Jane Austen’s Paper Path is a podcast from The Dialog celebrating 250 years because the writer’s beginning. In every episode, we’ll be investigating a distinct facet of Austen’s character via interrogating one in all her novels with main researchers. Alongside the best way, we’ll seek advice from places essential to Austen to discover a selected facet of her lifestyles and the days she lived in. In episode 4, we take a look at who have been Austen’s pals, and ask what we will be able to know about friendship within the pages of her fourth novel, Emma.
When she created the “handsome, clever and rich” Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen wrote that she suspected this was once a personality “no one but myself will much like”. It’s tough to disagree along with her evaluation, and but Emma endures as a fallacious heroine with whom readers wish to keep the direction, shortcomings and all.
Lovely, witty, conceited and spoilt, Emma has spent her 21 years within the lap of luxurious with little to hassle her. This is, till she makes a pal and protegee of Harriet Smith, a tender lady of candy disposition and lesser social status. There starts a extremely entertaining and continuously twisty story of affection, friendship, secrets and techniques, crossed wires, social pretend pas and pleasurable comeuppances. All of it performs out in opposition to the social panorama of Highbury, the place wealth, elegance and hierarchy are cruel yardsticks of other folks’s native status.
Nowhere is that this extra acutely seen than at a picnic accumulating at Field Hill in Surrey, the place Emma is at her maximum inconsiderate. All through a sport of wit, she mocks the candy however uninteresting Omit Bates, a spinster dwelling in genteel poverty who has lengthy regarded as Emma a pal. Looking at Emma humiliate this risk free creature in entrance in their social circle, George Knightley, the unconventional’s ethical compass, reacts with disgust and unhappiness. This incident sparks mirrored image and self-awarness in Emma, and he or she resolves to do higher.
Within the fourth episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Path, The Dialog’s Jane Wright visits Field Hill with Emma Claire Sweeney, senior lecturer in inventive writing on the Open College and skilled in Austen’s friendships. We discover who Austen’s pals have been, the importance of those relationships in her lifestyles, and the way she depicted feminine friendship in her novels.
The view from the highest. Jane Wright and Emma Sweeney visited Field Hill in Surrey.
Jane Wright, CC BY
In her e-book The Secret Sisterhood (2017), Sweeney wrote about Austen’s friendship with Anne Sharp, a governess who labored for her brother Edward. Crucially, Sharp was once additionally a author, which reinforced the bond between the 2 girls. Nevertheless it was once a friendship that Austen’s circle of relatives performed down and hid after her demise.
“In Anne Sharp,” explains Sweeney all the way through our interview, “Jane had a class-defying friendship that wasn’t really known about until the 1920s. But it was hugely important to Jane to have a friend she could talk to about writing, for although she was surrounded by her sister Cassandra, her friend Martha Lloyd and her mother who loved to discuss books, they were not writers. And while Anne Sharp was a very different kind of writer, she was a writer Jane valued.”
Afterward, Anna Walker sits down with two extra eminent Austen mavens to speak about friendship in Emma – emeritus professor Janet Todd of Cambridge College, and Bharat Tandon, lecturer in literature on the College of East Anglia.
As Tandon explains, Austen’s courting along with her sister Cassandra was once the nearest of her friendships. Cassandra and their shared pal (and eventual sister-in-law) Mary Lloyd shaped Austen’s “intellectual and comic focus group,” providing comments on her writing.
However no longer everybody in Austen’s day noticed feminine friendship as a favorable power. “The idea of an intellectual and emotional connection between women worried men,” Todd explains. “It seemed to be working against the important tie of heterosexual marriage, and so it was something that needed to be controlled.”
Pay attention to episode 4 of Jane Austen’s Paper Path anyplace you get your podcasts. And when you’re yearning extra Austen, take a look at our Jane Austen 250 web page for extra skilled articles celebrating the anniversary.
Disclosure remark
Emma Claire Sweeney, Bharat Tandon and Janet Todd don’t paintings for, seek the advice of, personal stocks in or obtain investment from any corporate or organisation that may take pleasure in this text, and feature disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.
Jane Austen’s Paper Path is hosted via Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior manufacturer and sound clothier is Eloise Stevens and the manager manufacturer is Gemma Ware. Paintings via Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.
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