Subconscious awareness and narrative irony

Are you a professional writer struggling with financial difficulties? The Royal Literary Fund is here to support you. At the RLF, we believe that every writer deserves the chance to thrive, no matter what life throws your way. We offer a variety of hardship grants tailored to help profession al writers in need, whether it's short-term relief or ongoing support. Perhaps you're dealing with an unexpected expense, a drop in income, or facing challenges that make writing difficult, such as illness, disability, or now relying on your pension. If you're eligible, our grants team will walk you through our discrete and confidential application process, ensuring you receive the support you need. Visit rlf.org.uk to check your eligibility and inquire today . The Royal Literary Fund. We believe writers matter because writing matters in their close reading series on satire, Claire Bucknell and Colin Barrow traced the development of satire over more than four hundred years from Erasmus's praise of folly to the novels of Muriel Spark. Through writers, including John Dunn, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Evelyn War, they ask what satire is, what it does, and why it's been such an enduring literary form. This week we're bringing you their episode on Jane Austen in which they look at Emma as the high point of Austen's satire of character. You can listen to the full series now and to all our other close readings series, looking at literature from ancient Greece to the present day on the Close Readings podcast, and you can get twenty-five percent off a twelve-mhont subscription by using the code Emma twenty-five at checkout when you follow the link in the description. Welcome to the eighth episode of the London Review of Books close reading series on SATA with me, Colin Burrow. And with me, Claire Bucknell. Today, Colin, we had the delightful task of talking about Jane Austen's novel Emma. Yep. But before we start, a little recital . Two gentlemen, most elegantly attired, but weltering in their blood, was what first struck our eyes. We approached. They were Edward and Augustus. Yes, dearest Marianne, they were our husbands. Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground. I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation, Sophia fainting every moment, and I running mad as often. And that affecting passage comes from the pages of one of Jane Austen's earliest surviving writings, a little novella called Love and Friendship. And it's Friendship with E before I because at the age of fourteen or so, and I think this is a tremendo usly reassuring fact. Jane Austen found spelling a bit of a challenge. Yeah, you really feel like this hope for us all. Yep. Um, love and friendship is a real hoot. Um, and we strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read and wants a more Austin in their life. It's full of fainting on the sofa, endless improbable coincidences, theft, imprisonment, long-lost children, that fantastic description of a coach crash that you just heard, more tragic and untimely deaths than you can shake a stick at. Um and Austin really was more or less an infant when she wrote that and you can tell that she has her tongue already so far in her cheek it's coming out of her ear. Yeah, and it's it is basically I suppose a satire on later 18th century romantic fiction. And I suppose one reason why it's such a great place to start today is because it suggests that Austin's career began pretty much exactly where we ended our last episode. On Lawrence Stern's Tristram Shandy, that is, with with the novel as simultaneously a vehicle for intense sentiment. So all that passionate fainting and running mad. Exactly. And at the same time a form that's dominated by an uncontrollable urge to satirize its own conventions. Yeah. So as you as you heard, the big recurrent joke of love and friendship is that the passions sorry the passions with a capital P are so overwhelming that you know every time they strike the sensibilities of the two heroines, Laura and Sophia, they tend either to fall in love or pass out or you know, both. So Laura marries a man called Edward, whom she comes to adore in the course of a 30-second conversation. As one does. As you do, and then an angry relation um threatens to repossess the house, and Edward has to go to London. In vain did we count the tedious moments of his absence, in vain did we weep, in vain even did we sigh, no Edward returned. This was too cruel, too unexpected a blow to our gentle sensibility. We could not support it. We could only faint . So Sophia, and this is I think the first of many spoilers, uh spoiler alerts in uh in this episode, Sophia dies as a result of too much fainting. You know, it's very cold on the ground. Uh, uh if you continually lie on it, and um she warns Laura on her deathbed to avoid the same fate. My beloved Laura, said she to me a few hours before she died, take warning from my unhappy end, and avoid the imprudent conduct which had occasioned it. Beware of fainting fits. Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreeable, yet believe me, they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your constitution. My fate will teach you this one fatal swoon has cost me my life. Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint . Lovely. And you you note the way their syntax there sort of collapses into a series of dashes because they're too weak and faint and passionate for full sentences. Passions and fainting and instant love affairs and rapid onset deaths is all the excellent stuff. So that's how Jane Austen began. And that is really handy for us because in this episode we're going to talk mainly about Emma, which is to state the blindingly obvious, uh a later and infinitely more sophisticated novel. But we're going to present it as belonging to a largest tradition of satire. We probably ought to start though by saying a little bit about the general shape of Jane Austen's career and sort of where Emma sits in that career. A bit of distant reading before we get down to close reading, you reckon Claire? Um so in that those juvenile writings, um Austin are doing her absolute level best not to be serious about anything in a sort of um you know, comic satirical vein to Stern and Tristram Shandy really, you know, she's all about fending off the task of writing about feeling, as uh Barbara Everett says, you know, by any means possible, by jokes, parodies of style, emotional undercutting, etc. And she might have gone on like this, but she didn't. Her six published novels instead take on that task of writing about feeling. You know, they they are novels of courtship and domestic life in a way that the juvenile fiction just can't uh bring itself to be. Yeah. And I suppose the traditional view is that these six novels fall into two groups of three. And there's an early period of more or less sportif and satirical ones. So that would include Northanger Abbey, which she finished writing around eighteen oh three, in which uh Catherine Mor land's expectations about life are formed by gothic fiction. Just never wise, yeah. Um sense and sensibility, which came out much later in 1811, which sort of puts pressure on the idea of the passionate sensitive heroine through Marianne Dashwood and then Pride and Prejudice, eighteen thirteen, which you know, I think we would say is already breaking out of that supposed early phase, but you know, which with the elopement of Lydia Bennett, you do have that same eruption of passionate sensibility.. Yeah And so I mean, like most literary s simplifications, that division into two groups of three sort of helps. It describes the general direction of Austin's career, but it it breaks down the moment you start thinking about it So, you know, the mature three, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, which was published posthumously in eighteen seventeen, I think do have a more overt ethical dimension than the earlier no andess l over uh they're also less overtly sportive and satirical perhaps than the earlier ones. But even they in pretty much every sentence you can get that ripple of mockery and and also self mockery actually that is supposedly a feature of the early writing. So love and friendship never really goes away, does it? Thank goodness. Yeah, and I mean actually Northanger Abbey, one of the supposed early ones, although it does have those sections that poke fun at Gothic novels, was published posthumously, along with persuasion, and clearly Austin had revised it. And yes, it's a satire on Gothic fiction, but it also sort of backhandedly endorses Gothic and the paranoid view of the world that Gothic teaches you to have. So Catherine Moreland thinks that her host at Northanger Abbey is a wife murderer from a scary novel, but actually it sort of turns out that he is the next best thing in real life, you know, a quite nasty, av aricious dad who only wants his son to marry money. And so he angrily through So North Anger Abbey. So that novel based vision of the world that she has turns out not to be, you know, entirely false. And so that sort of melts down that easy division between an early three and a late three, uh, because even the that sportive early book is already sinking its teeth into the union between man, woman, and avarice, which was your average eighteenth century uppercl upper middle class marriage. So in a bit we will talk in detail about Emma and and go under the bonnet of Jane Austen 's prose. Yeah, I mean under the bonnet is a is a good one, isn't it? And if you read more or less any sentence of Jane Austen, you can hear, I think , a sort of austere regency bonneted self discipline and restraint, but always this is sort of flashing out from underneath the bonnet a little winks and stabs, which are all the more visible for that decorous frame of the bonnet. Of the bonnet. Yes. So I th I think that image of these sort of sharp critical glances flashing out from between at the Regency bonnet is a good one to have in mind as we move forward. But before we go under it, the bonnet , let's stay above it for a moment and try and get a wider fix on where Austin comes from. Okay . Um so if we throw out the notion that Emma is the first novel in the serious later phase of Austin's career, and we got something to put in its place. I mean, can we point to a set of general concepts behind the novels that might help people make sense of them and perhaps give us some kind of anchor for well, they're endless ironical sub subtleties. I think I think we can do that, yeah. Um well let's start with the belief held by people who don't really like Austin and don't get her that she's a sort of prim Regency spinster who's main and only I mean we should say up front that she was very good at the the minute tremors stuff. So take this paragraph from Emma on the death of a wealthy old woman called Mrs. Churchill who nobody likes, but you can't say that out loud. Everybody had a degree of gravity and sorrow, tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends, and in reasonable time curiosity to know where she would be buried. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she Death indicates that she wasn't just annoying people by pretending to be ill. And I suppose it's a bit like Spike Milligan's tombstone, isn't it? I mean I told you I was ill, says Spike's tombstone. Uh I mean I mean Austin Austin could play up to that view of her work as just a matter of precise social miniaturism, though, couldn't she? I mean, she does that in the passage that everyone quotes, uh, from a letter to a nephew, in which she contrasts her nephew's strong manly sketches to her own little bit two inches wide of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour. Yeah. But her work also continu ously shows an awareness of larger things going on in the background. You know, the way that even if your subjects are small, they're always shaded by the language and concerns of the wider world. Yeah, and and she's sort of setting herself up, isn't she, in that letter to to her nephew. And and and when we talked about Tristam Shandy, we had a lot to say about the way in which miniaturism could actually expand outwards into the world. And she is the heir to that aspect of tr Tristram Shandy, I think, as well as I think that's right. I think the reach of her miniaturism is surprisingly wide. So in Emma there d there's a discussion of the practicalities of hosting a ball, you know, minute, that suddenly goes um, you know, in this unexpected direction Mrs. Weston proposed having no regular supper, merely sandwiches, etc., set out in the little room, but that was scouted as a wretched suggestion. A private dance without sitting down to supper without Sandwiches, etc. You can just imagine how dry they are, can't you? But an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women. Well, you know, a really obvious thing to say about Jane Austen is that she was born in seventeen seventy five, and that makes her a rough contemporary of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man was published in seventeen ninety one when she was sixteen And she wrote Love and Friendship in the same year as the French Revolution was going on in the background. So she's right in the middle of all those revolutionary ideas and revolutionary thinkers. And on another front, she was clearly listening to arguments about the question of plantation slavery, the slave trade by this point had been abolished, but plantation slavery, not. As you can see from its background presence in the plot of Mansfield Park. So Thomas Bertram has a plantation in Antigua and he's always away dealing with complicated troubles in the West Indies. And as the daughter of a not very wealthy clergyman who was dependent on others, Austin was in a position to look at the sort of rapidly expanding wealth of Regency England from a quite sceptical place. So she grew up surrounded by all these revolutions in thinking. So there's feminist philosophy, political revolution, dramatic economic change, poetic revolutions in the lyrical ballads, all you know, way more exciting than our own benighted age. Yeah. Um and so you can think of her as knowing about all these things, and some of them intimately, her brother Francis fought in the Napoleonic Wars and became an admiral, and then letting them seep into her fiction at the edges. But she was also someone with a basically conservative temperament. You know, she accepted the fact that the circumstances of the world were the way they were, however absurd or nonsensical she may have found many of the sort of conventions of the day. You know, she wasn't like Wollstonecraft or Godwin or Shelley imagining the sort of wholesale social alternatives. You wouldn't see her on the barricades probably. You wouldn't see her on the barricades. There's a very good book on Austen called Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation by Barrett Tandon and he says if she had to take the world as it was , that did not stop her remaking it in an art which consistently gets the better of situations of which there is no getting rid. Yeah, I like that. Consistently getting the better of situations that you can't change is often what she does in her heroines do too. So perhaps you could see her fiction as the product of a kind of collision, I mean still staying very high level abstract level, but a product of a collision between a sort of passionate romanticism, uh a belief that love and sentiments have a life of their own and are potentially rebellious and uncontrollable, which you see going on in France over just over the water. And that's combined with a strict realism about the material and moral and financial basis of marriage, sort of what you've ultimately got to do. And I think in a way a satirical or ironical tone of voice is perhaps the best and maybe even the only way of reconciling those completely irre Yeah, I think that's right. That's a good example of this um in a letter um to her sister Cassandra that she wrote in January seventeen ninety six when she'd been flirting um with an Irish barrister called Tom Lafroy , probably around the time that she was drafting Pride and Prejudice. So Tom Lafroy had visited her family home for a bit and was as penniless as Jane Austen herself, so she probably couldn't have been expecting much more from him than a bit of fun and flirt ation, no harm in that. Anyway, she wrote to her sister, I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. You'd love to get a letter or an email from her, wouldn't you? Yeah. I mean I think those two sentences are so brilliant. Um because they fuse together the two personae that Jane Austen was perhaps the only person to have conjoined perfectly. She manages simultaneously to be the sort of maiden aunt, disapproving maiden aunt, and the rebellious niece having fun . So she's using that maiden aunt vocabulary, profligate and shocking, and then pulls the rug from under it because you know, all they did was they sat there a bit and they danced a bit and they had a nice evening. Yeah, they had a nice time, yeah. So So this is someone who wrote with an awareness that, you know, the all these romantic and rebellious energies are exploding around her, but not necessarily for her or in her life. She died young, uh two years before the publication of the first parts of Byron's Don Dune, which is the subject of our next podcast. Looking forward to it already. Um but there are times when you sense she, you know, you might think she belongs to a different century or moral universe. So all those um sultry , Byronic, flirtatious men in her novels, the Willoughby's, the Wickhams, the Henry Crawfords, you know, they don't come out that well from it, you know, let's let's say that. She's actually fascinated though, isn't she, by the Willoughby's and the Wickhams , and also the kind of emotional escape and social disruption that they can bring. And in that respect, they are a major engine of the fiction, even if the individual characters are presented as being basically cads. And she's also acutely realistic about the fact that men like Willoughby, with all their Byronic posturing and so on, they want to do the Don Juan thing and be mysterious and seductive and and pull lots of birds. But they also ideally ultimately need a wife with twenty thousand pounds in order to support their rakish lifestyle. So you get a constant pull between passionate sensibility and a kind of moneyed realism, which usually wins out. Yeah. There's another sort of textbook feature of romanticism that she displays if we're continuing to hover above the bonnet for a bit. Absolutely hover. Yeah. And that is um the novel's emphasis on generational differences between the young and the old. And typically the old don't come out of it very well quite right too. So in love and friendship, which as we know is pure satire, she takes the parents versus children trope to extremes. Um do you want to read this passage? Absolutely with pleasure. So Sophia, as you'll remember, is one of the two fainting heroines in the novel. Convinced as you must be from what I've already told you concerning Augustus and Sophia, that there never were a happier couple. I need not, I imagine, inform you that their union had been contrary to the inclinations of their cruel and mercenary misspelt parents, who had vainly endeavoured with obstinate perseverance to force them into a marriage with those whom they had ever abhor red, but with a heroic fortitude worthy to be related and admired, they had both constantly refused to submit to such des potic power. So we have despotic parents who cruelly refuse to support their children's passionate, romantic, rebellious attachments. And there's a suggestion, I suppose, here, too, that maybe the prudent parents in this case are right and the sentimental children who are in the wrong, but you do get that sense of generational difference. Yeah. In amateur novels, fathers and mothers are often self indulgent and usually they fail to teach their children how to behave well, you know, either by letting them get away with anything or by being too severe on them. And the former, the getting away with anything, is true in a big way of Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, and of uh Colin's personal favourite character in all of literature, the frail and querulous Mr Woodhouse, Emma's father, who's always worried about the cold and addicted to gruel. So these are all the sort of failed dads of her fashion. It's so hard being a father, Claire. It's so harsh. Anyway, I I've got to make a confession. Go on. I have a deep admiration for all of Austin's father figures. I mean they're sound, aren't they? I mean they hate parties. They want to stay in when the weather's nasty. In fact, they ought to stay in when it's quite good too. They like being in the libraries. They hate it when the young people have fun or profligately leave windows open or perform in plays. But you know, despite my admiration for the older generation that she probably slightly despises, I I would agree that her fiction does have that sensitivity to intergenerational differences. And I think it's analogous to the way that we're now attuned to generational gaps in attitude between you know sort of cuspy boomers like me, uh I think probably c crusty boomers like me, actually is a bit more accurate really but and and millennials like you who are sort of free and exciting and have a lovely time in life. That's that that is it. That's what we're known for. Yeah, no, I think that's true. It's people born in the 1740s or 50s don't really shine in Jane Austen, that sort of older generation. She was very much a child of the 1770s, a very different time. And you know she, can see in her generation a whole range of self-indulgent vices and lots of toxic wealth and, you know, free spiritedness. But it is typically people like Mr Knightley or Mr. Darcy, who are only a little bit older than her heroines, not a lot older, who have their moral compasses aligned like Austen's. So and I here I risk being ultra literally m literal minded, but you know that's how I am. Mr Knightley is thirty seven in eighteen fourteen when Emma is set. So he's only a few years younger than Austin, and I think that's one factor that contributes to his overall air of knightliness and goodness. Yeah. While we're thinking about the historical period and context, we should say something about the economic background here. No, Colin, wake up. This was an important part of my my my very major defil thesis. Okay. Important work. Very very GDP per capita in England. You've got to say it with a straight straight face. Come on. GDP per capita in England. In England was stable throughout the eighteenth century until you'll be interested to note about the year of Austin's birth, and then it shoots up. It's a really striking feature of the graph actually. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that is largely because and accompanied by the sort of growing taste for luxuries, tea, silk, etc. And uh you know, s I'm not gonna talk about inflation, but fine. Yeah. No, it also matters. These material realities are not. These are material realities are key in the novels, right? Because she is not just seeing revolutionary ideas, but also she is seeing money. New money, new styles, new fashions, new vices, new nice things that you could eat and drink, sexy carriages, barouche land ows, etcetera. Yeah, and those carriages are usually markers of a ostentatious wealth, which instantly triggers a satirical response. Yeah, it's a bit like saying someone has a Range Rover, you know, you kind of know which bin they belong in. Yeah, yeah, not the recycling bin, I think. But um to stay a moment with money, your favourite subject. Yeah. Um it is worth remembering that Jane's brother Edward, whom we'll come back to, I think, when we talk about Frank Churchill in Emma, because there's got similarities there. But her brother Edward was in the seventeen eighties adopted by the Austin's wealthy childless relatives called the Knights, and like Frank Churchill, he changed his surname to Knight so he could inherit a whopping house at Chawton . So from eighteen oh nine onwards, and that's exactly the period during which Jane Austen's novels were published So what that means is that throughout this period she's seeing money and by our standards a lot of it every day while not having it m very much of it herself. And that situation, you know, close to on the outside of great visible wealth is a perfect position from which to develop a satirical vision of what it might mean to be rich and, you know, how the rich behave. So, you know, think of um to take a modern example, Nick Guest, who's in Alan Hollinghurst's novel Line of Beauty in the nineteen eighties, he is literally a guest in the houses of the wealthy Thatcherite elite, observing them as a sort of insider outsider. And that's become a widespread fictional trope. Charles Ryder in Brideshead, I suppose is another and I think Jane Austen is sort of right at the start of that insider outsider perspective. Anyway, I think that's enough of Jane Austen from above the bonnet. We need to say a little bit more now about how all of that um contextual detail, the that economic background, the GDP, how it plays into her particularly delicate form of social satire. Because she's not to put it crudely, the done kind of satirist who struts around London deploring contemporary vices. She's not the swift kind of misanthropic satirist who hates all humanity. Very sensible point of view, my as far as uh as I see it, but and she's certainly not the uh Rochesterian swaggering shagging kind of saturist either. So you know what kind of saturist is. Um I think that battle between the sort of passionate and the material, sensibility and, wealth, that is the foundation of her kind of satire. So her satire is all about people being pulled in different directions by emotional and economic forces. So you know she's keen to send up people who are over obsessed with wealt Who talk about nothing but GDP and Baruch Landau's. I didn't know what you were talking about. Um but at the same time, she recognises that women in particular need some wealth and some support in order to live because they can't work. So she she's sort of keen to give weight to romantic love and even sexual desire, but she sees it as potentially making people do absurd and either socially destructive or self-destructive things. Those forces are pulling against each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the key, I suppose, is the amazingly delicate way that she articulates the satirical pull between different forces. Uh, and the way she does that in her language, because any one of those forces can topple over into self-parody or into moral danger or whatever it might be. But the language just pulls them all together and keeps them woven into an intricate web. Yeah. And despite my very compelling economic explanation of her fiction. I was compelled. Thank you. I think that the reason that many other people would want to read it is because it's sort of constantly playing verbal games around that material base and um those games are delightful. So there are some specific words, in fact, that we could zoom in on here. I suspect you might have words in mind. Well, Colin, the words interest and interesting are particularly, you know, interesting in this respect. So interest was a major player in the late Georgian Regency vocabulary. It's a sort of word that people passed around all the time and they brought out to describe all sorts of different social transactions in their lives. And interesting is one of those uh I sort of charge the underline words when I'm reading or these days I highlight them in my ebook or whatever. But but interesting, just swirls around so much and it does so much work because sometimes it means alluring or or even sexy, and sometimes it means materially valuable, as when someone has an interest in a piece of land or a big house or whatever. And you often don't quite know which side the word is on. Yeah. And that's because it often can convey those multiple senses together. So someone can be described as interesting because they have lots of money, or because they're intellectually fascinating, or they're gorgeous, or a bit of all three. And that sort of shiftiness in the word is something that dates from roughly just before Austin's time. So during the later eighteenth century, interest moves from though those particular economic and legal contexts it have been in to this point, in which you know your interest is an objective thing, it's your share in something or your concern in something. It shifts to a much broader subjective field. So interest becomes used to describe something with a propensity to concern you, to attract you, to draw you in, to interest What's your map of podcasts from Ocul imundi won gold at the twenty twenty-five British Podcast Awards? Occuli Mundi is Latin for eyes of the Wldor, and' Wshatap Your M features a fascinating range of guests talking about the stories and ideas behind maps that they'd love. Guests this series include the Norwegian explorer Cecilia Skug, who's climbed the world's seven tallest mountains, and Ross Perlin, co director of the Endangered Language Alliance. Every episode is filled with history, culture and conversation. Jerry Broton, whose books include A History of the World in Twelve Maps and Four Points of the Compass. And you can zoom into the maps on Ocul imundi's website, Ocul yHyphenmundi.com. Subscribe now to What's Your Map available on Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress. co dot uk slash podcast to learn more so if we look back for a moment at sense and sensibility uh you know there Jane Austen is I think sort of working out her own vocabulary and she's playing with the instability of certain words which will become useful to later fiction. An interesting actually is a key word in sense and sensibility and one bit that I underlined in the novel as I read it again is the um masterly description of Marianne, who's the passionate sister to the sensible Eleanor. Um the description of Marianne as interesting. So she was sensible and clever, but eager in everything. Her sorrows, her joys could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting. She was everything but prudent. So there being interesting is in opposition to being prudent. It's an entirely spiritual or intellectual or romantic kind of interest that Marianne generates. Because of course, she, like all the other Dashwood girls, has no money at all, and so can't offer interest in the way that a spinster with twenty thousand pounds could interest a man who was low enough to be motivated by such base material concerns. And Marianne's mother elsewhere in the novel is is grateful to to Willoughby when he rescues Marianne out of a fool, you know, as she would be to anyone, but you get the feeling that she's especially grateful to him because the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance gave an interest to the ac tion which came home to her feelings. Don't you love it when something comes home to your feelings? It doesn't these days for me, but yeah. Basically Willoughby's hot, hot as Hades. But then we discover he's also potentially rich, and so Willoughby later becomes interesting in a more material sense. Since Marianne is a reader of books, um Willoughby seems to her like the most interesting kind of fictional hero. His person and air Every circumstance belonging to him was interesting. His name was good, his residence was in their favourite village, and she soon found that of all manly dresses, a shooting jacket was the most becoming. So his name was good, he had a great house and snappy clothes, and man is really seriously interesting. And we have another example from love and friendship. You're a bit obsessed here. I really love it. But this time with a negative form, disinterested. So Augustus and Sophia slash Sophia are said to be admirably disinterested because they never think about that grubby thing money translation they don't pay their bills. They exalted creatures scorn to reflect a moment on their pecuniary distresses and would have blushed at the idea of paying their debts. Alas, what was their reward for such disinterested behaviour? The beautiful two L's Augustus was arrested, and we were all undone. So Austin is sort of saying here that sometimes people should, you know, think of their financial interest s and stop trying to be interesting in all the other more fun but less remunerative ways that people can be interesting. Yeah, and and just to take us back from this very interesting digression to Emma, the topic, Claire, you don't remember of the of this podcast, there's an absolutely perfect fusion of the dispassionately material and the erotically fascinated sense of the word interest. When Mr. Knightley says of Emma , I have a very sincere interest in Emma. Isabella, who's Emma's sister and Mr Knightley's sister in law, Isabella does not seem more my sister, has never excited a greater interest, perhaps hardly so great. There's an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma. I wonder what will become of her. I wonder. At this point in the novel we don't know that Mr Knightley is in love with Emma, and he maybe doesn't know it either or possibly isn't quite yet in love with her, but he will be. So interest here all of us. Sorry, sorry. Sorry everyone. Yeah. Inter est here is a big flag that maybe Mr. Knightley's sort of paternal concern for Emma may turn into or mask something more. Mm-hmm. Material is in some ways the key origin point of Jane Austen's style, and it comes through in the delicate usages of interesting that we've been exploring. But I suppose another factor we ought to bring into our view of Austen satire in general is reading that great evil. Yes indeed. It would be, I think, hard to exaggerate the importance of the act of reading to Austin's novels. You know, as we've seen, she starts off by writing these self-conscious parodies of other sentimental fiction. And throughout the six all six novels really, there is a very distinct and of its time sense that if you attempt to apply the conventions of fiction to real life, well, that will screw things up for you. Yes, I have found. Um the sort of Madame the old Madame Beauvery problem. Austin would not have called it the Madame Beauvary problem. She would have come to it via the very longstanding and quite annoying eighteenth century debate about the evil effects of reading fiction on impressionable young minds, particularly female minds. The idea was that if you read novels as a young woman you would forget yourself and your duties. You know, you'd be carried away by all that heightened language and extreme emotions and all the scenes of seduction So one Regency Churchman said that novels carried a turbid stream of vice over the morals of mankind, polluted girls' hearts, and debased their intellects. So, you know, very rational So in sense and sensibility, Marianne Dashwood has learnt from books as well as from her own sentimental nature, I suppose that, emotions are the pathway to happiness. And that's why she finds Willoughby quite so interesting, and that's why she is made quite so miserable by falling in love with Willoughby because he's a sort of fiction of her own invention. Yeah. And in Northanger Abbey likewise, we learn that Catherine Morland has been in training for a heroine since she was fifteen. She read all such works as heroines must read, to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventual lives. So it's bit bits of pope actually . Yeah, and there's another side to the women who reads books issue for Austin, which I suppose we should also mention. Yes, so one target of the satire in Sense and Sensibility is Lady Middleton, the uh brain dead wife of Sir John Middleton. And he is the relation who invites the Dashwoods to stay when they lose all their money in the cottage on his estate in Devonshire. Um so they're they're in poverty under his wing as it were. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but Lady Middleton , who um Colin has described as an icy vacuum of a woman. I think that's an accurate description of her. Yeah. Um but at one point Austin sort of uh imputes or transcribes her thoughts about the Dashwood girls. Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton's behaviour to Eleanor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all. Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good natured, and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical, perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical, but that did not signify. It was censure in common use and easily given. And that final sentence means what exactly? Basically that satirical is a common insult, so common that you didn't need to know what satirical meant in order to call people it. Maybe what she means is sort of, you know, a bit acerbic, a bit sharp, uh not easy or socially complacent, a bit too clever. Yeah, read books. You read red books, read books. So a character in Emma calls Mr Knightley quite a humorist, which is sort of code for you make me feel uneasy and I'm worried that you're laughing at me. You just read out does suggest two things, doesn't it? I mean, one that for Austin being satirical is something that women can do, which is really important. And two, that a lot of people regarded it as a necessary consequence of re ading in women. Uh, because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical. Right. So I think we've put together now a nice recipe for Austin's brand of satire and we're cooking. We're cooking. Cooking with gas. In which a lot of different forces are converging in this satirical recipe. So to start with you've got that acute awareness of generational difference and economic social difference between the GDP. Yeah, GDP. And you've got to add to the pot that early interest in sending up novelistic novelistic conventions. And I suppose too a sense that there's a line between fiction and real life which is permeable but you cross it um at your peril. Yes. A genuine attraction, sometimes with some parody thrown in, to sensibility and the potentially overpowering force of sentiment. Yeah, and that's a powerful flavour in the brew and it's there in Marianne Dashwood's love for the wicked Willoughby. Yep. And presiding over all that, a sort of constant awareness, which is described as prudence when characters in the novel display it, of the fact that money matters and that it will motivate, it will hold in check the romantic components in the fiction. So interest. As cash, really, yeah, yeah. And that that's also the gender question, isn't there? Um 'cause I I suppose Austin also often seems to be suggesting that being a woman doesn't exclude you from feeling passions, but it often excludes you from acting on them. So perhaps observing or to put it another way, reading and writing fiction that probes and satirizes conventional man ners, that is the main form that female agency can take. If we're being really optimistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So with all of that in mind, as our recipe for Jane Austen, and you could try it at home, folks. Uh let's turn to Emma, which I always think is her best book by a mile until I reread the others, and then I think they're the best ones, and then I reread Emma and I think it's the best again. Perhaps we should just remind readers, uh listeners, readers, viewers, uh multimedia, whatever. Listeners, roughly what it's about. I would say one word, it's about mistakes. Yeah, yeah. Perhaps also misread ings . So Emma is in several ways pretty unusual, isn't she among Jane Austen's heroines? 'Cause for one thing she gets a book title all to herself, which should tell us something about the power she has over her own little world. Because pride and prejudice is not called Lizzie, is it? Carolon Lizzie. It's good yeah. I think she made a good choice not calling it L Lizzie. Emma's twenty-one. Which is significant because it means that in theory she would not need her guardian's consent to marriage. Yeah, so she's a grown up and she's well off, and she's not living in a cottage on the estate of a rich relative, but she's living in the fairly substantial heart field, the principal house in Leafy Highbury, a small provincial town sixteen miles from London, we're told that very precisely, where she lives with her querulous and valitudinarian father, who is of course the hero of the novel, entirely sound on the undesirability of parties, though perhaps likes Gruul a little bit more than I do. Mm-hmm. So Emma is someone at the centre of her own small universe. You know, she's not dependent on richer relatives like the Dashwoodss. She' not in a family whose future depends on making good marriages like the Bennets. She's not the ward of much richer people like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. She is blase about marriage because she's well aware, she says this, that almost any marriage she entered into will likely mean less freedom than the freedom she now enjoys as mistress of Hartfield. And that's because of her father allowing her to do that. I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want, employment I do not want, consequence I do not want. So she's about as autonomous and independent as a young lady could have been in Austin's day. Yep, yep, and much of the satire that we've been reading over the past few months has been in some sense written from the margins of things, hasn't it? I mean Dunn, Scottling for per ferment at court and then at church and Pope excluded by his Catholicism from all kinds of things and then the perennially unfavoured gay who was miserable and got the wrong job throughout his life. And Austin often writes about characters who occupy those sort of economically or socially marginal positions which are akin to the position she held really, um, but who can turn their satirical gazes on worlds that they're not quite part of. But I think with Emma something new is going on, isn't it? I mean, it's very hard for Emma to think critically about hybrid because she's the queen of hybrid, in effect. I mean she is inside it looking out rather than outside it looking in. And she's also powerful. So satire from the margins has a hard time making things happen. I mean in some ways it's the fury of the satirist is being excluded from the Emma has has has real agency and the sort of mistakes she makes have major consequences for the people in her world, you know, within that small world, but big consequences. All of that centrality and just general material well-being makes her feel that she can be as if the author of a romantic novel of her own. And it would be called Emma. It would, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Catherine Moreland, we said earlier, has a sort of dim awareness of being the heroine of someone else's book. But Emma has this very conscious aspiration to author other people's fates. And she's described at one point as an imaginist. Such a good word for her. Yeah. So, you know, Austin is sort of implying that she has pretty high levels of self satisfaction. Yep, yep. So we're back with the idea perhaps of reading as having an intrinsically satirical effect 'cause it makes you want life to behave in the way it does in novels, which typically life refuses to do, and you know, satire works off the g that gap between expectation, hope, moral attitudes, and reality. And reading though sort of makes you an imaginist who can't accurately understand the motives of people around you because you're projecting their stories into the future. You're writing the stories for them and you're imputing motives to them that they don't necessarily show. And I think it's notable in that respect that Emma only reads certain kinds of things. So the very judgy Mr Knightley says at one point, Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read, regularly through and very good lists they were, but I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience and a subjection of the full In other words, she doesn't want serious improving stuff, she wants fancy, she wants novels and romances. So fuelled by that reading, Emma thinks she can make romantic matches. And before the nov el opens, she has set up her former governess, Miss Taylor, in a good marriage to the sort of genial squire, Mr. Weston. So she naturally thinks, next job, that a very pretty but not very smart orphan from a local school called Harriet Smith, Parentage Unknown, must be the daughter of a person of substance. Because you know that's how things go in novels, and that therefore Harriet must marry the sort of shiny new local clergyman Mr. Elton and that he surely must be attracted to her. So misreading or making mistakes in reading the world around you is really what the novel's about or exploring. And I suppose it's significant that the social world of Highbury is very small, very stable. Um, everybody thinks they understand each other, and it's a bit like an Agatha Christie closed room mystery in its way, or a or a very small stage set or set of stage sets, because there's a handful of grand houses, there's Hartfield, and then there's Mr Knightley's house Donwell or Dunwell Abbey, and there are some less grand houses that the grand people condescend to visit, and there's a main street, isn't there, with a single shop for Ford's. Yeah. That everyone visits for everything. It's where you buy you know and the social life of the place and its pecking order are completely established. And Emma is stuck there with Mr Woodhouse. Yeah. We need to give him less screen time. And Mr Knightley. Yeah, and Mr Knightley is sixteen years older than her. So since the loss of her governess, Mrs. Weston to marriage, she really hasn't got any real friends and none around her own age. And what happens then in the novel is that new people arrive in this closed world, and to begin with, they're unknown quantities. And because of the fact that they are unknown quantities, they generate enigmas and I suppose potential plots as well. Wes, which the novel either takes up or doesn't. Yeah. So there are lots of moments actually in the novel where characters are given literal puzzles or riddles or enigmas which have to be deciphered or read, and these are sort of associated often with the enigmatic new arrivals in Highbury. So early on, Mr. Elton makes a charade or riddle to while away those boring long winter evenings, the solution to which is courtship, which Emma sort of in part deciphers, but she assumes that it refers to the he's imaginary courtship of Harriet, whereas really , spoiler, it hints at the fact that he fancies her. Yeah, and I suppose one of the mistakes Emma makes throughout is to think that people are like puzzles, people, you know, just you gotta work them out. And if you're clever enough you can solve them or find the key to them. And usually those around her turn out to be well, more complex and also more straightforward than she thinks they are sometimes. You know, they can be just in it for the money , plain and simple, Mr. Elton. At other times they do things which are completely unpredictable and she doesn't really know what's going on. Yeah. The uh Mr Elton misreading ends in a real debacle in which he proposes to Which was a very good place to propose to someone in this period, if you were in the proposed mood, because you c you were briefly alone with your beloved. You were away from the prying eyes of family and friends and you could be there without breaking any rules of decorum. Yeah, and if everything went tits up as it does with mistakes. That's so elegant in your phrasing. Yep. Tits up. Tits up um Well it it does with Mr. Elton's proposal to Allen. You know the description. You would just have to hope that the carriage driver's short. Um but I would like to propose, Colin, that Elton has the proposal scene happen in a carriage for more reasons than that practicality one. So in eighteenth century novels, the kind that Austin read, carriages and coaches are often vehicles, ha ha for plot. Um and that's because they're places where unpredictable and often potentially awkward things can happen. So if your character is travelling in a public coach, you can have them encounter all sorts of strange people who then set off new avenues for the plot. And that's what happens at the end of Love and Friendship. Um Laura boards a pass a passing stagecoach en route to Edinburgh. As one does. As you do, and as it grows light, she can suddenly see and she sees that all her fellow passengers are in fact all her long lost nearest relatives and connections. As they always are. Uh and I suppose that because journeys don't always go as planned. And uh this podcast is sponsored by Avanti West Coast, which has one point six stars on trust pilot reviews because none of its journeys ever go as planned . The carriage trope is a means by which plots can be sort of rerouted because things go wrong. Stagecoaches crash or turn over. And you could think of those moments in in Hogarth uh that centre around halted or broken down vehicles. So you know Tom Rakewell of the Rake's progress, his coach gets stopped by the forces of the law while he's en route to St. James's, and that gives rise to a whole satirical spectacle. A whole host of very bad things, yeah. And I not to press the point, but there is a very good example yet again in Love and Freedom. Surely not. Yeah, too. It was from the passage we read right at the beginning. The husbands of the two heroines are killed in a tragic but actually in the end quite convenient road accident. Their uh their fate and is overturned in the street very shortly after they get married. Um then in Frances Burney's novel, which Austin read very closely, Evelina, seventeen seventy eight, the heroine, Evelina, finds her carriage held up at gunpoint by two highwayman, except one the highwayman is actually her rakish would-be lover, Sir Clement Willoughby in disguise, who, you know, takes the opportunity to get inside the carriage and proposition her. Yeah, and just to drag you back, that is the immediate Evelina is the immediate model for what Austin's doing in Emma with Mr. Elson's opportunist opportunistic proposal in the carriage, isn't it? Because and and I suppose it it's also not a coincidence uh coincidence, is it, that Willoughby is the name she gives to the sexy rake in sense and sensibility? I mean she is steeped in in Evelina. Yeah, yeah. So carriages. So all that to say the carriage as a site of seduction motif was really big in the later 18th century, which you can tell by the fact that when Casanova wrote up his racy memoirs in the 1790s, he pretended, and this was not the case, that the majority of his famous sexual encounters and seductions had taken place in carriages, or because of, you know, fortuitously broken down carriages. And it seems that he wanted to make his memoirs read, you know, as racely as a novel, and he knew that inserting at sort of novel motif, a carriage here and there would would achieve that. So you're suggesting to k pull us back to Emma, uh that with Emma and Mr. Elton, Austin is doing the sort of favourite thing of sending up a nov elistic Well I think that already by Bernie's time in the seventeen seventies and definitely by Austin's time, carriages are such an established bit of business that you would always be using them in at least a semi tongue in cheek Okay. So when the high women appear in Evelina, Evelina's companion exclaims, Don't say we shall be overturned. Surely not. And then Edward before he dies in love and friendship But I mean Jane Austen isn't that in America. But it it matters for the novel's ethics and for Emma's moral development that she should find herself wrong about Mr Elton's romantic motives in such a dramatic way and be confronted with the real harm that she's doing to Paul Harriet Smith, you know, she's at who's desperately in love with Mr. Elton. Um so she's forced up against the truth in that intimate space in the carriage the carriage. So the carriage is the way of almost literally sticking Emma's face into her into it, how wrong she is. Yeah. So yeah. So it introduces Emma in this like as dramatic possible way to the idea that she has been, in her words, in a most complete error with regard to the intentions of others. You know, Mr Elton is prudent, he's interested in his courtship, he wants her and her cash and status, not the romantic orphan Harriet Smith. And that another thing that happens there, you said? Two things, a couple of things? Uh couple of things. Well, we said a few minutes ago that Emma believes that she can be the author of other people's romantic lives. And I think what the carriage episode suggests is that she isn't. It tells us, and it should tell her, but it doesn't, that she's at the mercy of novelistic conventions. She's not in charge of them. She's part of a novel with all the tricks that a novel has on hand to swerve and throw its characters off course. You know, it's not that the episode is some sort of little knowing satirical dig, it's not Austin saying, here's a clever joke you'll get if you read novels about carriages. But it is a sort of satire at Emma's expense and at the expense of her authority. Okay, yeah. So the convention of the carriage sort of traps her. Yeah, well I've enjoyed my little excursion . Should we talk about the the other new arrivals in Hyrule beyond Mr. Elton? Yeah, okay, but there is the glamorous Frank Churchill. Yep. Frank Collan. He's mister Mr Weston's son and so the stepson of Emma's newly married ex governess, and his name is Frank Churchill, not Frank Weston, because as a little boy he was taken into the care of his dead mother's family Yep, and he appears at a time that curiously coincides with the return to Highbury of the secretive Jane Fair fax, who is a sort of long running social nemesis of Emma's for no good reason, and niece of the poor but very genteel Miss Bates, who is one of Emma's hybrid neighbours. And Jane is the ward of a wealthy London family , the Campbells, but as everyone knows, she will soon have to give up her nice life and become a lowly governess 'cause she has no money. Yeah, and and and she's clearly more beautiful than Emma, isn't she? I mean that's sort of sort of the point. And Emma can't really bear bear that fact. But we and we're repeatedly told that Jane Fairfax is smooth and cold and cautious and suspiciously reserved and generally hard to read. And Emma actually uses that key word in Jane Austen elegant, which is always a barb term that ref barbs both the person it's used to describe and the person using it very often, actually, because she's Emma's being bitchy really in calling her elegant. And ms even Mr. Night ley, who's o who's very often willing to offer opinions that are clear, shall we say, to a fault, says of Jane, I do not accuse her of want of feeling. Her sensibilities, I suspect, are strong, and her temper excellent in its powers of forbearance, patience, and self control. But it wants openness. She's reserved. So she is a human enigma, ripe for misreading. She is a riddle, quite a riddle, the Emma says at one point. So why has she not accompanied Mr and Mrs. Campbell to Ireland to visit their daughter? The recently wed Mrs Dixon, who's supposed to be her best friend. What exactly is the nature of her relationship to Mr Dixon, the new husband? And who has ordered an expensive piano for her, mysteriously Could he be Mr Dixon and Frank has mysteries about him too? For one thing. Why does he go all the way to London to get his hair cut? You know, not something you do in Regency England, 'cause sixteen miles , heck of a long way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And anyway, later in the novel there are more riddles, aren't there? I mean there's the alphabet game in which Frank and Emma collude to embarrass Jane Fairfax by spelling out the word Dixon in letters, which profoundly cruel thing to do. Then on the disastrous trip to Box Hill, which we're going to talk about in a minute, uh even the genial Mr Weston tries to make a conundrum or verbal puzzle. Which two letters spell out perfection? And the answer of course is M A or Emma , though Emma characteristically needs to be told the answer So, riddles, puzzles, wrong answers, they all abound. But perhaps the main thing that sets Emma apart from Austin's other novels is the sort of intricate way in which we are made to misread what's happening, you know, almost as badly as Emma does. Yeah, and that's really what makes it such an endlessly rereadable book, because it gives you hints about what's going on. You know, big spoiler, Frank and Jane Fairfax are secretly engaged, and Frank is flirting with Emma to create a smok escreen in front of the engagement. But you know, the narrative stays so close to Emma's view of the world that you're made to share in her misreadings. And every time I read it, I see new things and little winks and hints, just, you know, over and over again, new ones. Yeah. So you're more or less brought to go along with Emma's mistakes and yet part of you stands outside them. And more than that, because you sometimes think that Emma knows she's making mistakes, as though she's trying not to see what she knows is there. Yeah. There's a nice example of that towards the end of the novel when Mr Knightley is about to leave Hartfield for London. Before he goes, he sort of seizes Emma's hand as if he means to kiss it, which is a thing that's quite out of character for him, and it at least gives a hint to us that perhaps he's more interested in her than he lets on. But Emma, at least consciously, doesn't think so, it doesn't occur to her. She thinks the gesture speaks perfect amity. We're just we're just mates. Just mates. But there's this hint in Austin's prose that it's more the case that she isn't allowing herself to think that. And so some other subconscious awareness is sort of bubbling up and she is repressing it. They parted thorough friends, however, she could not be deceived as to the meaning of his countenance and his unfinished gallantry. It was all done to assure her that she had fully recovered his good opinion. So she could not be deceived. So could not, because she's absolutely 100% right about his just wanting to be her friend, or does could not mean she's afraid of what might happen if she thought otherwise that it was he was more than a friend. And both those possibilities are there, aren't they? I mean Mr Knightley is a friend, Mr Knightley is more than a friend. And that they're both there for her, but she opts for the wrong one, you know, just a friend, because she's not quite ready for what the right one might mean. She wants to shut it out. And I think the idea of her as having a subconscious as a result of this slippage between her perspective and the reader's perspective, absolutely crucial to what Joe is doing with the novel as a whole. Yeah. Yes, I think that's right. I think it's especially clear to see in moments of literal reading in the novel. So early on, Emma's protege, Harriet Smith, is being courted by a really nice young man, a sort of solid yeoman called Robert Martin, who sends her a lovely letter declaring his love for her. And Emma's a bit of a snob and thinks that life is one big romance, so she tells Harriet that she can't possibly marry a mere farmer who hasn't read anything apart from the agricultural reports. I have read. Probably interested in GDP as well, isn't he? Robert Martin's love letter impresses Emma nonetheless . Will you read the letter? cried Harriet. Pray do. I'd rather you would. Emma was not sorry to be pressed. She read, and was surprised. The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no grammatical errors , but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman. The language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feed feeling. Delicacy. Delicacy of feeling, yeah. So she proceeds to persuade herself at once that the letter can't possibly have been written by him. It must have been the work of one of his better educated sisters. Yeah. So Emma's really good at persuading herself. But that is in every sense an interesting moment because Austin's representation of Emma, willfully misreading that letter again allows Emma to have that sort of subconscious. She doesn't want to believe that Robert Martin is gentlemanly and likely to be a good husband for Harriet, but despite herself she can actually see the truth, the qualities in his writing, but she suppresses them because it isn't the reality she wants to see. So in a way, the misreading is the satire, right? Which is directed at Emma Snobbery at this point. Yeah, yeah. And and amazingly, we don't actually get the text of the letter at all, do we? I mean, we just get with Emma trying to misread it, and that allows a space to grow up between the readers and the heroine, uh, which is a very narrow space because what Robert Martin actually wrote is filtered through Emma's reading of it. We just see her view trying to and and we see her trying to push away what she knows to be true. But we don't have all the evidence, the let text of the letter itself, to enable us to know that she is completely wrong. So I suppose what we have here potentially is a is is a rather deep seated kind of satire on the novel as a form in which a character is making up a world while the novelist is quietly picking that world to pieces from the edges and giving readers little glimpses of an alternative reality. So in that sense, we could say that Emma is in its way as much a satire on novelistic convention as something like Northanger Abbey, but it takes the satire a few steps further. You know, it's not just satirising young women like Emma who think the world obeys the laws of romantic fiction. It's sort of setting traps for readers who think they know more than Emma , but who also want this fiction to follow the general rules of romance. So you know materialistic realism, which tells us that Harriet, because she's illegitimate, would be doing really well to marry the good, sensible Robert Martin, is sort of tugging against romantic myth making, Emma wanting Harriet to be the love child of an aristocrat who therefore should marry the elegant Mr. Elton. And those forces are pulling away at both Emma and the readers, and we readers by definition are tilted towards Emma's viewpoint because we must be people who like novelistic fictions. We've just picked up a novel. Yeah, so we're pulled along by her. And I suppose Frank Churchill is a sort of classic instance of this, isn't he? I mean, 'cause he's set up really as the romantic lead, um, the person Emma must marry, because he's a glamorous man of about her age who comes from outside. He's rich enough for her, um because like Jane Austen's brother, he's given up his own father's surname in order to inherit that substantial estate. But there is this sort of telling slipperiness or evasiveness to the way that he's presented before he arrives that makes you think things may not be as simple as all that. Certainly when you're rereading it, whether it's a little stuff. Austin has this way of using the passive voice to describe what he has or hasn't done. And the main thing he hasn't done is show up in highbury to meet his new stepmother, Mrs. Weston, following his father's marriage. And that is a that's a bad thing to do. It's a really, really bad thing to do. It's not not the right thing to do. Inexcusable. It is, it is. And it's describ ed like this. His coming to visit head father had been often talked of but never achieved. Yeah, and it's really ambiguous because does had been often talked of mean Frank himself often promised to come and then said, Oh actually I've got to go to the races. Or does it or the hairdressers or or does it mean that everybody else talked about his arrival as a certainty but he never showed? And 'cause there's it and there's a huge moral distinction between those two uh equally possible interpretations of those of that phrase, because the first of them implies that Frank Churchill is an unreliable and selfish brat, really, while the second , I suppose might just mean that Miss Bates and Co., you know, the hybrid gossips have been saying, Mm, Frank Churchill, he's gonna come, isn't he? He's gonna have it, young man, he's gonna arrive soon, isn't he? Yeah. Passive and active matter in Austin, so it's rare for he's big, isn't it? If you look for it, you'll see it. It's rare for Emma, in contrast to Frank, to be made the subject of a passive verb. Because the way in which the narrative comes through her thoughts means that we always see things from her active perspective. So she's shaping and doing, she's not being done by. And actually, one measure of her growing uncertainty about the world as the novel goes on is the higher frequency of passive verbs that Austin uses sort of in her vicinity. That's really interesting thought, yeah. And and in the Frank Churchill example, the pressure is put on the reader to judge what that passive phrasing tells us about his character. You've got to ad judicate between different possibilities. And I suppose I suppose that is part of what people mean when they talk about Jane Austen's irony, is it? Yeah I mean that's a that's a big subject but one aspect of it is that it's a kind of irony that gives you just enough reality to detach yourself from a character's fantasy world, but also gives you enough of the character's fantasy world to let you live in it too. So it's a kind of perceptual satire where you have the delusion and the reality at one and the same time. But I think it doesn't work if you find yourself as a reader sort of completely at sea. You know, there has to be something in there of what the brilliant William Empson called energy of judgment as well as breadth of sympathy. So that means you're not just floating between possibilities in a sort of, you know, postmodern sea of whatever, nothing matters, either will do. Yeah. So y yeah, you've got to have some kind of investment in in what Emma sees as against what might be going on around her. Yeah. And I think we can see uh something of that later on in the novel when Emma learns to her great disappointment that Frank has been called home to the awful Mrs. Churchill, and that as a result, horror of horrors, there will be no ball in Highbury, and no possibility of further flirtation with him. So Joan Austen says this there was no doing anything but lament and exclaim The loss of the ball, the loss of the young man, and all that the young man might be feeling. It was too wretched, such a delightful evening as it would have been, and it's as if we're giving them as view of things via the order of the disappointments as they're set down. So first she's sorry about the bull not happening, big loss, then for the loss of the man, yeah, middle middling kind of loss, and then for his imagined feel ings, well, you know, uh it's all too wretched. Yeah. So the reality is that she's clearly just not that into Frank Churchill. Although again she doesn't quite see it doesn't herself. Yeah. Yeah. And Austin prompts us to see that in that order of syntax, but her irony, that sort of double-edged irony, also lets Emma's fantasy perspective sort of coexist alongside the reality, though it isn't allowed to displace it. We see more than Emma do