Austen Chat: Episode 28

October 2, 2025

Jane Austen & the Oxford English Dictionary: A Visit with Charlotte Brewer

Bath bun. Bobbinet. Poor basket. Vanity-bait. These are just a few of the words the Oxford English Dictionary credits Jane Austen with using for the first time in print—and almost all are words related to domestic and everyday life. In this episode, we sit down with scholar Charlotte Brewer to explore the Dictionary’s 19th-century origins, its reliance on volunteer readers, its ongoing digital evolution, and the literary biases that shaped whose words were recorded. A must-listen for word nerds! 

Charlotte Brewer is Emerita Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She began her career as a medievalist, subsequently turning to the history of the English language and in particular its record in the Oxford English Dictionary. Her publications include studies of Jane Austen and Shakespeare in the OED, and she is currently working on the Murray Scriptorium, a co-edited edition of the letters of James Murray, first chief editor of the OED. 

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Charlotte for joining us on Austen Chat!

• Learn more about Charlotte Brewer and her work.  
• Visit Charlotte's website Examining the OED.
• Learn more about the Murray Scriptorium.

• Check out the words the Oxford English Dictionary credits Jane Austen with using first in print.  
  
  

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 October 2, 2025. © 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 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. Listeners, odds are, if you're a fan of Austen, you, like me, are also a word nerd. I have a thesaurus bookmarked on my browser, and I have been known to peruse the dictionary in my leisure time. I am therefore excited, thrilled, delighted, and overjoyed to have Charlotte Brewer as my guest today to talk about Jane Austen and the Oxford English Dictionary. Charlotte Brewer is professor of English language and literature and a senior tutor at Hertford College, Oxford. She began her career as a medievalist, subsequently turning to the history of the English language and, in particular, its record in the Oxford English Dictionary. Her publications include studies of Jane Austen and Shakespeare in the OED, and she is currently editing a selection of the letters of James Murray, the first chief editor of the OED, which, for those of you who saw The Professor and the Madman, was the role played by Mel Gibson. Welcome to the show, Charlotte.

Charlotte Brewer: Thank you. Hello.

Breckyn: Okay, so to start off, this is our icebreaker. We're going to play an Austen version of Would You Rather? Would you rather be forced to take a turn about the room with Caroline Bingley, or to play Whist with a drunken Mr. Hurst?

Charlotte: Well, actually, I couldn't think who Mr. Hurst was. I had to go back and have a look.

Breckyn: He's a pretty minor character.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. Well, he struck me as deeply unattractive, as he's evidently supposed to be, and—but I could see you picked them both out because they have something to say about reading. I mean, Mr. Hurst thinks it's absolutely extraordinary anybody should prefer a book to cards, and Caroline Bingley, obviously, is trying to get Mr. Darcy's attention by pretending to be a great reader when, obviously, she's not going to be anything of the sort. So I thought that was a pretty awful choice, but I think it might be quite fun to find out exactly what Caroline Bingley thinks that she does want out of a library? Presumably, you know, she wants very beautifully bound books which will look incredibly impressive on her shelves. That might be a quite interesting thing to discuss with her—you know, what the books look like, whether you get a great run of major authors, and which authors, in fact, she would want. Maybe she—or you could catch her out if she actually had no idea at all. But I thought, at least there would be something to say.

Breckyn: That's such a great parallel that you've drawn between those two characters. I would love to take credit for that thought, but I really didn't think of it beforehand. I love that that quote from Caroline Bingley is always misappropriated. If you ever see on a T-shirt or on a mug or anything, it'll say, "There is no enjoyment like reading. —Jane Austen." And it's like, no, Caroline Bingley said that, and she didn't really mean it. She was just putting on airs.

Charlotte: There's something really, really shameful for Britain out of that. I don't— know if you've come across this, but it was chosen—

Breckyn: For the money, wasn't it?

Charlotte: There were some commemorative stamps for Jane Austen, for great writers. And Jane Austen was on the stamp, and that was the quotation. So it was just lamentable, really.

Breckyn: It drives Austen fans crazy because we all know the full context. And the same thing happens with Mrs. Elton from Emma. Something like, "There's no real comfort or no substitute for comfort for staying at home." She talks about how, "Oh, I just love to stay at home." And, really, she always wants to be out and doing, and she's a busybody. So all of—it's really—I think Jane Austen herself would laugh at how her quotes are taken out of context.

Charlotte: Yeah, she'd really relish it. Yes.

Breckyn: Yes. Okay, Charlotte, let's dive in. Since you are an expert on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, can you start by giving us an overview of the Dictionary and its origins? How did it start, and what were its goals and its purpose?

Charlotte: Actually, now, you know, in itself it's a historical dictionary. It's a dictionary that was published a long time ago. But one of the things that the editors set out to do when they made it was to produce the first historical dictionary of English—truly historical, in a way that nobody else had ever done before. What they wanted to do was to give the history of as many, well, ideally all English words—obviously, that was impossible, all words in English—but not just their current sense—current being the end of the 19th century—but a full history, what they called a biography, of every word from its first recorded use in written down sources right through to the present day. So that made the Dictionary totally—well, it was unique, it was revolutionary for a dictionary in English. Actually, the same sort of thing was being started up in various other countries in Europe. They were following in the footsteps, for example, of the Grimm brothers in Germany. But it was a very, very bold and ambitious target— ambition—for them to have. So, they wanted to give a complete history of every word in the English language, and the way they set out to do this, which is the only way that they could do, was also another incredibly ambitious sort of target that they set their hearts on.

They wanted to get—they wanted it to be based on proper evidence, and this was very much the rage in the 19th century. People were much—were really coming to understand the importance of empirical evidence, of data, for whatever scientific theory or investigation you were engaged in. So they wanted the evidence for the OED was quotations from examples of real use. These words had really to be—they needed to show that these words had been actually used in the English language. They couldn't actually—well, they did record words from very early on, which had been—which were evidenced in manuscripts, but actually they had for practical reasons to limit themselves to printed sources, although those printed sources were often editions of manuscripts. So they set out—they said that the meaning of a word is revealed by how it's been used in context, and they set out to get real examples. And this is one—I suppose one of the main reasons why the Dictionary took such a long time to make. They started—a bunch of gentlemen scholars, really—men, they were all men—started up this idea in the 1850s, the end of the 1850s, but they didn't really get going until this person called James Murray was appointed as editor in 1879.

And then he worked from 1879 to the end of his life on the Dictionary. He died in 1915. That's a very long time to spend. And the Dictionary came out in 123 different—123? Possibly 128, I'm not entirely certain—installments between 1884 and 1928. So it was a sort of incredible, heroic undertaking, and in many ways it was remarkable that it was even finished at all. It's still regarded as a major landmark in English language lexicography. It became famous very quickly in England and the UK. In the US, actually, a lot of American readers contributed because the way in which they got these quotations together—they couldn't do it themselves, they had to outsource it to the public. So it was a very early example of crowd sourcing, and they got loads and loads and loads of individual helpers to read books of all sorts and to send in these quotations. And the result is that the Dictionary is very long. In the end, 1928, it was published in 10 very, very fat volumes, and page after page is covered with quotations from, well, the giants of literature and English language. So there are loads of quotations from Chaucer, from Shakespeare, from Milton, from Dryden—these key figures in the history of English language.

I mean, in fact, history of English literature because there's possibly a very interesting difference between language and literature. I mean, what is language? Is it what great men have written in the past? Or is it the language that everybody uses? They set out, in fact, to be objective and to—not to leave words out for any particular reason. And they were trying to produce a scientific, objective account of the English language, but it also came to be regarded as a sort of cultural icon. It represented the nation. It wasn't just a history of the language, it was a history of how—one of the newspaper reviews said—how Englishmen had read and thought over the centuries. It's a very cultural object, not just a linguistic one.

Breckyn: But also it's a living object, right, because they keep on updating it and writing new additions because English is alive—because as we use it, it changes, and we add new meanings, and old ones fall away.

Charlotte: Yeah. Exactly. In fact, by the time—I mean, very early on, it wasn't just by 1928, but definitely by 1928—when the last volume was published, it was already out of date. I mean, the words from the volume covering A—"A to Ant" was the first installment, actually—that missed out words beginning A-I-R. And if you think about the history of airplanes—and so that—particularly in that period, there was two—over the course of the first edition, the First World War and an enormous amount of military vocabulary was coming into use, but also there was this explosion of interest in—you know, there were many, many things happening culturally in music and art over that period. The cinema, the invention of cinema. And so it was always—I mean, dictionaries always are striving to keep up, which is possible to do that much more easily now because we use dictionaries which are produced on the internet, and they can trawl internet sources. But when you're using manual labor to get your sources together, and when there's such a long time that has to be devoted to editing and then to going through proof stages—you think about the technology of printing in the late 19th century, there's a big gap between doing the research and actually getting it published.

So, there were two supplements during the course of the 20th century, in 1933 and then over the 1960s to '80s. And now—well, actually over 20 years ago, in the year 2000, Oxford University Press, the Dictionary's publishers, just started—decided to revise the whole thing. And they've gone back to—they've revised every single—well, they're in the process of revising every single entry, not in a way which we might think of as organized. Of course, it's highly organized, but they actually started with the letter M, and they tended to dot about. They've dotted about between—also between revising old entries that were out of date and also putting in vast quantities of new material. So at the moment, the OED is going through this period of enormous change.

Breckyn: Recently, they made the decision to not print it anymore, right, which I understand. I mean, it's gotten so enormous that you would need a whole wall in your house just for the volumes of the OED, but it's also a little sad that they're not going to print it anymore.

Charlotte: It is, of course. Yes. Well, I don't think—I mean, it just wouldn't be commercial.

Breckyn: Who could afford it?

Charlotte: Who could possibly afford to buy it? No. But also you would lose—I think now we're all used to reference works being available on the internet and being pretty frequently updated, if not instantly updated. So I think we'd find it intolerable. One of the things that the recent OED—we're getting a bit off track now—but was very good about was—actually Webster's, many dictionaries were terrific at this—was they got the language of COVID onto their screens very, very quickly with new usages of words like "lockdown" and so on.

Breckyn: But that is—you were talking about it being an important historical and cultural artifact, but don't we lose that if we're constantly updating it? Because I mean—I think you're the kind of person who is looking at the changes. Do they document those changes?

Charlotte: No, it's an absolutely enormous frustration. Because, in fact, the research that I did for that article, which was published 10 years ago, and I was working on it—I worked on it over a period of years, and they did—actually the publishers did something terrible in 2010. They had an electronic version of the early version of OED, the early version—it wasn't quite the first edition but it was the first edition melded together with the two supplements. And that meant that you had an enormous amount of historical cultural information about the later Georgian and early Victorian period because, as you absolutely say in one of your questions later, it does—dictionaries do document our social and historical understanding of the time. They record—you know, yeah, they also record prejudices. And I mean, prejudice against everyday vocabulary, for example, or women's words. The first edition was—really didn't recognize what—what they should have done linguistically, which is that words, for instance "sewing" and "cottons", and, you know—for example, "satin stitch." Satin stitch was something that Jane Austen herself was basically rather distinguished in. That did get into the first edition of the OED, but it pops up a couple of times, or more than that, perhaps, in her own writing.

Charlotte: And there's no—in the the first OED, there is no example from the 18th century or the early 19th century of the use of the word "satin stitch." But, of course, women were engaged in embroidery throughout. And those sorts of words tend to get neglected.

Breckyn: But if we then now replace them, then it will look like there was never that oversight. But it's important that we know that that oversight was there.

Charlotte: Exactly. Exactly.

Breckyn: I could see how that's incredibly frustrating

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. So you can look up—I mean, if you've got a copy of the original OED, which—they are now sort of antiquarian objects, but you can look it up manually but, actually, it's very difficult to do research on it manually. You've got to be looking up many words an hour, and therefore you need electronic access, and that's now very difficult. I mean dictionaries still—you know, they are commercial. I think I'm right in saying not in the US and not in the UK—they're not supported by the state; they're supported by commercial companies, and those companies are focused on people believing that they're up to date and—

Breckyn: Reliable.

Charlotte: Yes, and they don't want to have—I mean, there's no problem with having "satin stitch" or not in the dictionary, but there are problems with—the first edition had all sorts of definitions which you just could not have in a dictionary now. I mean, anything to do with race, ethnicity, they have had to go through and just get rid of. Well, they've never got rid of a word, but what they do, what they had, just for example, there's an awful lot of anti-Semitic 19th-century English literature. I guess American literature—to be honest, I don't know—but 19th-century English literature has a lot of anti-Semitic terms, but they're not identified as such in the OED.

Breckyn: That's fine. That's what we should do. But it's also important to know that there was a time when they weren't. You know—I mean you're like a linguistic archeologist, and you can't just go into an archeological site, and clean everything up, and straighten all the edges. It's like, "No, I need it exactly preserved the way that it..." Yeah. I just presented at a conference in Spain, and it was about Jane Austen and linguistics. And we were talking about looking at her manuscripts and her letters, and it's like, you need to preserve every single comma and every single dash. I mean, all of Emily Dickinson's dashes—you know, we need to keep them there because they tell a story that we're trying to preserve.

Charlotte: Yeah, they do, they do. It doesn't mean that we don't—I mean, obviously, the amazing thing about Jane Austen is that she's constantly—in fact I hadn't quite realized—I mean obviously, one knows about the rewritings of the novels and the films, etc.—but I hadn't realized how much stuff there was online about her. I mean, people are remaking her all the time, which is an amazing tribute to her. Just to go back to the Dictionary, though, to the OED, I think Jane Austen is the only—I think—I believe I'm correct in saying this—Jane Austen is the only source—single individual source—which was given a—you know, she didn't get that much attention in the first OED; she got around about 700 quotations, which is nothing to male novelists far less distinguished now than we would regard Jane Austen. But in the mid-20th-century supplement a whole lot more quotations from Jane Austen got in, and that was almost certainly because there was a particular reader—as I said, the OED relied on external volunteer readers—and there was a woman called Marghanita Laski who was very interested in household literature, and cooking literature, and domestic vocabulary. And she very enthusiastically reread Jane Austen and came up with a whole load of usages with words which they had missed out.

So Jane Austen gets in again in the middle of the 20th century to that version of the Dictionary, but in today's internet version of the OED—particularly over the first 10 or 15 years, up to about 2015—today's lexicographers still were putting in—they put in about a thousand or more new quotations from Jane Austen. So it is really remarkable that she has been thought to be current. I mean, I have to say I don't believe it was just for linguistic interests.

Breckyn: No, it's because she's fun to read. And you would rather read that than read an old technical manual about farming.

Charlotte: Exactly. Of course, that explains why there are these biases in the OED towards great literary names, because those are the authors that people love to read. And so, of course, that's where they found the quotations. That's particularly true in the first edition.

Breckyn: Okay. Well, you kind of already touched on this but I want to mention the article that you wrote in 2015. You published an article called "'That Reliance on the Ordinary': Jane Austen and the Oxford English Dictionary," and in that article you talk about how female authors have historically been quoted at a much lower rate in the OED than male authors. And we mentioned them, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Chaucer. So where does Austen stand, both overall and then just among the female authors? Because you mentioned several female authors that I've never heard of, but they're quoted way more often than Jane Austen is, even though she's such a household name.

Charlotte: Yeah, you could only find out about this—just to give you the sense of it, if you're just leafing through a book, of course, you can't—or 10 books, 10 enormous books—you can't possibly know, you can't possibly count up all the quotations. But in the 1980s the OED as it then was—which was mostly the first edition but with those supplements added—the OED was digitized, and that meant that it was possible to do all sorts of interesting things with it. One of the things that you could do was to search for quotations from individual authors.

Breckyn: Word search. It's such a great invention.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. And I remember how exciting that was when I got a CD-ROM in the late 1980s. You could—there had been a little bit of sample research before which suggested that this was the case, but it was only then that you could see that Shakespeare, for example, was the single most-quoted author by such a long way. So 33,000 quotations from Shakespeare alone. Then the next most quoted author was Walter Scott, which is really interesting because Walter Scott was a very, very popular—he was actually the most-printed author over the course of the 19th century, and he was also a great cultural figure. He was an editor, a poet, —you know, very, very well known, very good personality. And he'd written—he wrote many, many novels, many of which themselves had historical vocabulary in them. So the OED readers seem to have done an incredible job on his novels. And then you go down to the people we've already mentioned, like Milton; Tennyson, who was a Poet Laureate in the 19th century; and Charles Dickens, for example; Carlyle, who was a very well-known historian. These people come in with about 7,000 to 12,000 quotations. So Jane Austen, with around 700 quotations in the first edition, is really, really a long way down the list of novelists, both men and women.

Charlotte: But if you look at how she figures as a female novelist, interestingly, the other women, as you just said, they actually come before her. The most-quoted novelist, the most quoted woman in the first OED was George Eliot.

Breckyn: Which really surprised me because—maybe this is just revealing my own ignorance, but I know Middlemarch is pretty long, but that's really the only one I can name by her.

Charlotte: Right. Well, she must have written actually—I guess about five or six novels, but they were long novels. They were—she was extremely well-regarded because she was an enormously learned person. She translated works of German philosophy, and her works had really terrific moral stature. They were very serious. They were about life and love. They're still extremely readable, and particularly Middlemarch. But they also tell moral stories and are full of moral sentiments. I'm assuming that was why they were thought to be so important or comparatively important—not anything like as important as male—as the novels written by a man. So there was somebody you mentioned: Martineau, Harriet Martineau. She was—well, actually, the second most-quoted woman was the 18th-century novelist, Frances or Fanny Burney, she's often referred to as. And she—the evidence would be from that that over the time that the OED has been compiled, in the late 19th century, early 20th century, she was still much read and admired.

Breckyn: Jane Austen loved her. It was one of Jane Austen's favorites.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then, Harriet Martineau was not a novelist. She was a writer and essayist on social theory, on economics. In fact, she's actually—there's a lot of work done on Harriet Martineau today, and she's very, very unusual as a woman who's able to support herself by her writing. But the other authors, the other female authors with a reasonable number of quotations—well, I say reasonable, when we're coming down to a thousand or so—the best-selling novelist, Celia [sic] Braddon, I think her name is, Braddon is her surname; one poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and then somebody called Mary Mitford, who I don't think people have heard of at all now but she's a popular but virtually unknown writer on village life. All those people had more quotations than Jane Austen. So that really is quite remarkable if you think about the fact that today she's a global phenomenon. And of all those writers that I've just cited, I would guess—I mean, her books must be still selling at a phenomenal rate—the original ones, not just the rewrites. But she's not alone. I mean, she's done quite well to get in at all. So somebody like Christina Rossetti, who we now regard as an important 19th century poet, she has no or she has actually just 100 quotations.

Emily Brontë has 68 quotations. So you can see that there is an absolutely gigantic disparity between the regard that was paid—the notice that was paid to women writers and to male writers. And, of course, by the 18th and 19th centuries, women were actually publishing in significant numbers, particularly in the 19th century. In the earlier part of English language history—from Old English right up to the beginning of the 18th century—it was much, much less usual for women to get into print. And although the OED did quote from some journals and diaries, they don't—I mean, women weren't in a position to publish, right? Often because they were so much less well-educated than men, and you'd have to be from a very high-born background to have access to a library and to be literate in the same way as men of your day. So, in many ways it's not—I mean, it's not quite as shocking as you—as it immediately appears: the disparity between quotations from women and quotations from men. But nevertheless, it's still very, very surprising that you don't have more quotations from 19th century female sources.

Breckyn: Well, and then the next layer of this is, which you point out in that article, is that, when Austen does appear in the OED, it's almost always for household and everyday vocabulary rather than conceptual and moral. And that begs the question, is it because she actually uses more domestic feminine language, or is it because that's what the Victorian Dictionary writers were looking for in her work? Or is it a little bit of both?

Charlotte: Yeah. So that's the nub of the question. That was what I was trying to think about when I started interrogating the versions of the Dictionary digitally and seeing that. She is quoted quite a lot for—I mean, it's not so much that she isn't quoted for more ordinary types of usage. So, let me get—what I mean to say is that, if you look at moral and vocabulary relating to moral standards—although we think of her novels as having a very, very strong moral direction, notwithstanding that they're also extremely entertaining—you don't find her if you look up typical words relating to morality, say, "conscience,"— words, or quite writerly words, such as the sort of pyrotechnic language that Dickens uses, for example. You don't find Jane Austen there, but you do find this really large quantity of words which are denoting household objects, words for cloth, for sewing—what we've already talked about. So, yeah. So is it because they're quoted from Jane Austen because that's where the male editors, and to some extent readers, were looking? That's what they thought of. They thought that Jane Austen was somebody who just wrote about household things. Or, so what's going on there? And I think there is something really interesting which is picked up very early on as a feature of Jane Austen's novels.

She was writing at the beginning of, or the early versions at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. And she—as you can see from Northanger Abbey—she was well aware that there was a whole body of literature out there, which had been and still was extremely best-selling and very popular, which was to do with really melodramatic stuff. Gothic fiction's what we—is the term we use now. And so there were—well, actually, there's a really interesting quotation from Walter Scott, for example, who wrote in his diaries in 1826 that he had "read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice." And he goes on to say, "That young lady" (it's a bit patronising) "had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." Then he goes on to say, "The big bow wow strain I can do myself like any now going," (I mean, he's writing in a grandiose or rather pompous way.) "but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."

So that's something that Walter Scott was noticing—that she is dealing with everyday matters and that she's not a grand, artificial, or sort of large-scale writer. And here's an interesting comment from somebody called Annabella Milbanke, who became the wife of Byron. Sorry to define her in terms of the man she married.

Breckyn: But that's the bigger name. Everyone knows Byron.

Charlotte: Yeah. But she wrote a letter describing Pride and Prejudice again to her mother: "I think a very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of Novel writers, no drownings, nor conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs & parrots, nor chambermaids & milliners, nor rencontres and disguises. I really think it is the most probable fiction I have ever read." So, you can see that people—even her contemporaries reading her—were actually thinking about her as somebody who engaged with and who dealt with the ordinary stuff of life—ordinary life as in social meetings, questions of parties, the sentiments, the desire to get married, the emotional landscape of ordinary life.

Breckyn: The internal.

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. But also there's a lot to do—also in her letters, actually—to do with what happens in the kitchen. Again and again, we get references to what women—women who weren't working class women were almost always sewing. They would have work on the go. The word "work" often referred to as sewing. When they were sitting in the evening and reading to each other or talking to each other, they might be continuously stitching whatever it might be: clothes, or curtains, or embroidering cushions, whatever it might be.

Breckyn: Or work for the poor.

Charlotte: Work for the poor. Exactly. Yes.

Breckyn: Sewing for them.

Charlotte: Yes. One of the words which is, I think, still only recorded from Jane Austen—from Mansfield Park, actually, I think—in the OED that's today, is the word "poor basket". It's when Mrs. Norris says "poor Fanny is feeling a bit low because of being neglected by Edmund or being overwhelmed by Mary Crawford, and Mrs. Norris says, "Well, come on, get on with your work." And she says, "There's plenty of calico in the poor basket." So it's a way of, it's a way of characterizing—really bringing to our eyes—the way that ordinary women—middle class, privileged women, of course— lived.

Breckyn: Sure. Well, and I don't think it's an insult at all to say that she deals in the ordinary and the everyday. That's exactly how she described her own work. Two quotes that come up again and again from her letters are that the stuff of her fiction is "three or four families in a country village." I mean, she's very zoomed in, and that is the stage on which she sets all of her dramas: three or four families. And that's advice that she's giving to her niece, Anna, I believe, because she had nieces and nephews who also had aspirations of being writers. And I think she was kind of telling her, "Just focus on what you know." Right? That's advice that we still give to writers: write what you know. And then the other quote that comes up a lot is about her two inches of ivory with her little brush. Like she's just painting very small, very delicate, but extremely accurate portraits on this little tiny bit of ivory. And so, maybe we can think that, oh, Victorian men, they're just looking at her for domestic feminine language. But I also think that she should be proud of that, and that's what we love about her, and so that doesn't have to be sort of a put-down. It's what she did excellently. And it is so accurate and lifelike that even 200, 250 years later, we can see ourselves in it. Her portraits of humanity and of real people are so lifelike.

Charlotte: Yeah, and you're right. It's what—you just said it's what we love about it. But the reason I have the title for my article that I have, which is "That reliance on the ordinary," that comes from an account of her by somebody nobody has heard of now. But he was a really well-known literary critic in his day called George Saintsbury, who edited editions of Austen's work, and then published a history of English literature and a book on the English novel in the early years of the 20th century. And he said that the novel Emma represented "the absolute triumph of that reliance on the . . . ordinary," but at the same time, every event, every circumstance, every detail is put sub specie aeternitatis. It's given a sort of eternal perspective, a perspective of eternity, by the "sorcery of art," he said. And he went on to say, "This Hampshire parson's daughter"—that's a bit patronizing again—"had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into a novel-gold by it."

Breckyn: I have never heard that quote. That's awesome. The philosopher's stone. I mean, it also makes me think of Harry Potter, of course, but that's great.

Charlotte: Yeah, it's interesting. It's linked to the pots and pans—this very vocabulary, which the OED readers picked out and put into the Dictionary is seen as—I mean, it's even seen in her day, or in that case about 60, 70 years later—as somehow absolutely intrinsic to her genius. And I just must say, I only noticed it recently when I was looking again at George Saintsbury's edition of Pride and Prejudice. And I hadn't clocked that right at the end of his preface he says—and this just gives you such a taste of how attitudes between men and women are; well, let's hope they change. But, anyway, he says that any Englishman of any taste, if they came across—and he gives a list of some female characters—would be bound to fall in love with these characters. He puts Elizabeth Bennet as the first one. Then he says that, nevertheless, of all these characters, five in all, "The one that I would like to live with and—to marry and to live with, that would be—no one, again, with any taste, with any judgement" (meaning no English gentleman) "would ever settle for anybody other than Elizabeth Bennet." So they do sort of identify with the world of the novel. And, um. . . 

Breckyn: She's a living, breathing character. Yeah. . .

Charlotte: I mean, I think—you know, you look at the photograph of George Saintsbury on his Wikipedia page and you say, "Well, you should be so lucky."

Breckyn: You're no Mr. Darcy, George Saintsbury.

Charlotte: No, but it is interesting how intimately engaged both men and women have felt by these novels of Jane Austen. It is extraordinary. It's the intimacy of the identification with the world of the novel. It's really very interesting.

Breckyn: So, it's a mark of distinction for an author to be quoted as the first instance of a new word in the OED. You mentioned all these numbers— thousands, and for Jane Austen, it's about 700. Those are not all first instances, of course, but Austen has several first instances to her name, but that's always changing, right? Sometimes they'll go back and find an older source. Can you give us a few examples of where Jane Austen is quoted first or where maybe she used to be? I know "baseball" is one that shows up a lot from Northanger Abbey.

Charlotte: That's right. Well, baseball has now been—no, she's no longer the first person to be quoted—

Breckyn: Darn. She lost that one.

Charlotte: Yeah, but she's still down there as the first one for "Bath buns." If you go to Bath and walk around, there's a whole load of Austen memorabilia in Bath.

Breckyn: I have been to Bath. I have had a Bath bun in Bath. It was delightful.

Charlotte: Right. Well, so she—it's a very typical sort of use—reference to them. She writes to Cassandra in 1801 to make a joke about "disordering my stomach with Bath bunns [sic]." She ate too many of them.

Breckyn: Too many?

Charlotte: Yeah, exactly. And so they—this is a round yeast bun containing currants, topped with icing or sugar. And then other ones which are still down there in the OED as first uses are—well, this is two other typical uses—this is "bobbinet", which is a sort of machine-made veil. She says in one of her letters, "Mrs. Clement walks about in a new black velvet pelisse . . . and a white bobbinet veil." "Netting-cotton", which is a type of material that she—this comes up in Northanger Abbey. Catherine is waiting for a letter from Isabella, and she's very concerned that she hasn't heard from her, because, among other things, she wants to be, quote, "assured of Isabella's having matched some fine netting-cotton." So she wants to know that Isabella has found a type of material that Catherine needs for her sewing. So, "poor basket" is another one. That's Mansfield Park. An example of cooking in Emma—at some stage, Mr. Knightley comes to—I'm not sure where, I think he's calling on the Bates's, and Miss Bates is sort of getting carried away with saying 16 different things at once. And she's very anxious to thank the Woodhouses because they've given her a leg of pork. And she just mentions, "my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan."

Breckyn: Salting-pan? I remember that.

Charlotte: Right. So "salting-pan"—because the pig had just been killed, and so you needed to preserve it, you needed a salting-pan. So, there's lots of words of that sort.

Breckyn: But everything you just mentioned, yeah, it's about material or it's about cooking. It is those domestic household words.

Charlotte: Yeah, and another—I can't believe that the OED won't eventually manage to find earlier examples, but she's—two really interesting ones from Sense and Sensibility are referring to Marianne and her relationship with Willoughby. Obviously, Marianne thinks that she's engaged to Willoughby, and then she realizes that she's no such thing. And when Elinor is trying to find out from Marianne what exactly happened between her and Willoughby, Marianne [Elinor-Editor] uses the word "engagement". And Marianne responds, "Engagement! There has been no engagement." Because it was all done through suggestion. There is that word "engagement" with that quotation in the OED as the first example of engagement.

Breckyn: Really?

Charlotte: Yes. And then "disengagement", which is what happens, of course, in effect, because she's then jilted by Willoughby, and Elinor is trying to work out how best to comfort Marianne; she's so incredibly upset about it. And "She dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement . . . as an escape," —in fact, an escape from an evil, because, of course, he was such a bounder, an untrustworthy person. So both "engagement" and "disengagement" are in there. So that's a very interesting example of vocabulary, which is incredibly important to do with marriage and to do with promises. It's, again, to do with domesticity, to do with sentiment. And obviously, really, Austen's novels are about engagement and how the way to marriage is found.

Breckyn: And yeah, just human relationships. That is fascinating. I did not know that those two words—both within a paragraph of each other, that's really interesting—that those were the first instances. Okay, well, I'm reaching the 45 minute mark, but I'll just end on this last question about the cohabitating, because I thought that was so interesting. So, you gave a fascinating example of a new sense of a word being added to a later edition of the OED—the sense of cohabitating for the phrase "live with". In Pride and Prejudice, it says, talking about Mrs Bennet, "She was more alive to the disgrace which her want of new clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials, than to any sense of shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they took place." That sense of the phrase wasn't included in the first edition of the Dictionary, but by the mid-20th century attitudes about sex and the body were changing, right? So, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Charlotte: Well, yes, that is a very interesting example, isn't it? So, obviously, Austen was writing about the impropriety of living with somebody before marriage.

Breckyn: That's such a modern phrase. We still say that, "live with." Cohabitating sounds like something Jane Austen would say, but she didn't say that. She said they were "living together."

Charlotte: Yes. But there are a lot of other scandals and so on that happen in Austen's novels. The fact that you didn't necessarily have terms in polite usage to designate scandalous behavior didn't mean to say that—you could use—I mean, "living with" is an innocent phrase, isn't it? You don't have anything which is explicitly scandalous, but I haven't gone back and looked at it. But, for example, in Mansfield Park, when it's found out, actually from a newspaper article, that Maria and Henry Crawford have had, have—

Breckyn: Run away together.

Charlotte: Exactly. I mean, there are ways—that sort of disgraceful, scandalous, sensational thing is always there as a hinterland. Not just to Austen's novels, but to many novels to do with love and marriage, because, of course, the whole notion of courting was that you had to be very careful. Women had to be very careful to protect their reputation. So, that's just a particularly interesting—I mean, in a way, our use of the words "living with" now to mean live together in a quasi-marital relationship which isn't actually one—that is a euphemism. I mean, that's really rather a 19th-century way of putting it, isn't it?

But the more significant point where the Dictionary is concerned is that, while the OED did, in fact, include words relating to sex and the body, they were pretty selective. They did not put in any four-letter words. I mean, obviously, Jane Austen would never have written them. But it's just something which, despite their wish to be completely comprehensive and inclusive, there were still, nevertheless, some barriers. And in fact, words which denote—certain words which denote sexual matters would have been subject to prosecution because it could have come under the Obscene Publications Act. So there were actual legal restrictions on what you could and couldn't publish, and, even if you wouldn't have been sued, you were worried about it. But also you didn't want to shock your readership. So I think there was a lot of self-censorship that went on. But it's a very—I mean, just to take that example of four-letter words, they did, of course, get into the Dictionary in the 1970s. And, in fact, the then-editor of the OED wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, which is a very upmarket literary publication, where he actually boasted about how all these rude words had now got in. So, you can see there's a complete flipping of attitude from one to another.

Breckyn: A lot had changed in the culture in the '60s.

Charlotte: Yes, exactly. But it also goes back to—it's another way of looking at how not only the words that get in but how they're defined, whether they're defined by euphemism or whether they're actually explicitly defined or not. That also gives you a sense of how dictionaries reflect the culture of their time. So, for example, the language of homosexuality, of anything to do with being gay, some of it did get in the OED but defined in an incredibly careful way, and often in a way which is so euphemistic you'd had to know what was being referred to before you could actually understand the definition. And that has all changed now. But that, again—I think we were talking earlier about the importance of the original OED as a historical cultural document—that shows you how attitudes towards all sorts of things have changed over the years. Now, the OED is very frank about sexual vocabulary. It's incredibly careful to label anything that could be seen as a racist slur, which, of course, (inaudible) an offensive racist term. It will put those words in because it won't censor them. Unfortunately, they're part of common usage.

Breckyn: Part of the language.

Charlotte: Exactly, they're part of the language, but it will explain that they are highly offensive. They are much, much less sensitive to sexist terms, interestingly. Which I think—yes, I know, I think it's that sexism is always with us. Unless it was actual hate speech.

Breckyn: Sure.

Charlotte: Dictionaries are not just linguistic.

Breckyn: There are always humans behind this sort of faceless endeavor, so you can never fully get away from the prejudices and the preferences. And we just keep updating it. That's the best we can do.

Charlotte: Yeah, yeah.

Breckyn: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Charlotte.

Charlotte: It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. And also, it's been a pleasure to go back and look at this stuff. When I was looking up individual words, I was always getting caught into or tempted into actually reading the text on either side because it's obviously such a delight to plunge back into those stories.

Breckyn: You want to find that context. That's so fun. Thank you so much.

Charlotte: Lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

Breckyn: Dear listeners, I just wanted to end today's episode by saying thank you. Austen Chat now has over 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We are thrilled and so grateful for everyone who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please consider giving the show five stars on Apple Podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it is for new Janeites to find us. Join us again next month for another episode. In the meantime, I remain yours affectionately, Breckyn Wood.

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