Jane Austen’s Paper Path is a podcast from The Dialog celebrating 250 years since Jane Austen’s delivery. In each and every episode, we’ll be investigating a distinct side of Austen’s persona by way of interrogating one in all her novels with main Austen researchers. Alongside the way in which we’ll seek advice from places vital to Austen to discover a selected side of her existence and the days she lived in. In episode 2, we have a look at Jane the romantic, during the pages of Pleasure and Prejudice.
Each heroine in a Jane Austen novel finally ends up married. It’s the bow at the finish of each and every tale that ties up all of the unfastened threads – reputedly without equal satisfied finishing. Then again, whilst marriage is an conclusion she selected for her characters, it isn’t one she selected for herself.
Austen did have suitors – maximum famously the speeding Irishman Thomas Lefroy, with whom she had a temporary however intense flirtation. There have been even proposals, significantly one in 1802 from Harris Bigg-Wither, the rich brother of a pal, which she authorized handiest to promptly smash off the very subsequent morning.
It sort of feels most probably that Austen selected singledom, even if she used to be obviously preoccupied with romance and marriage. Many readers imagine her one in all historical past’s biggest writers of romance.
That her novels centre on love and marriage has now and again led critics to disregard them as mild or frivolous. However underneath each and every courtship and proposal lies a pointy observation on category, cash, morality and the restricted alternatives to be had to ladies in Georgian England.
Austen’s heroines are sensible, succesful ladies – regularly extra so than the boys of their lives, lots of whom have made alternatives that experience left their households in monetary straits. However those middle-class ladies are not able to paintings and so will have to pursue your best option truly to be had to them, marriage.
Nowhere is that this pressure clearer than in Austen’s 2d novel, Pleasure and Prejudice. Revealed in 1813, it follows Elizabeth Bennet – shiny, outspoken, and sceptical of society’s conventions. Unluckily for her, she has a mom who’s obsessive about securing appropriate marriages for her and her 4 sisters – an obsession this is despatched into overdrive when the eligible Mr Bingley strikes into the neighbourhood, bringing his boastful however similarly eligible pal Mr Darcy with him.
In the second one episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Path, as we discover romance on the earth of Jane Austen, Naomi Joseph visits a Regency ball on the Grand Meeting Rooms in York with Meg Kobza. Knowledgeable within the Georgian social calendar, at Newcastle College, Kobza has produced equivalent recreations on the Bathtub Meeting Rooms – the place Austen attended balls and used to be courted by way of a number of males.
As dancers in all approach of Regency get dressed strive a minuet within the comfortable candlelight of the primary ballroom, Kobza is helping us perceive the difficult dating Austen had with romance.
An attendee of the regency ball within the ancient Grand Meeting Rooms in York.
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Over the process Pleasure and Prejudice, Lizzie, and the opposite ladies in her existence, will have to navigate their emotions at the complete establishment of marriage. There are marriages of comfort, probably socially ruinous unions, hasty weddings, quiet passions and, in fact, love fits – and Austen turns out to have evaluations on all of them.
“Jane herself was dependent on her father and then later her brothers for financial security. And we see in many of her novels financial security is driving a lot of her heroines to opt for or against certain matches,” says Kobza. “If you didn’t get married at all, you became a spinster, you’re a burden to your family.”
In a while within the episode, Anna Walker takes a deeper dive into Austen’s view of romance in Pleasure and Prejudice with two extra mavens. Octavia Cox is a lecturer in 18th and nineteenth century literature on the College of Oxford, and founding father of the preferred YouTube channel All Issues Vintage Literature. Becoming a member of her around the desk is Adam J. Smith, an affiliate professor in English literature at York, St. John College who researches satire and the gothic, romantic and mawkish genres.
Meg Kobza speaking to us simply out of doors of the primary ballroom.
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As Cox explains, Pleasure and Prejudice is “a joyful love story in that the two central characters, Darcy and Lizzie talk about and value happiness and how to achieve happiness. But there’s a lot more going on too.” Smith concurs: “The more I read Austen, the more I feel that all of the books are really about how to read and understand and interpret the world.”
Concentrate to episode 2 of Jane Austen’s Paper Path anyplace you get your podcasts. In case you’re yearning extra Austen, take a look at our Jane Austen 250 web page for extra skilled articles celebrating the anniversary.
Disclosure remark:
Meg Kobza recieved investment from the Leverhulme Accept as true with and the British Academy and the Society of Antiquaries funded the Bathtub fancy get dressed pop up ball and exhibition.
Adam J Smith sits at the Senate of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Research, which is a registered charity.
Octavia Cox does no longer paintings for, seek the advice of, personal stocks in or obtain investment from any corporate or organisation that will have the benefit of this text, and feature disclosed no related affiliations past their instructional appointment.
Jane Austen’s Paper Path is hosted by way of Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior manufacturer and sound clothier is Eloise Stevens and the chief manufacturer is Gemma Ware. Paintings by way of Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.
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