she? To have to deal with her mother.  And that would be, I think, an easier thing to come at than a way of living with Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Breckyn: I guess if you're looking at the products, it's kind of "would you rather be Elizabeth Bennet or Anne de Bourgh?" And the answer there is obvious.

John: Oh, yes. Or poor old Charlotte Lucas is having to see her pretty often, isn't she?

Breckyn: It's true. There are some benefits of having her nearby, but you have a lot to deal with. As many of our listeners will know, John is excellent at providing fascinating analysis and insight into Austen's novels. For our episode today, we will be delving into passages from the four novels published in Austen's lifetime so that we can discuss different aspects of her genius as a writer. But before we get into the quotes, I want to first ask you this, John. After 250 years, why are we still reading Austen?

John: [Laughs] Well, because she writes so well. I mean, what can I say? What I would say is the slightly dusty literary academic's answer, which is that there's so many wrong answers to that question given, I think. Whenever people are asked on, I don't know, radio or TV in the UK about it, they always say, "Oh, because she writes about money or love or courtship or property or class, and all these things are abidingly interesting." But actually, like many of your listeners, I've read lots of those novels written around the same time as Jane Austen, some of which are perfectly okay, which are about all the same things. I've read Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney and Mary Brunton, and none of them have lived on in the same way, because it's not what Austen writes about. It's the extraordinary life that's in every sentence of hers. So that when I was looking at some of the passages you'd suggested to me, Breckyn, for today's discussion, I was looking at one or two in Emma, and I was seeing things I'd never seen before. And that always happens, doesn't it? And I've read Emma—I don't know—but probably in my life, maybe right away through 15, 16 times, something like that.

And definitely, as soon as I started looking at a passage I hadn't really carefully looked at before, I saw this extraordinary web of minute connections between it and other things going on in the novel. And I think only Shakespeare, in English literature, only Shakespeare has that incredible thing. She must have held—I think in her head as she wrote, whenever she wrote a new bit, she could remember every other bit.

Breckyn: It's like an encyclopedic knowledge of her own work.

John: Yes, extraordinary. And so it's endlessly re-readable. And also, unlike Shakespeare or many other great writers, she has this remarkable thing, which I think is almost unique, which is that an intelligent 13-year-old can read one of her novels and totally get it. And then you read it for the tenth time in your 50s, and you see all sorts of new things, and it means different things. And that mixture of simplicity and complexity is really extraordinary.

Breckyn: And I've said this before, but something that I find amazing is that when I was reading them as a 13-year-old a girl or a 15, 16—I'd identify with the heroines. I felt for Marianne. And now I'm older, I'm a mother, and I'm like, "Mrs. Bennet, we all just need to give her a break, okay? She's doing her best." The fact that you can, in different stages of your life, identify or sympathize with different Austen characters has been an enjoyable part of the process for me as well.

John: Yes, yes, yes. I thought for a moment you were going to say after Marianne, when you first read it, you sympathized with her. I thought you were going to say, "but now I realize what a clown she is."

Breckyn: I feel bad for her because I was her. I was a very poetic and dramatic 15-year-old, and so I had a soft spot—

John: I can't believe you were quite as humorless as Marianne is.

Breckyn: No, and I don't think I had such a passion for dead leaves. But yeah, no, it's extraordinary. Well, let's start with Sense and Sensibility. We're just going to go in the order that they were published in Austen's lifetime. And let's start with this passage about Marianne, which I think is so wonderful. I'll read it, and then I'd love to hear your thoughts.

John: Okay, great.

Breckyn: It says, "Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a disgrace left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with a headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment, giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbid all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough!"

John: Well read.

Breckyn: Thank you.

John: Yes. So, do you want to say why you chose it, or do you want me to say what I think about it?

Breckyn: Well, I think . . . It's an aspect that,—well, I mean, it speaks to the title, certainly, Sense and Sensibility. And I think an aspect of the novel that I find really interesting is Marianne. We think of her as—or she thinks of herself as so genuine and—it's that teenage trap of thinking that you're so unique and original and nobody understands you. But really, she's following exactly the form of sensibility. Like, this is the proper way to behave, and this is how heroines do it, and I'm going to follow it to the letter. And I love that. She's almost—she watches herself as a tragic sensibility heroine.

John: Yes. I mean, she's learned this from books, hasn't she? She's essentially learned it from books. Sensibility is, in Sense and Sensibility, really closely attached to reading especially—of course, music and arts and things as well—but especially to reading. And you remember, Willoughby reads with great sensibility. And of course, Edward doesn't read with enough sensibility. And that's reading aloud, of course, as mostly reading in Austen novels means reading aloud. And yeah, she is, as we would say now—and I think it's a word people—it's a word my students have started using it only in the last three or four years, but maybe it goes back a bit further in the States— "performative." This is performative, isn't it?

Breckyn: That's a perfect word for it, yeah.

John: Yeah, it is. But it's also, I think, quite an unusual paragraph in the sweep of Jane Austen's fiction because Austen's doing here something I think she doesn't really do very much, or she does decreasingly through her novels—Sense and Sensibility, of course, being her first published novel—which is that she can't resist a sarcastic comment. And that thing Virginia Woolf says about Jane Austen, which I think it's generally true—she's inscrutable, she's absent, she's not there. But in Sense and Sensibility, now and then, she can't resist making a comment, and that last sentence that you read so amusingly, which has an exclamation point—

Breckyn: I was going to point out the exclamation point.

John: Yeah. Her sensibility was potent enough. Now, of course, a lot of Sense and Sensibility is percolated through Elinor's consciousness. But this is Jane Austen exclaiming, sarcastically, sardonically at Marianne's performance of all the symptoms of distress. And of course, this has a—it has a neat—we discover it has an elegant narrative function—which also has a psychological truth about it—which is that Marianne gets ill twice in the novel, doesn't she? From having been abandoned. And the second time, she really does get ill and almost dies. Although she's done a bit of walking in wet grass to bring that on, hasn't she? In just a stocking.

John: But this one is just an act, and the two are sort of balanced against each other. It's very wittily done. But it does feel like this is a different Jane Austen from the one that she goes on to become, I think. And there are more occasions. If we can put Northanger Abbey out of the reckoning for the second, because she comments as an author a lot in that, and that's one of the ways you know it's an earlier work, I think. But if you think of the other five novels, I think Sense and Sensibility has many more occasions when Jane Austen just can't resist a very amusing comment. Lady Middleton comes to visit the cottage for the first time with one of her children, and Jane Austen—they're always going on, how tall, how tall the child is or isn't? And Jane Austen says, "Oh, if you've got nothing to talk about, always useful to have a child." And that's not Elinor, that's Jane Austen. And I think that that direct sort of authorial intervention is what marks this out as an earlier work than the other novels.

Breckyn: Well, you brought up Virginia Woolf, and I was sure the quote that you were going to mention was her quote about, "Of all great novelists [or all great writers], Austen is the hardest to catch in the act of greatness." And I really felt that when I was picking passages for our episode today, because it's hard to exclude her greatness. Like you said, it's—so many of her themes and her characterizations, they're woven—they permeate the entire novel. And so plucking them out and—to try to cherry-pick them—you really lose the context.

John: Yes. Yes.

Breckyn: But I will say—I mean, another quote from Sense and Sensibility, one of my favorite in the whole novel is—so I don't think we'll get into the toothpick case scene because it's very long, but I think it's hilarious— but later, when Robert is blabbering on about being excessively fond of a cottage, he just talks and talks and talks, doesn't leave any room for Elinor to say anything. We get this wonderful line, "Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition." That's like a mic drop moment for me for Jane Austen. It's a culmina—it's so Elinor because it's not just understated, she just doesn't really say anything.

John: Yes. Well, also it's very—it's characteristic of not just her, but of the novel as it is channeled through her. In a way, two things are happening. There's what Elinor is actually apparently doing and saying, and there's what Elinor is thinking, and only the reader knows the latter. Only the reader, because she has to spend her whole time keeping secrets, not saying things, not hazarding herself too far because she doesn't know this guy, Edward. What's he up to? What game is he playing? He seems to like her, but what's he doing? And there's her sister, Marianne, making every mistake of over-committing herself, on the basis of no good evidence, alongside her. So I think in a way that it is really the most fascinating and singular thing about Sense and Sensibility. It's almost like there are two completely different things going on. There is Elinor's inner life, which we are totally privy to, and there's what, as it were, if you film this, you would see and hear. It's one of the reasons why, although there have been some brave attempts, the brave attempts to film Sense and Sensibility can get Marianne, but they can't get Elinor.

They just can't get her. Because what she shows and says is completely at variance with what we know she's thinking. Even when she thinks something is funny, she will often stifle a laugh or just smile, because to do more than that would be to cause trouble, you know.

Breckyn: Yeah. That is why it's so rewarding in the movies, at least, when she does have that outburst at the very end. Edward comes to the cottage, and she just—she has her Marianne moment, where she gets to just cry from happiness and everything else.

John: Yes. Yes. But I note that in the most accomplished film version of Sense and Sensibility—I think what most people think is the most accomplished, the Ang Lee one, scripted by Emma Thompson—I have quite a lot of things I don't like about that, but it's undoubtedly a very well-made film. But given that they can only get a tiny proportion of the actual dialog that's in the novel into the film, it's quite striking that Emma Thompson felt it necessary to invent some new dialog between her and Edward, because otherwise the cinema goer, as it were, wouldn't believe there was anything between them.

Breckyn: There's very little at Norland Park. Jane Austen doesn't give us very much.

John: No, no, no. And that's designedly, I think.

Breckyn: You think so?

John: Oh, definitely.

Breckyn: Why? Tell me. Tell me your thoughts.

John: Well, because we have to, as it were, believe that she can't know what his real feelings are, and that even if she trusts that he does have an affection for her, she knows there's something wrong. She knows there is, and that it's quite likely that she'll never know what that is. And after all, this is one of several Jane Austen novels—it's true of Mansfield Park, it's true of Persuasion, it's true of Emma—where the heroine is led to believe that the man she loves is going to be snapped up by somebody else. I mean, that's four of the five lengthy novels. You know, there's something slightly sort of—no, it's not sadistic, but Jane Austen makes her heroine go through that. Yes? Believing that she's lost him to somebody else.

Breckyn: The romantic suspense.

John: Yes, and therefore, in some ways, what a relief that I didn't Marianne—do a Marianne, and sort of go, "Good God, Willoughby," so that everybody in London knows. Everybody in London knows that Marianne has been jilted. And whatever's going to happen to Elinor, even if she thinks Edward's going to marry Lucy Steele—

Breckyn: At least she'll have her dignity.

John: No, I think better than that. I think her integrity, actually. I think her integrity. But then I think—to go back to the passage with which we started, that you read out to us—I think that the other aspect of the novel, which I think readers sometimes feel first-time round, anyway, a bit dissatisfied with, but that Austen definitely intended—is there in this passage, which is—It's possible, isn't it, to think that there's something slightly unfair to Marianne in this passage? "Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby." She's slightly laughing or inviting us to laugh at Marianne. And Marianne is often humorless and ridiculous and talks to trees, and we should laugh at her talking to trees.

But she has been treated badly by this guy, and he has suddenly disappeared. And if we were a bit more like Mrs. Jennings and a bit less like Jane Austen, we might think, okay, she's overdoing it, but I mean, you know . . . .

Breckyn: He gave her plenty of good reason. I mean Willoughby—even Elinor believed, because of how he acted, that there had been an understanding. And so Marianne's not completely out of line.

John: Yes. But she does get—It's common when I teach Sense and Sensibility, sometimes to students who haven't ever read it, that they feel that the arc of the novel is one which is designed to punish Marianne.

Breckyn: It does feel that way. But she doesn't die, at least, which most other characters would have at the time.

John: She doesn't die. She doesn't die. But she more or less, as I'm sure you've noticed—you say that there's not much between Edward and Elinor to indicate the voltage of mutual attraction. But there's a good sight more than there is between Marianne and Colonel Brandon. They never speak to each other at all.

Breckyn: Certainly.

John: They just—and it says Colonel Brandon came to the cottage to talk to Elinor and look at Marianne. And of course, that is quite funny, but it's Jane Austen preparing us, and arguably preparing Marianne, for a marriage to a man who certainly loves her, but to a marriage which is an admission of defeat in some ways.

Breckyn: Oh, it's sad. It's sad. And like you said, hard to adapt to film because you have to make Colonel Brandon seem more romantic than he does in the novel. Okay, I love this, but we got to move on if we're going to get to—

John: Okay, move on. Move on. 

Breckyn: Let's go to Pride and Prejudice. I watched your lecture that you did from Jane Austen's House, and that was really enjoyable. And so I wanted to do this quote from Mrs. Bennet because you talked a lot about her and her contradictions. It's the conversation that begins—she says, "Well, Lizzie, said Mrs Bennet one day, What is your opinion now of this sad business of Jane's? For my part, I am determined never to speak of it again to anybody. I I told my sister, Phillips, so the other day."

John: [Laughs] Yes.

Breckyn: And you gave examples of how she's always doing that, where she will say something and then either immediately contradict herself, or you gave some examples where it's almost the entire novel later, and you have to, like Jane Austen, hold that information in your mind and remember that Mrs. Bennet is directly contradicting what she had said earlier.

John: Yes, yes, yes. She's wonderful like that, isn't she? And of course, she has to manage it about Mr. Darcy, doesn't she? She says what a terrible person she is—he is—and then finds out that he's about to become her son-in-law. And she—there's a wonderful bit where she's looking around for something to say. She says, so—Mr. Darcy, so handsome and so tall.

Breckyn: Tall, yeah. It's funny, but also, isn't that something that Bingley says about him earlier? Like "I wouldn't have near as much respect for him or be nearly as afraid of him if he weren't so tall."

John: Yes. And that's in an exchange where—it's a really interesting little exchange. Isn't that the one where Mr. Bingley is saying, you should see Mr. Darcy on a Sunday evening in the countryside, and he gets a bit scary because he's all broody and feeling sort of melancholy and grumpy. His grumpiness is becoming something—and you know, he is quite scary, and one of the great things is Elizabeth is the only person who's not scared of him. I mean, that's the turn-on in a way, because even her dad says, oh, he came to ask me my permission. But I mean, I can't imagine he's the kind of person you'd ever not give him what he asked for. But of course, Elizabeth does exactly that. She doesn't give him what he asked for. But yeah, this bit of Mrs. Bennet, I mean, she goes on, doesn't she? She says, "But I cannot find out that Jane saw anything of him in London. Well, he's a very undeserving young man, and I do not suppose there is the least chance in the world of her ever getting him now. There's no talk if he's coming to Netherfield again in the summer. And I've inquired of everybody too who is likely to know." So it's not just her sister. She's out spraying information around.

Breckyn: And saying this same line to everybody, that she's determined never to speak about it again. She says that line to every single person in Meryton.

John: Yes. I mean, and one of the entertaining things about Pride and Prejudice, which I think becomes a really complicated and deep thing in Emma, is inviting you to imagine this community of people you never actually meet. Most of them you never meet. The people of Meryton, the servants in the house, the fact that people are gossiping all the time, that things are becoming known, and I think this is one of those things that contemporary readers would have been much more sensitized to than we are. We have to sort of realize it, that—there's a bit later on in the novel, isn't there, where Elizabeth is trying to get her mother to restrain herself after news of Lydia's—well, it's not even an elopement—her disappearance into London with this rake comes back to them. There are servants all around them, and they're talking. And because they're human beings, they're going to talk, and they're going to tell their friends who are servants in other people's houses and tell people they know in Meryton. You know, that thing: in times of trouble, one can never see too little of one's neighbors. There's an echo chamber. That's probably a bad metaphor, but there's a world of report and rumor and gossip and chat out there.

Breckyn: A grapevine.

John: Yeah, which is funny, but also dangerous, worrying, and foolish people are not aware of it. And Mrs. Bennet is certainly a very, very foolish person—even though you say you now have creeping sympathy for her.

Breckyn: Okay. I want to get to Mansfield Park because I want your opinions on Mrs. Norris. I hate her so much, but love to hate her. She's an example of one where her evilness is spread so widely throughout the whole novel that it's difficult to pick out any one example. But it starts in the very beginning, so I was going to read this example where it says, "Mrs. Norris had not the least intention of being at any expense whatever in her maintenance." So bringing Fanny is her idea, but really all she cares about is arranging it. She said, "Having married on a narrower income than she had been used to look forward to, she had, from the first, fancied a very strict line of economy necessary, and what was begun as a matter of prudence soon grew into a matter of choice as an object of that needful solicitude which there were no children to supply." And then I'm going to jump forward: "Under this infatuating principle counteracted by no real affection for her sister, it was impossible for her to aim at more than the credit of projecting and arranging so expensive a charity, though perhaps she might so little know herself as to walk home to the parsonage after this conversation in the happy belief of being the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world."

John: Yeah, that's the—that last sentence is wonderful, isn't it, I think. In a way, it's a marker of one of the key differences between Jane Austen and some other nineteenth-century novelists, who try to represent whatever you want to call it: evil, villainy, cruelty. The thing about Mrs. Norris, and the thing about all the bad people in Austen, is they don't think they're bad; they think they're good. I'm sure that Mr. Elton, who strikes me as a horrible human being, thinks of himself as a good person. And Mrs. Norris certainly does, and occasionally can quote scripture if she needs to, and has a great line in telling people what kind of person she is. I mean, shortly before the bit that you read out, Breckyn, there's a chunk of her—she doesn't converse. She talks in bits of monolog. And very often in her bits of monolog, there are things that she says about herself, and they're utterly untrue. But you know—and there are always things about how unselfish she is, how kind she, what—"you know, Sir Thomas, how I would give up anything for somebody else," blah, blah, blah. But she probably believes these things.

John: It would be unsustainable if she didn't. And it's really important that she's set up like that, I think, because soon—once Fanny arrives, but also once she gets a bit bigger and we really get going in the novel— Mrs. Norris is—I mean, Mrs. Norris is a sadist.

Breckyn: She is. I've said that before. She is.

John: She is absolutely a sadist. And one of the brilliant—I mean, you suggested it as a possible passage—one of the brilliant but appalling chapters in the novel is the one where Edmund and Julia come back after a lovely evening out at the parsonage, and they find grumpy Maria and Mrs. Norris and Lady Bertram half comatose. And we find out in the course of a conversation between Edmund and mostly Mrs. Norris, and Lady Bertram a bit as well, that, basically, Mrs. Norris has spent the afternoon torturing Fanny.

Breckyn: Yeah, just sending her back and forth, and it's 100 degrees outside, and Fanny is not strong.

John: Oh, you didn't lock the interior door. Go back and do it. And she is—I think I'm not the first person to notice this—it's not just Fanny, although it's Fanny in particular. But Mrs. Norris is the character in all Jane Austen's fiction who mentions the names of most servants, most often. She knows all the servants. She's always talking about them and to them. And you know that behind what she says, the fact is she is torturing them all. Bossing them around at best, making them suffer at worst.

Breckyn: They're under her thumb.

John: Yes.

Breckyn: That's interesting. I've never thought about her mentioning the names. That's really interesting.

John: Yeah, yeah. She does.

Breckyn: And so what I like about that first passage that I read out is it shows the narrowing of Mrs. Norris's heart and mind. Because her tyranny is so small. Her parsimony is—she's just—everything is tight-fisted. I mean, you're a Dickens man. I love that line from A Christmas Carol about a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone,” a “wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner.” I love that line, and that could absolutely apply to Mrs. Norris.

John: But, of course, because it's Austen, there's always an echo with something later. And it's almost shocking that moment—much, much later in the novel where Fanny is in Portsmouth—and she thinks to herself, well, in the same situation as my mother, Mrs. Norris would have made a better job of this. She actually has that thought, and she means economically—

Breckyn: That those skills would have been put to good use.

John: Well, she would have been—all the horrible things about her would have been brought to advantage. She wouldn't have let the servant—their one servant, Rachel, she's called, isn't she?—behave as badly and be so slovenly. And she would be much better at domestic economy and much better at making sure that their small resources went around. And that's an horrific realization for Fanny, but it's absolutely characteristic of the psychological complexity of Austen's fiction, I think.

Breckyn: Well, and it makes you wonder—Mr. Norris is not really a character at all, right? He dies pretty soon in the novel, but it makes you wonder, man, what was that man's life like? What did he have to suffer through?

John: Yes. Well, one more to add to the list of not happy marriages that we encounter in Austen's novels before we get to the happy marriages, we hope, at the end of them.

Breckyn: Yeah. I wanted to say one more thing about Mrs. Norris. Oh, just about her parsimony and her smallness. You get so many concrete examples of that when she's always trying to save the little bits of fabric, or she takes the green baize, and the cream cheese, and the eggs. It's just such good characterization. And like I mentioned, it's permeated throughout the novel. So it's not one thing. Mrs. Norris's crimes are throughout the entire thing, and they're so small, but they add up to this sadist, like you said.

John: Do you remember, they're coming back from Sotherton, and she's managed to get some sort of cheesecake—

Breckyn: Quail eggs and cream cheese.

John: Yes. And Maria actually tells her she's had a successful time sponging. She uses that word, you know, because Maria has a vein of kind of . . .  quite indelicate truth-telling. And that's what she is. She's a terrific sponger. But then, of course, her double existence is on the one hand, sponging off the Bertrams, but on the other hand, appearing to dictate to them in a way which suggests that they're totally reliant on her, not the other way round.

Breckyn: Okay, John, let's end with Emma, and it's your specialty. You've done your own—what's that called—an edition.

John: An edition, yeah.

Breckyn: You've put out an addition of Emma. I've heard some of your interviews about Emma, and it's great. Let's talk about Mr. Knightley, because I love him. He's my favorite character. I have a quote here where Mr. Knightley and Emma are talking about Frank Churchill. It says, "She then proceeded to say a good deal more than she felt, and ending with reflections on the Churchill's again, found herself directly involved in a disagreement with Mr. Knightley, and to her great amusement, perceived that she was taking the other side of the question from her real opinion and making use of Mrs. Weston's arguments against herself."

John: Very good. Very good. Yeah. Well, I'll make a confession. When I—you suggested this passage and I looked at it and it comes—what follows is a really quite long dialog between Emma and Mr. Knightley, in which he—I mean, most of what he says carries quite a lot of conviction, because they're talking about why Frank Churchill's, yet again, not turned up to see his father and his new stepmother. And he clearly should have turned up, and he's always saying he's going to and then writing a fancy letter explaining how he can't.

Breckyn: That conversation has one of my favorite lines from all of Austen, which is, "There is one thing that a man can always do, Emma, and that is his duty." I love that.

John: Yeah. But of course, because it's Emma, because it's Austen, although Mr. Knightley is sort of in the right, there's something else going on, which has sort of got nothing to do with, really, in a way, with judgments about Frank Churchill. And one of the things that's going on is Mr. Knightley is getting hot under the collar, actually. And he does get hot under the collar and says things like she says later on, "You seem determined to think ill of him." "Me? Not at all, replied Mr. Knightley, rather displeased." Then later on, she says, "We're both prejudiced. You against and I for him." And he goes, "Prejudiced? I am not prejudiced." And he is getting—and so it's part of the process that you have to read the novel at least twice to appreciate, which is that really brilliant kind of intimation—slowly, slowly, slowly—of his feelings for Emma. And it's mostly done through the detonation device of Frank Churchill. Frank Churchill hasn't even turned up yet, but you mention his name and Mr. Knightley [growls]. But also, here, there's something which actually—I'm not sure I quite noticed before you chose that paragraph you read out—which is the importance that Emma is, as we say, winding him up.

She is teasing him. And it's really important, isn't it, that when we get to that moment where it goes through Emma with the speed of an arrow that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself, that although this is the first moment that she's realized it, actually all the way through the novel, she sort of realized it. And what is she doing here? What is she doing here? She's sort of teasing him. She's provoking him. And in one way, we know that when a woman teases a man in a Jane Austen novel—but dare I say in life?—that it means there's something there. There's something there. But this is different, I think, from Elizabeth teasing Mr. Darcy. This is Emma—her self is not conscious of the sort of undertow here. And it's terribly, terribly clever, I think. And it's almost—I always feel Jane Austen got to the end of Mansfield Park, her previous novel, and she had to convert Edmund into Fanny's husband, into the man who loved Fanny. And she says in that last chapter, doesn't she, "How long did it take? Well, as long as is necessary." So she makes a joke of the difficulty. But I always think it's almost as if she came to Emma and thought, Okay, I'm going to do something which requires the hero and the heroine to recognize only near the end of the novel that they love each other. But I'm going to make it so that that revelation may be news to them, but it shouldn't be news to the reader in a way.

Breckyn: It's both surprising and inevitable.

John: Yes. And it's even cleverer, because the bit you read out—what I hadn't noticed before, is the bit you read out, it says, "to her great amusement, Emma perceived that she was taking the other side of the question from her real opinion and making use of Mrs. Weston's arguments against herself." And if you're reading the novel, you probably read through that quite quickly. But I thought, "Hang on, what is Mrs. Weston's—? And then you realize what it is, is four chapters earlier and some time earlier in the timeline of the novel, at the famous, infamous Westons' Christmas Eve dinner, Mrs. Weston and Emma had a moment of conversation together, and they only get a bit before somebody else comes along and they have to stop, much to Emma's regret. And they're talking about Frank Churchill's non-appearance, and Mrs. Weston is making excuses for him and saying, Oh, poor chap, it's all the Churchills. Emma is saying, Oh, I'm not so sure. If he really wanted to come, he ought to come. "One can hardly"—she actually says—I wrote it down—"One can hardly"—this Emma to Mrs. Weston—"One can hardly conceive of a young man's not having it in his power to do as much as that."

And Mr. Knightley is now saying exactly the same thing. So it's really complicated. So basically, not only have you got this sort of flirtatious friction—no, it's not flirtatious—this sort of friction between Emma and Mr. Knightley, which she is herself creating, but also she knows that Mr. Knightley is right because she's already said it herself.

Breckyn: I like it because it's one of the rare glimmers of self-knowledge that we get from Emma. I mean, most of Jane Austen's novels are heroines going through the arc of self-knowledge, and Emma is, I think, one of—has to be the most oblivious to herself. And it's funny because the first line talks about her being clever, and then it proceeds to show you for the next 50 chapters how not very clever at all Emma is. But then we get this scene, and these scenes with Mr. Knightley, I think, are where she shines the most—that even though she has these flaws, you see her glimmers of intelligence. Because being able to argue something that you don't actually believe or you don't actually think is a skill. It's a level of intelligence that a lot of people don't have. And so that's something that I liked about it.

John: Okay. Well, look, I would go further than what you've said. I would say one of the extraordinary subtleties of the novel, which I didn't get until I read it lots and lots of times, is what happens to Emma when Mr. Knightley is not present necessarily as a person, but even as a topic of conversation. And I used to do a talk—very good talk, I'll do it again—whose title was "Is Emma Ever Right?" And the answer, of course, is she is sometimes right, but one of the things that's very striking—and one of the reasons why we get a sense of the real bond, love bond between them, even though it's totally unstated and Emma doesn't see it herself—is that she tends to be right when Mr. Knightley is there and always when she's talking about Mr. Knightley. So, the ultimate sign—he's like a magnetic force for her. So, the ultimate sign of that is that great moment when she thinks that she's lost him because she thinks that Harriet—that he's going to propose to Harriet. And Harriet says to her—and it's absolutely a glimpse into the abyss, isn't it? She's going to see this sexy young airhead marry the man she loves, and she's going to spend the rest of her young years playing backgammon with her dad. I mean that—you know . . . and that's it.

And Harriet says to her—I can't remember her exact words—but says—Emma says to her, have you got any reason to think Mr. Knightley returns your affection, and she says, Yes, I rather think I do. Of course, Harriet's incapable of untruth or irony. She just calls it as it is. And then she says to Emma, What do I think? And Emma could say anything to her, because Harriet believes whatever Emma tells her. And Emma says—but because it's to do with Mr. Knightley, she can't say something untrue—and she says, All I'll say to you—your listeners will forgive me if I get it slightly wrong—but she says something like, All I'll say to you is that Mr. Knightley is the last man in the world who would ever give a woman the idea of feeling more for her than he does. And that's totally true. And it's a courageous thing to say.

Breckyn: Yeah. It's Emma showing some rare integrity, I think.

John: Well, I think it's not just integrity. It's also that she could not tell a lie about him, or not tell a lie—tell one of her delusional untruths. Because most of the time she's not deliberately lying at all. She's just saying things that she wishes were the case as if they were the case. She could say, of course, she could say, Forget it, girl. He's way above your station. He's never going to think of you. She could say a polite version of that, and Harriet would believe her, but she doesn't. And of course, Harriet's ecstatic. And that's the most important version of how, when she thinks about Mr. Knightley, she gets a version of what she knows is true. And here, of course, it reveals itself in the example you chose, very playfully, because she knows perfectly well what she really thinks and says the opposite for a laugh. Well, it's not just for a laugh, is it? It's to enjoy teasing him. It's to enjoy—

Breckyn: The sparring.

John: Yeah, the sparring. And why does he get so cross? Why does he get so cross? She genuinely seems not to suspect, but on the other hand, it's as if—I don't know, it's as if her unconscious self knows.

Breckyn: Yeah. Or she, at least, for some reason, she knows him so well, she knows the buttons to push to get the reaction that she wants.

John: Yes, but I mean, it's a scenario which is often repeated in fiction and in film, where a woman gets a man interested in her by making him jealous. And if Emma consciously knew what she was doing, you would say that's what she's doing. And it's almost a parody of what a woman who was a bit of a manipulator might do to get a man more interested in her.

Breckyn: That's so interesting because Emma is manipulative, right? I mean, the whole novel is her moving people around on this chess board and trying to turn things out. And she can't really do it with Mr. Knightley—or she thinks she can't, but she actually does have this unconscious power because she doesn't realize how he really feels about her.

John: That's right. And she makes him go red in the face as he's putting on his gators. And actually, she does—she does have some power. And also, of course—it's got so many layers to it, this dialog you chose—of course, he is the one person with whom she enacts a playfulness, and we know that playfulness—we know from Pride and Prejudice how erotically charged, I suppose you might say, that that is. And there are other bits in the novel where she will sort of tease him. And what's he say? Ridiculous girl. And when she's teasing him about coming in the carriage—and he says ridiculous girl, but not at all in anger. He likes it, really. I did once read the novel trying to—just to look at what Mr. Knightley was doing and saying and how it indicated his feelings for Emma. And it is minutely choreographed, the feelings that he has and how Frank Churchill has almost—he's just almost designed to get him.

Breckyn: To get him going.

John: To get him going, yes.

Breckyn: Well, I would love to hear your lecture about "Is Emma Ever Right?" because I once read the entire novel trying to determine, is Emma ever right? Does she ever say anything—and it's amazing the number of times she makes declarations, and they're just wrong. She's just wrong every time. It's astounding.

John: Yes. And however—even better, of course, and very tricky but delightful for the first-time reader of Emma, how she makes those statements in her head, you know. So, of course, when you say things, you're adjusting them to the people you're saying them to. So that is a reason to get things wrong quite often. But she—the number of times the novel will say she understood. She understood. She understood just—you know.

Breckyn: But she just doesn't.

John: Yes, and she doesn't. And even when—you know, there's a great bit late in the novel after the strawberry-picking party at the end of it, when Jane is saying, I'm going, I'm going, and Emma says, Oh, I'll arrange a carriage for you.

John: No, no, just leave me. I just want to go. And Emma thinks, as we often do, that it's her better self has taken over. So she's not been very friendly to Jane Fairfax, but now she sympathizes with her. And it says something like, "she understood just how she felt." She doesn't understand at all.

Breckyn: She has no idea what's going on.

John: No idea whatsoever. But she's confident, and even more confident than usual, because she knows at this moment, she's not being horrid, meddling, bossy, interfering Emma. She is being a better self. She's being sympathetic. She's being fellow young woman, Emma.

Breckyn: And she's still wrong.

John: Actually—and she's still totally wrong. What is it—with that wonderful line later on, after, actually, Emma and Mr. Knightly have declared their feelings for each other, "seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure." I just feel like that should be engraved on all our walls, that even at the moment when—

Breckyn: When they're laying themselves bare.

John: Yeah. In fact, there's a whole load of misunderstandings going on. That Mr. Knightley only declares himself at a moment when Emma has thought he was going to say that he's going to marry. And he doesn't know that that's what she's thinking, you know. And she's done this rather brave thing of saying, actually, I was unfair to you. Please do tell me what you're going to say.

Breckyn: Oh, this has been so much fun, John.  I've really enjoyed it.

John: Well, that's very kind. It's been great fun for me, too.

Breckyn: Yeah. Where can listeners go to learn more about your books and your work?

John: I don't have a website or anything. I'm very, very—I'm very behind the time. Google. Google. Apparently, there's quite a lot of me wittering on about Jane Austen on the net. But of course, the thing I would really like people to do is read the things I've written about Austen, my introductions to Sense and Sensibility and Emma. But I guess lots of your listeners might have come across it. Well, you say, What matters in Jane Austen. I guess it should be, What matters in Jane Austen? Because it has got a question mark.

Breckyn: I say it the wrong way.

John: Yeah. That's a book I really enjoyed writing. I hope people would see that and I enjoy reading it.

Breckyn: It's incredibly accessible scholarship, which is, I think, a great skill that you have—is that it's incredibly deep and insightful, but also just enjoyable to read. And that's an accomplishment.

John: Bless you for saying it. That's what I tried to do. But I'm writing for people who aren't necessarily doing PhDs, but who read and love Jane Austen. And to read and love a Jane Austen—as she says, what does she expect from her readers? "I write not for such dull elves as have not a good deal of ingenuity themselves." Good readers of Jane Austen have to be really switched on.

Breckyn: Sometimes we need help with the ingenuity, and John Mullan is here to provide that ingenuity for us if you're feeling dull on any particular day.

John: Well, I think once you read Jane Austen, it gives you the wonderful illusion that you're a clever person, doesn't it? But then, unfortunately, you have to close the book and return to your sole self.

Breckyn: Well, thank you so much, John.

John: It's a pleasure. Thanks very much to you, Breckyn. 

Breckyn: Hello, dear listeners. I just wanted to ask you a favor. If you've enjoyed listening to Austen Chat, please consider giving 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.

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