July 29, 2017 • 37 mins
We're revisiting a classic episode, all about Jane Austen. She was not a shy spinster who wrote some little books mostly to amuse her own family, and she wasn't a real-life Elizabeth Bennett. Her life was very different from any of her heroines.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, we know we have some dedicated listeners who've been
with the show from day one or have taken the plunge,
gone all the way through the back catalog, listen to
all nine hundred plus episodes in the archive. Huge shout
out to those folks. That is a commitment. But we
also know that we have lots of new listeners who
haven't heard some of our older material. So to welcome
(00:23):
them and introduce them to some of our our older stuff,
We're gonna try something new on Saturday's. We're going to
re air some of our favorites from the past. To
kick it off, we have our Jane Austin episode, which
originally aired March and aside for being a personal favorite
of mine because I love her, she's the one that
was requested again and again, and she had even been
on the wish list for these shows prior hosts before
(00:46):
we even came on board. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
(01:06):
I'm Holly Fry and we're just gonna get two things
out in the open. At the beginning of this episode,
Thing number one. Jane Austen was not just a shy
spinster who wrote some little books mostly to amuse herself
and her own family. That's a common rumor. It's a
common rumor that is false. Another common maybe not rumor,
but another perception that is false. She was not like
(01:29):
the real life version of Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Yeah,
and I think that dovetails on the rumor, like people
think that her books were some sort of personal wish
fulfillment scenario, yeah, or sort of a fictionalization of her
own life, and they really were not. There. There's some
(01:50):
little things that you will read and Jane Austen books
that do have a little tie into her own life,
but for the most part, these were very, very definitely
fictional books from her imagination, not from real things that
had happened to her. Um. She is one of our
most requested writers, for sure, lots of people asking us
(02:10):
to talk about Jane Austen. So we're going to do
that today, talk about her not at all Jane Austen
novel like life, um, starting of course at the beginning. Yeah,
it was completely unlike any of the heroines in her books,
just not the same as her fictional world now. She
was born on December sixteenth, seventeen seventy five and Steventon, Hampshire,
(02:34):
and she was the seventh child and second daughter of
George Austen, who was an Anglican rector, and his wife Cassandra.
And she was christened the following April five and she
spent a little more than a year after that in
the care of another family in the village. She was
close enough that her parents could visit and for her
to be brought to the parsonage to visit as well,
(02:55):
and Jane went to live at home again once she
was a toddler. All of the Austin children at scept
for her brother George, who had uh some kind of
developmental disability, followed the same pattern like this was their
family practice, to send the children away and then bring
them back. It was an extremely successful practice. All of
the Austin children lived into adulthood, which is not common
(03:17):
at the time and not common at the time at
all um uh And by all accounts they were an
exceptionally modest family. I mean, it's eight children in the
end being raised on a rector's salary, which was not
a lot of money, but they were exceptionally intelligent and literate.
Jane and her siblings and the many many cousins and
(03:38):
friends who would come to visit them and stay for
a while. We're also really creative and they like to
do things like put on plays together, and they made
extensive use of their father's five hundred volume library, which
is really where Jane cut her teeth on the world
of language. And if you've read any novel by Jane Austen,
or even seen any adaptation for film or television or
(03:59):
the screen, mean, you've probably picked up on the theme
that being smart and articulate can make up for not
inheriting a fortune. And this really was one of the
Jane Austen's family family's values, having been written down in
almost those precise words by her father's grandmother long before
Jane was even born, that you can make something of
(04:20):
yourself even if you didn't inherit tons of money when
Jane was a child. This is to me where things
really diverge. If you are a fan of Jane Austen,
like they're they're definitely interesting male characters, but the focus
is really on the women and the women's lives and
the sort of the other women and the other sisters
(04:41):
and the cousins and the moms, and yeah, I think
most people think of her, uh and in some ways
as like a women's writer, really writing a lot about women,
a lot for women. But she grew up in a
house full of boys. She didn't really have that much
exposure to huge groups of women. I would even call
this upbringing overrun with boys. I mean she had she
(05:05):
had all of those brothers, you know, she was just
her and one of her sister, all of these brothers.
Her mother and father ran a boys school out of
their home to try to you know, make ends meet,
and so um, you know, Jane and her sister would
share a room and all the other bedrooms were full
of all these boys, and her father taught her brothers
(05:26):
and all of these other male children. And so she
lived in this like very rowdy, noisy, boyish environment and
kind of what we would think of as a tomboy
kind of sense um until she was seven and went
away to boarding school with her sister Cassandra, and their
cousin named Jane Cooper went to the same school as well.
So from the toddler ages that she came back from
(05:47):
being with a wet nurse in the village until the
age of seven. Uh, noisy boy time all over the
place in Jane Austen's world. It stresses me out just
thinking about it. I kind of love it, many people do.
I'm not great with the loud children noises well, and
the thing that it reminds me of on on my
mom's side of the family, UM, I have there were
(06:08):
eleven children total in my generation, um, and only three
of us were girls, so kind of a similar proportion, um.
And I like, I remember like the boy footsteps thundering
up and down the stairs, and I kind of imagined
that it was a little bit similar growing up growing
(06:29):
up in this many many boys and and uh boys
that she was related to, and ones who were brought
into study at the school. While I'm like this is stressful,
like hey, noisy fun time, but girls schools at this
point in history tended to be fairly meager and indifferent.
(06:50):
And it seems that the school that Jane went to
was really better than most. But while they are all
three of the girls got sick with what was probably typhus.
They did recover, but Jane Cooper's mother caught the illness
while nursing her back to health, and unfortunately she ultimately
died from it. Now, once they were all well, they
all spent another year at home, with Jane Cooper often
(07:12):
being there as well since her mother had died, and
they eventually all went off to another boarding school what
they only stayed for about a year before coming home
again for good and being taught at home. Jane's first
and perhaps only love was Thomas Langlois la Foy, and
she met him in when he was visiting for the holidays. Well,
(07:32):
they fell in love and were obvious enough about it
that it drew some attention, and soon enough his kids
sent him home again, either to protect Jane from him
or to protect him from Jane. Basically, people did not
want them together. It worked out fine for Thomas, who
married an heiress, but afterwards Jane really had little in
the way of suitors for a very long time. Yeah.
(07:53):
She he definitely got the longer end of the stick
on that whole breakup. Yeah, So let's talk about Jane
the grown up. She was not the only writer in
her family. Her mother panned little poems for the children
and for the students at the school. Jane's oldest brother, James,
was also a writer and a poet, and in January
(08:13):
of seventeen eighty nine he actually started his own magazine,
which was called The Loiterer and it ran for fourteen months.
And Jane's first written works were satires. One was called
Love and Friendship, which satirized romances, and a historical satire
called History of England. When she was around nineteen years old,
she wrote an epistolary novel which, uh, on the off
(08:36):
chance you don't know what that means, it means the
novel that's written as a series of letters, and it
was called Eleanor and mary Anne, which would later become
Sense and Sensibility. Jane's parents stopped teaching in seventeen ninety six,
when Jane was twenty, so at this point the house
became a lot quieter. Uh. That year she started working
on First Impressions, which would later become Pride and Prejudice,
(09:00):
and about a year later she started rewriting Eleanor and
mary Anne, changing it from this series of letters into
a more linear narrative. She also wrote her first draft
of Northanger Abbey, which was originally called Susan between sev seventine,
so she basically banged out the bulk of three novels
in as many years, super productive. I'm kind of imagining
(09:23):
now that it was not quite so reality in the
house and she had a little headspace to herself. She
was like, let's write some books for real now. Jane's
family played a huge part in the process of her
writing and her rewriting of these books. In the evenings,
she would read her work aloud to Cassandra and her parents,
testing out her writing on the family, and she would
(09:44):
make notes to herself of what what worked and what
they responded to and what really needed to be revised.
Her father liked first Impressions so much that he wrote
to a publisher to ask how much it would cost
him to publish it at the family's expense. Uh. He
got this inquiry almost immediately marked declined by return of post,
and Jane got to work rewriting the book again. I actually,
(10:07):
I really like this about Jane's fother like he could
have been like, no, this is not a seemly thing
for you to be doing. Novels were not really respected
as a form of literature at this point in history,
and for a woman to be writing novels there were
other women novelists, but it was still kind of a
groundbreaking thing, and not a lot of published women novelists
(10:30):
in particulars. This is not a career women aspired to know,
and people generally thought that poetry and plays were a
much higher genre of literature than novels, where novels were
kind of trashy and scandalous. So um, the fact that
he supported her in all of this, I really like, Yeah,
it's always, uh, sort of refreshing and heartwarming when you
(10:53):
hear about things like that kind of step outside the
boundaries of society's rules in an effort to sort of,
you know, nurse along and nurture somebody's creative spirit. Yeah.
The Austin's pretty much encouraged all their kids too, to
do what they wanted to do and to pursue their
own path in life. So a little bit of an exception.
(11:14):
And in the midst of all of this writing and rewriting, Uh,
an event happened that didn't happen directly to Jane, but
it did really dramatically influence how she lived the rest
of her life. Cassandra was engaged to a man named
Thomas Fowl, and Tom had gone abroad to try to
make enough money to afford to marry, and he and
Cassandra were supposed to get married around Easter of seventeen
(11:36):
nine seven, but he had not come home and the
wedding was postponed until spring, only for Cassandra to find
out many months after the fact that he had actually
died of yellow fever while he was away in February. Yeah,
he he had already passed away when their wedding was
supposed to have transpired, but it took so long for
news to get anywhere at this point that that she
(11:56):
didn't know until much later. He did leave her money
in his will, not enough to make her totally independent,
but she wasn't completely destitute, and she effectively considered herself
to be a widow at this point. She and Jane
had always been extremely close, but from here on out
they basically were one another's primary companions, and a couple
(12:18):
of years later there was another dramatic change in Jane's life.
She returned from visiting friends to learn that her parents
were moving to Bath and turning over the parsonage to
her brother James and his family. So Jane and Cassandra
were still mostly dependent on their parents at this point,
so that meant that they were going to be moving
to So Cassandra destroyed all of the letters that Jane
(12:40):
wrote to her about this, and that's something that she
she did with basically, any letter that Jane wrote her
that was extremely personal was destroyed. So we can kind
of glean from that that Jane was pretty upset by
this development. Stevenson was her home and she had, you know,
lived there for whole her whole life, and she and
(13:01):
her sister had to kind of watch as its furnishings
were divided up among their brothers. The books and the
and their father's beloved library were all sold off. The
place that had been their home was now their brother's
home and not theirs anymore. So it kind of shook
the foundations of of Jane's world a little bit well,
and her new location added to that because Bath was
(13:24):
much more urban than Steventon had been, and there were
also many more social demands, and Jane's parents had actually
met in Bath when they were about her age, so
she sort of had this feeling that it was on
her to do list when they moved there to find
a husband. Scholars don't completely agree about how this move
(13:44):
affected her writing. There are some who use the lack
of letters and new manuscripts and new novels written in
Bath as evidence that the whole thing was so distressing
that Jane just couldn't write. But there are others who
insist that she had always been writing and she wouldn't
let she wouldn't have let moving stop her, so that
they theorized more that she was like rewriting. It was
(14:05):
a revision period rather than a new work period. Um,
but we don't know for sure. I don't know for sure,
And regardless, there's a pretty big gap in her writing
output at this point. Yeah, at least in terms of
new content, we weren't seeing anything. We don't have tons,
unlike that three years where she was just like streaming.
Here are my three new books that didn't really happen
(14:26):
while she was in Bath. Her biggest life of him
during the Bath years actually happened back in Hampshire, when
Jane and Cassandra went to visit their friends, the Big
Sisters in December of eighteen o two. Their brother Harris Big,
asked Jane to marry him while she was there. They
had known each other since they were very young and
Jane accepted his proposal, but their engagement only lasted one night.
(14:52):
It's possible that being in the BIG's house, where she
and Tom mcfroy had spent time in one another's company,
sort of stirred up old memories of a more passionate relationship,
and whatever the reasons, in the morning, Jane called the
engagement off as gently as she could, and she and Cassandra,
who had planned to stay for several weeks, asked to
be taken home immediately. Yeah, I can imagine the awkwardness
(15:15):
of yes, I will marry you, and in the morning
going not so much, Yes, I'm gonna go now. Well,
and as with Tom, this all worked out fine for Harris.
He got married to someone else two years later and
they had ten children. Uh. Fortunately, it also does not
seem to have soured Jane's relationship with with the rest
(15:36):
of the Big family. They were still friends after that,
even though they had She had had this extremely awkward,
less than twenty four hour engagement to their brother was
kind of funny, uh, And her one night engagement to
Harris Big seems to have kicked started Jane's desire to
write again and actually get her work published. After all,
if she did not get married, she was gonna have
(15:58):
to find a way to manage once her parents passed away. Yeah,
this was the reality of being a woman at this point.
If you did not have money, either from your family
or from your husband, then you did not have money.
That was how it worked. Jane's brother, Henry, became her
literary agent, and he also got the help of a
lawyer named William Seymour. The first book that they turned
(16:19):
their eye to was Northinger Abbey, which at the time,
as we said earlier, was called Susan. They sold it
to a London publisher named Richard Crosby for ten pounds,
and although he advertised the book, he never actually did
anything with it. And Jane also started on a new book,
one that she never finished and had more direct parallels
to her own life than any of her other books.
(16:40):
It was called The Watsons and it was about four
impoverished daughters trying to find husbands before their father died.
She planned to kill off the father in the book,
but then her own father died in January of eighteen
o five after a brief and sudden illness. One of
the saddest parts of that part of the story is
that it fell to Jane to write to her brother
Frank about their father's death, and after she had written
(17:03):
and sent that letter, her sister got another letter from
him that revealed that his ship was in Portsmouth, and
that was not where the first letter had been sent,
so Jane had to do that all over again. Kind
of makes your heart hurt. Her father had never had
much money, but his death meant that Jane and Cassandra
(17:23):
and their mother were basically completely penniless. They had to
move into smaller lodgings immediately. James Henry and Frank Austin
each offered to give them fifty pounds a year to
help make ends meet, and Frank, who was the most
well off, had originally offered a hundred pounds, but Jane's
mother would only accept half of that amount. So at
this point, Jane's mother had a little bit of money
(17:45):
of her own, Cassandra had inherited a little bit from
her deceased fiance. Jane, more than anyone else, was just
completely dependent on other people's generosity for every penny she had.
And on top of that, brothers, while you know they
seem to have had good intentions about wanting to look
after their mother and their sisters, but they kind of
(18:06):
just took for granted that whatever arrangements they made were
going to be okay with her. Um. They would make,
you know, arrangements for getting the women from one place
to another without consulting them first, and then Jane would
sort of be like, actually, I am I have plans
to be in this place with these people at that time, UM,
(18:27):
it was just sort of awkward. They all of their
moving around had to happen at the convenience of other people. Um.
And so for about a year they did. They moved
around a whole lot, and it mainly had to live
off the generosity of others. I can imagine that being
incredibly stressful. I do not like that idea much at all,
(18:49):
and no like my independent spirit just like feels all
trapped thinking about it. Uh. In eighteen oh six, Frank,
who was in the Navy, suggested that the Austin Ladies
actually share a home with his wife to be because
he would be at sea a lot, and so they
lived together in Southampton for about three years. Then in
eighteen o nine they made the move to Jane's most
(19:10):
famous home, Chotton cottage. And before we talk about what
happened there, let's take a moment for a word from
our sponsor, back to the the home where Jane Austen
got most of her work that was published during her
lifetime completed and published. Chotten Cottage was part of Edward
(19:32):
Austin's estate and he offered it to the Austin Ladies
when it's tenant died, so Jane, Cassandra, and their mother
all moved there, along with a sister in law in
eighteen o nine. And that same year Jane wrote to
Richard Crosby, the publisher who had bought Susan, asking when
he might publish it. Uh. He said he didn't plan
to do anything with it, and offered to sell it
(19:52):
back to her for ten pounds, which of course she
did not have. I have I have an audio book
that is a collection of some of the letters to
and from Jane Austen Um And after reading the response
to this letter, there's a sound effect of her just
like crumpling up the paper. Um Like ten pounds does
(20:14):
not sound like a lot. But she did not have
the money to buy it back, and the publisher was
just not going to do anything with it um. Once
they were in this cottage, the four women lived a
pretty quiet life. Jane and Cassandra shared a bedroom, and
Jane would get up first and play the piano for
a while and then make breakfast for everyone. And she
was otherwise exempt from most of the other household duties
(20:37):
as long as Martha, the sister in law, and Cassandra
were there to do them, and so she spent most
of her time writing. The first book that Henry was
able to find a publisher for was Sense and Sensibility,
and it was published in eighteen tens through Military Library
Whitehall at Henry's expense. Its author was simply listed as
(20:57):
a lady. A lady wrote Sense and Sensibility. The lady
wrote it. Uh. It came out at the end of
eighteen eleven, and its first run had sold out by
eighteen thirteen. Jane made a hundred and forty pounds on it,
which gave her a little independence. I mean, it was
not enough money to to totally live off of, but
she was no longer one percent dependent on other people.
(21:17):
She could at least go by postage or plan, you know,
a trip to visit a friend without having to ask
other people for many on. Thomas Edgerton, the publisher at
Military Library, was ready for another book before the printing
sold out, so she sold him Pride and Prejudice for
a hundred and ten pounds. Her name still did not
appear on the book. It was simply printed as being
(21:38):
by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and her identity
of the author as the author was mostly kept secret
outside the immediate family for years, so nobody knew that
she was writing these bestselling novels. The next book, and
another sold out print run, was Mansfield Park, and after
that came Emma, which she worked on between January eighteen
(21:59):
fourteen in March eighteen fifteen, and very gradually a few
people outside the immediate family started to learn that Jane
was the person writing all these books. And for reasons
that aren't entirely clear, uh Edgerton was not interested in
publishing a second run of Mansfield Park, and he didn't
publish Emma. Another publisher, John Murray, published it on commission.
(22:23):
So even though she was wildly successful for him and
he was probably making a lot of money, it was
like he wasn't really into keeping that writing. Yeah, I
don't know if i'd go so far as to say
wildly successful. They were definitely successful, but she was not.
She wasn't like, she wasn't writing this centuries version of
Harry Potter. Like. Things were doing pretty well, they were
(22:46):
getting good reviews, but it wasn't like people were lining
up at the docks to get the first printing off
the ship. I'm trying to somehow my brain make that
similar to Oprah's Book Club, and it's not working yet. Um.
It was actually a little later before it became like,
oh this is these are the greatest books and everyone
should read them. Um. As she was working on Emma,
(23:08):
Jane received word that the Prince Regent, George the Fourth
was a fan of hers. His librarian asked her to
come visit Carlton House, which was the Prince Regent's London residents,
which she did. He also told her that she might
dedicate the next book to the Prince Regent, which she
also did. Her what she actually wrote at the dedication
was very simple. What actually wound up on the you know,
(23:32):
the the title page a lot more elaborate. Um. So yeah,
she she definitely had fans and high high places. And
at this point it seems as though things were going
quite well for Jane and the rest of the Austin's,
but in eighteen sixteen the family fell on hard times.
The ship that her brother Charles was commanding wrecked in
(23:53):
the Mediterranean. He survived, but he did not get another
command for a decade, and her brother Frank, an admiral
by this time, was on half pay. Both of these
reversals of fortune were ultimately because England was finally no
longer at war with France, and on top of that,
the bank that Jane's brother Henry was running also failed
and Henry went bankrupt. Henry and Frank at this point
(24:16):
had both still been contributing their fifty pounds a year
to kind of the upkeep of their mother and sisters,
but now neither of them could afford to do it anymore,
and even though Jane was earning money from her books,
this did put a big dent in her finances. Henry
eventually set out to be ordained and he was given
the curacy at Shotton, which helped a little bit. Jane
(24:37):
finally saved up enough money to buy back Northanger Abbey.
She also started working on persuasion, which at the time
was called the Elliotts it is my favorite of her books. UM.
I did not totally realize until working on this podcast.
If you have not read Persuasion, I have not. UM.
I love it that the heroine of Persuasion basically has
(24:57):
a second chance, uh to sort of revive the first
love of her youth when she is a much older woman.
I mean not she's not exceptionally old, but she's a
little older than than the heroines of these books often are. UM.
And I didn't quite realize that where Jane was at
this point in her life was she she was just
about to turn forty. She was, it was pretty clear
(25:21):
to her that it was unlikely that she was going
to have another romance in her life, and um, that
made that book a little more poiant for me. Also,
around the time that Jane turned forty, she started to
feel kind of vaguely unwell. Since they didn't like bath,
Jane and Cassandra went to Cheltenham to take the waters there,
(25:42):
and Jane thought it made her feel a little bit better,
but by the time they returned home, she was starting
to have pain and fevers, and her letters continue to
insist that she was getting better, but in fact her
health declined. Before she became too ill to write, she
started on a book she called The Brothers, which she
never or finished. You can't find partial versions of it,
(26:03):
uh and versions of it that people have completed on
her behalf today under the name of Sandaton. Eventually, at
the insistence of her family, Jane was moved to Winchester
to be closer to medical care and from there. On
April seventeen, she wrote out a will, leaving everything to
Cassandra except for two fifty pound legacies. One was to
(26:26):
her brother Henry, who had been her literary agent effectively
for so long, and the other was to a friend
uh Madame Bijean, who had worked for her cousin Eliza.
Eliza was quite a dramatic character. We've talked almost not
about in this podcast, but she she could be a
subject of her own She was perhaps she was. She
(26:47):
was quite larger than life. On July seventeenth, after briefly rallying,
Jane had some sort of seizure. Afterward, Cassandra sat with
her for six hours with her sister's head on a
hello in her lamp, and sister in law Mary took
over for two hours in the middle of the night
with Cassandra returning to her post at about three in
(27:07):
the morning, and Jane died approximately an hour later on
the morning of the eighteenth of eighteen seventeen. Let her
written to their niece Fannie. Cassandra wrote, of Jane, she
was the son of my life, the guilder of every pleasure,
the soother of every sorrow. I had not a thought
concealed from her, and it is as if I had
lost a part of myself. Their brother Henry, secured permission
(27:31):
for Jane to be buried in the Winchester Cathedral. They
had a very early morning funeral so as not to
interrupt the church services that would happen later in the day,
and while the casket was open, Cassandra caught cut some
locks of Jane's hair, some to keep and some to
give to others. At least one of these survives until today.
Her obituary reads Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the
(27:55):
late Reverend George Austin, Rector of Steventon in the Country
and Authoress of Emma Mansfield Park. Pride and prejudice and
sense and sensibility. Her manners were gentle, her affections aren't
her candor was not to be surpassed, and she lived
and died as became a humble Christian. The marker for
her burial place, on the other hand, makes no mention
(28:17):
of the books. I don't I don't really say. Ah,
he's still kind of a secret, yeah, I mean this
was that was really the first public announcement of all
of these books being attributed to her, and her cause
of death. We still don't exactly know. For many years,
people pointed to Addison's disease because it fits some of
(28:39):
the symptoms that she described when she wrote about how
she felt in her letters. But Addison's also caused vomiting
and dehydration, which she said nothing about, and she had
additional symptoms that are not normally associated with Addison's. There's
a lot of speculation about exactly what happened. She was
only forty one, and uh the the that was the
(29:00):
youngest age at which any of her siblings passed away.
They all the rest of them all lived to much
older ages than she did. As executricks of the estate,
Cassandra had Catherine and the Elliotts, which were renamed north
Inger Abbey, and Persuasion published together as one book. After
(29:23):
Jane's death. This volume contained a biographical note that named
Jane Austen as their author, and this was the first
time that her actual name had appeared on any of
her books. In eighteen sixty nine, James Edward, who was
one of Jane's nephews, wrote a memoir of Jane Austen.
This presents her a sort of a spinster who wrote
to amuse herself and her family. So it's really the
(29:45):
genesis of that ongoing characterization, which is not so much
accurate to know. She definitely like she started having a
goal of becoming a published writer and making enough money
to have some measure of in dependance based on her writing.
It was not sort of a I'm going to sit
here in the corner and pleasantly right and maybe able
(30:07):
amuse all of you. And I'm sure he wrote that
through a lens of tenderness, like he didn't mean to
make her seem smaller or less in charge of her
life than she was, but it kind of did mess
with her public image historically. Yeah. Well, and as we
alluded to earlier, she did make some money off of
her books while she was alive, and their print runs
generally did sell out, but it was really about a
(30:30):
hundred years before they came popular to the way that
they are today. Her books started to get scholarly attention
in the nineteen twenties as as uh, you know, literary
theorists and critics started to recognize them as masterpieces, and
that is really when they became the sort of worldwide
(30:51):
phenomenon that they are now. Jane, who I know is
near and dear to your heart, She's very near and
dear to my heart. I love her it a lot,
and I used this episode as an excuse to buy
every Jane Austen thing that I wanted. So I now
have this immense volume of her collected letters that's like,
(31:15):
it's it's huge, it's it's it's as long as a
Harry Potter novel, one of the long Harry Potter ones. Um.
I also there are annotated versions of her books, which
I love, that have the story on one page, and
then on the facing page they are all these notes
about what's going on, which like it makes them twice
as long as the books normally are, but there's so
(31:37):
much but like four times as rich. Yeah, They're like
there are things where as a modern reader you might
not pick up on the fact that this thing this
person said just now was a marriage proposal. Um, but
it was so. Yeah, I bought the three of those
for the three of her books that I did not
(31:57):
already have, I bought to buy bography was very much
a Jane Austen shopping spree at my house. But that's
all good stuff. I love that you will treasure for years. Yeah,
I will, I will, definitely will I have this like giant.
I already had sort of a giant collection of Jane
Austen stuff, and now you have a Jane Austen situation. Yeah. Yeah,
(32:21):
my own my own book that does not exist in
reality as a published thing, is very heavily Jane Austen influence.
So this was my wish fulfillment episode. Do you also
have listener mails? Yes, I do. This is from Alec
Alex says. I've recently discovered your lovely podcasts and I've
(32:41):
really been enjoying listening to all the varied topics you
guys have talked about. Great work I did. However, I
want to make a quick point concerning your recent podcast
on the Pueblo Revolts. When discussing the ancient origins of
the Pueblo peoples. You use the term anasazi in your description.
I don't blame you for this choice at all, as
it is over willingly common to use anasazi in modern
(33:02):
history and archaeology, but more recently it has become more
of a touchy subject. The reason is that anasazi is
actually a Navajo word taken by Europeans to refer to
the ancient people that had built the pueblos they saw
as they came into what is now the American Southwest.
They often had Navajo guides when and when asking them
who built those pueblos, it is commonly believed that they
(33:25):
replied with the term anasazi, which translates loosely to enemy
of ancestor. As someone who is studying archaeology, I thought
I should bring this to your attention. Is it is
really a shame that the term we've adopted for these
ancient peoples isn't even from their own dialect. In the
archaeological community, many of us have taken to referring them
as ancestral Pueblo, which isn't exactly perfect, but is certainly
(33:48):
better than referring to them as the enemies of our ancestors. Hopefully,
this doesn't just seemed like political correctness for the sake
of political correctness to you, and you'll keep it in
mind for future discussions. Keep up the great work, Alec.
I had no idea me either. Um, I had no idea.
And then when I went to because you know, I
I want to innately trust everything or our listeners sent
(34:10):
to us, but occasionally we get corrections that are themselves
not correct um. And so I went to try to
confirm this, and it took some doing to to find that.
I mean, I'm sure we will get notes from people
are like you could have read that at Wikipedia, but
we try to do our resources from primary sources as
much as possible. Um. And so it Yeah, it took
a little doing to find out that that really is
(34:32):
the case. I had no idea. And now, as a
personal side note, I have this moment of laughter because
many moods ago. I used to manage a hair salon
and I remember at one point, I don't know if
this company is still around, but there was a hair
Caroline called an a Saucy. Yeah. Well, now I'm like,
that is weird. Yeah, And I can't remember who I
(34:52):
was talking to. I was talking to somebody and they
were like, oh, yeah, I found that. I found that
out when I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and
I was like, I've read that book and that did
not stick in my head me either, and I also
read it. I also want to have a little note
about quote, political correctness. I kind of want anybody who's
gonna say something about political correctness substitute the words being respectful,
(35:17):
because that's really all the political correctness is. We get
a lot of flaks sometimes for quote trying to be
political politically correct. What we are trying to be is
respectful of other people. Yeah, that's like part of the
goal of this whole podcast. So what other people do, Yeah,
do not feel the need to apologize if there is
(35:38):
something that you feel like it's motivated from political correctness,
because what that really really boils down to you is
not being disrespectful of other people. Yeah, and like disregarding
important historical elements that would inform our knowledge. Yeah, it
would be awesome if we had a word that was
neither ancestral pleblos, since it's like a Spanish word that
(36:01):
was made to describe the houses that people lived in,
and also not anasazi, since that is a Navajo word
like that does not mean what it should mean in
the way it has been adopted. Nope, So thank you
very much for bringing that to our attention. I had
no idea. Uh. If you would like to write to us,
you can. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(36:22):
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History and on Twitter at missed in History. Our
tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and
our pinterest is at pinterest dot com slash missed in History.
If you would like to learn a little bit more
about what we have talked about today, or more specifically,
what Jane Austen wrote about extensively as a core concept
and all of her writing, you can come to our website.
(36:45):
Put the word marriage in the search bar and you
will find betruths through the centuries, a timeline of marriage.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it has stuff works dot com. E
Hey, we know we have some dedicated listeners who've been
with the show from day one or have taken the plunge,
gone all the way through the back catalog, listen to
all nine hundred plus episodes in the archive. Huge shout
out to those folks. That is a commitment. But we
also know that we have lots of new listeners who
haven't heard some of our older material. So to welcome
(00:23):
them and introduce them to some of our our older stuff,
We're gonna try something new on Saturday's. We're going to
re air some of our favorites from the past. To
kick it off, we have our Jane Austin episode, which
originally aired March and aside for being a personal favorite
of mine because I love her, she's the one that
was requested again and again, and she had even been
on the wish list for these shows prior hosts before
(00:46):
we even came on board. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
(01:06):
I'm Holly Fry and we're just gonna get two things
out in the open. At the beginning of this episode,
Thing number one. Jane Austen was not just a shy
spinster who wrote some little books mostly to amuse herself
and her own family. That's a common rumor. It's a
common rumor that is false. Another common maybe not rumor,
but another perception that is false. She was not like
(01:29):
the real life version of Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Yeah,
and I think that dovetails on the rumor, like people
think that her books were some sort of personal wish
fulfillment scenario, yeah, or sort of a fictionalization of her
own life, and they really were not. There. There's some
(01:50):
little things that you will read and Jane Austen books
that do have a little tie into her own life,
but for the most part, these were very, very definitely
fictional books from her imagination, not from real things that
had happened to her. Um. She is one of our
most requested writers, for sure, lots of people asking us
(02:10):
to talk about Jane Austen. So we're going to do
that today, talk about her not at all Jane Austen
novel like life, um, starting of course at the beginning. Yeah,
it was completely unlike any of the heroines in her books,
just not the same as her fictional world now. She
was born on December sixteenth, seventeen seventy five and Steventon, Hampshire,
(02:34):
and she was the seventh child and second daughter of
George Austen, who was an Anglican rector, and his wife Cassandra.
And she was christened the following April five and she
spent a little more than a year after that in
the care of another family in the village. She was
close enough that her parents could visit and for her
to be brought to the parsonage to visit as well,
(02:55):
and Jane went to live at home again once she
was a toddler. All of the Austin children at scept
for her brother George, who had uh some kind of
developmental disability, followed the same pattern like this was their
family practice, to send the children away and then bring
them back. It was an extremely successful practice. All of
the Austin children lived into adulthood, which is not common
(03:17):
at the time and not common at the time at
all um uh And by all accounts they were an
exceptionally modest family. I mean, it's eight children in the
end being raised on a rector's salary, which was not
a lot of money, but they were exceptionally intelligent and literate.
Jane and her siblings and the many many cousins and
(03:38):
friends who would come to visit them and stay for
a while. We're also really creative and they like to
do things like put on plays together, and they made
extensive use of their father's five hundred volume library, which
is really where Jane cut her teeth on the world
of language. And if you've read any novel by Jane Austen,
or even seen any adaptation for film or television or
(03:59):
the screen, mean, you've probably picked up on the theme
that being smart and articulate can make up for not
inheriting a fortune. And this really was one of the
Jane Austen's family family's values, having been written down in
almost those precise words by her father's grandmother long before
Jane was even born, that you can make something of
(04:20):
yourself even if you didn't inherit tons of money when
Jane was a child. This is to me where things
really diverge. If you are a fan of Jane Austen,
like they're they're definitely interesting male characters, but the focus
is really on the women and the women's lives and
the sort of the other women and the other sisters
(04:41):
and the cousins and the moms, and yeah, I think
most people think of her, uh and in some ways
as like a women's writer, really writing a lot about women,
a lot for women. But she grew up in a
house full of boys. She didn't really have that much
exposure to huge groups of women. I would even call
this upbringing overrun with boys. I mean she had she
(05:05):
had all of those brothers, you know, she was just
her and one of her sister, all of these brothers.
Her mother and father ran a boys school out of
their home to try to you know, make ends meet,
and so um, you know, Jane and her sister would
share a room and all the other bedrooms were full
of all these boys, and her father taught her brothers
(05:26):
and all of these other male children. And so she
lived in this like very rowdy, noisy, boyish environment and
kind of what we would think of as a tomboy
kind of sense um until she was seven and went
away to boarding school with her sister Cassandra, and their
cousin named Jane Cooper went to the same school as well.
So from the toddler ages that she came back from
(05:47):
being with a wet nurse in the village until the
age of seven. Uh, noisy boy time all over the
place in Jane Austen's world. It stresses me out just
thinking about it. I kind of love it, many people do.
I'm not great with the loud children noises well, and
the thing that it reminds me of on on my
mom's side of the family, UM, I have there were
(06:08):
eleven children total in my generation, um, and only three
of us were girls, so kind of a similar proportion, um.
And I like, I remember like the boy footsteps thundering
up and down the stairs, and I kind of imagined
that it was a little bit similar growing up growing
(06:29):
up in this many many boys and and uh boys
that she was related to, and ones who were brought
into study at the school. While I'm like this is stressful,
like hey, noisy fun time, but girls schools at this
point in history tended to be fairly meager and indifferent.
(06:50):
And it seems that the school that Jane went to
was really better than most. But while they are all
three of the girls got sick with what was probably typhus.
They did recover, but Jane Cooper's mother caught the illness
while nursing her back to health, and unfortunately she ultimately
died from it. Now, once they were all well, they
all spent another year at home, with Jane Cooper often
(07:12):
being there as well since her mother had died, and
they eventually all went off to another boarding school what
they only stayed for about a year before coming home
again for good and being taught at home. Jane's first
and perhaps only love was Thomas Langlois la Foy, and
she met him in when he was visiting for the holidays. Well,
(07:32):
they fell in love and were obvious enough about it
that it drew some attention, and soon enough his kids
sent him home again, either to protect Jane from him
or to protect him from Jane. Basically, people did not
want them together. It worked out fine for Thomas, who
married an heiress, but afterwards Jane really had little in
the way of suitors for a very long time. Yeah.
(07:53):
She he definitely got the longer end of the stick
on that whole breakup. Yeah, So let's talk about Jane
the grown up. She was not the only writer in
her family. Her mother panned little poems for the children
and for the students at the school. Jane's oldest brother, James,
was also a writer and a poet, and in January
(08:13):
of seventeen eighty nine he actually started his own magazine,
which was called The Loiterer and it ran for fourteen months.
And Jane's first written works were satires. One was called
Love and Friendship, which satirized romances, and a historical satire
called History of England. When she was around nineteen years old,
she wrote an epistolary novel which, uh, on the off
(08:36):
chance you don't know what that means, it means the
novel that's written as a series of letters, and it
was called Eleanor and mary Anne, which would later become
Sense and Sensibility. Jane's parents stopped teaching in seventeen ninety six,
when Jane was twenty, so at this point the house
became a lot quieter. Uh. That year she started working
on First Impressions, which would later become Pride and Prejudice,
(09:00):
and about a year later she started rewriting Eleanor and
mary Anne, changing it from this series of letters into
a more linear narrative. She also wrote her first draft
of Northanger Abbey, which was originally called Susan between sev seventine,
so she basically banged out the bulk of three novels
in as many years, super productive. I'm kind of imagining
(09:23):
now that it was not quite so reality in the
house and she had a little headspace to herself. She
was like, let's write some books for real now. Jane's
family played a huge part in the process of her
writing and her rewriting of these books. In the evenings,
she would read her work aloud to Cassandra and her parents,
testing out her writing on the family, and she would
(09:44):
make notes to herself of what what worked and what
they responded to and what really needed to be revised.
Her father liked first Impressions so much that he wrote
to a publisher to ask how much it would cost
him to publish it at the family's expense. Uh. He
got this inquiry almost immediately marked declined by return of post,
and Jane got to work rewriting the book again. I actually,
(10:07):
I really like this about Jane's fother like he could
have been like, no, this is not a seemly thing
for you to be doing. Novels were not really respected
as a form of literature at this point in history,
and for a woman to be writing novels there were
other women novelists, but it was still kind of a
groundbreaking thing, and not a lot of published women novelists
(10:30):
in particulars. This is not a career women aspired to know,
and people generally thought that poetry and plays were a
much higher genre of literature than novels, where novels were
kind of trashy and scandalous. So um, the fact that
he supported her in all of this, I really like, Yeah,
it's always, uh, sort of refreshing and heartwarming when you
(10:53):
hear about things like that kind of step outside the
boundaries of society's rules in an effort to sort of,
you know, nurse along and nurture somebody's creative spirit. Yeah.
The Austin's pretty much encouraged all their kids too, to
do what they wanted to do and to pursue their
own path in life. So a little bit of an exception.
(11:14):
And in the midst of all of this writing and rewriting, Uh,
an event happened that didn't happen directly to Jane, but
it did really dramatically influence how she lived the rest
of her life. Cassandra was engaged to a man named
Thomas Fowl, and Tom had gone abroad to try to
make enough money to afford to marry, and he and
Cassandra were supposed to get married around Easter of seventeen
(11:36):
nine seven, but he had not come home and the
wedding was postponed until spring, only for Cassandra to find
out many months after the fact that he had actually
died of yellow fever while he was away in February. Yeah,
he he had already passed away when their wedding was
supposed to have transpired, but it took so long for
news to get anywhere at this point that that she
(11:56):
didn't know until much later. He did leave her money
in his will, not enough to make her totally independent,
but she wasn't completely destitute, and she effectively considered herself
to be a widow at this point. She and Jane
had always been extremely close, but from here on out
they basically were one another's primary companions, and a couple
(12:18):
of years later there was another dramatic change in Jane's life.
She returned from visiting friends to learn that her parents
were moving to Bath and turning over the parsonage to
her brother James and his family. So Jane and Cassandra
were still mostly dependent on their parents at this point,
so that meant that they were going to be moving
to So Cassandra destroyed all of the letters that Jane
(12:40):
wrote to her about this, and that's something that she
she did with basically, any letter that Jane wrote her
that was extremely personal was destroyed. So we can kind
of glean from that that Jane was pretty upset by
this development. Stevenson was her home and she had, you know,
lived there for whole her whole life, and she and
(13:01):
her sister had to kind of watch as its furnishings
were divided up among their brothers. The books and the
and their father's beloved library were all sold off. The
place that had been their home was now their brother's
home and not theirs anymore. So it kind of shook
the foundations of of Jane's world a little bit well,
and her new location added to that because Bath was
(13:24):
much more urban than Steventon had been, and there were
also many more social demands, and Jane's parents had actually
met in Bath when they were about her age, so
she sort of had this feeling that it was on
her to do list when they moved there to find
a husband. Scholars don't completely agree about how this move
(13:44):
affected her writing. There are some who use the lack
of letters and new manuscripts and new novels written in
Bath as evidence that the whole thing was so distressing
that Jane just couldn't write. But there are others who
insist that she had always been writing and she wouldn't
let she wouldn't have let moving stop her, so that
they theorized more that she was like rewriting. It was
(14:05):
a revision period rather than a new work period. Um,
but we don't know for sure. I don't know for sure,
And regardless, there's a pretty big gap in her writing
output at this point. Yeah, at least in terms of
new content, we weren't seeing anything. We don't have tons,
unlike that three years where she was just like streaming.
Here are my three new books that didn't really happen
(14:26):
while she was in Bath. Her biggest life of him
during the Bath years actually happened back in Hampshire, when
Jane and Cassandra went to visit their friends, the Big
Sisters in December of eighteen o two. Their brother Harris Big,
asked Jane to marry him while she was there. They
had known each other since they were very young and
Jane accepted his proposal, but their engagement only lasted one night.
(14:52):
It's possible that being in the BIG's house, where she
and Tom mcfroy had spent time in one another's company,
sort of stirred up old memories of a more passionate relationship,
and whatever the reasons, in the morning, Jane called the
engagement off as gently as she could, and she and Cassandra,
who had planned to stay for several weeks, asked to
be taken home immediately. Yeah, I can imagine the awkwardness
(15:15):
of yes, I will marry you, and in the morning
going not so much, Yes, I'm gonna go now. Well,
and as with Tom, this all worked out fine for Harris.
He got married to someone else two years later and
they had ten children. Uh. Fortunately, it also does not
seem to have soured Jane's relationship with with the rest
(15:36):
of the Big family. They were still friends after that,
even though they had She had had this extremely awkward,
less than twenty four hour engagement to their brother was
kind of funny, uh, And her one night engagement to
Harris Big seems to have kicked started Jane's desire to
write again and actually get her work published. After all,
if she did not get married, she was gonna have
(15:58):
to find a way to manage once her parents passed away. Yeah,
this was the reality of being a woman at this point.
If you did not have money, either from your family
or from your husband, then you did not have money.
That was how it worked. Jane's brother, Henry, became her
literary agent, and he also got the help of a
lawyer named William Seymour. The first book that they turned
(16:19):
their eye to was Northinger Abbey, which at the time,
as we said earlier, was called Susan. They sold it
to a London publisher named Richard Crosby for ten pounds,
and although he advertised the book, he never actually did
anything with it. And Jane also started on a new book,
one that she never finished and had more direct parallels
to her own life than any of her other books.
(16:40):
It was called The Watsons and it was about four
impoverished daughters trying to find husbands before their father died.
She planned to kill off the father in the book,
but then her own father died in January of eighteen
o five after a brief and sudden illness. One of
the saddest parts of that part of the story is
that it fell to Jane to write to her brother
Frank about their father's death, and after she had written
(17:03):
and sent that letter, her sister got another letter from
him that revealed that his ship was in Portsmouth, and
that was not where the first letter had been sent,
so Jane had to do that all over again. Kind
of makes your heart hurt. Her father had never had
much money, but his death meant that Jane and Cassandra
(17:23):
and their mother were basically completely penniless. They had to
move into smaller lodgings immediately. James Henry and Frank Austin
each offered to give them fifty pounds a year to
help make ends meet, and Frank, who was the most
well off, had originally offered a hundred pounds, but Jane's
mother would only accept half of that amount. So at
this point, Jane's mother had a little bit of money
(17:45):
of her own, Cassandra had inherited a little bit from
her deceased fiance. Jane, more than anyone else, was just
completely dependent on other people's generosity for every penny she had.
And on top of that, brothers, while you know they
seem to have had good intentions about wanting to look
after their mother and their sisters, but they kind of
(18:06):
just took for granted that whatever arrangements they made were
going to be okay with her. Um. They would make,
you know, arrangements for getting the women from one place
to another without consulting them first, and then Jane would
sort of be like, actually, I am I have plans
to be in this place with these people at that time, UM,
(18:27):
it was just sort of awkward. They all of their
moving around had to happen at the convenience of other people. Um.
And so for about a year they did. They moved
around a whole lot, and it mainly had to live
off the generosity of others. I can imagine that being
incredibly stressful. I do not like that idea much at all,
(18:49):
and no like my independent spirit just like feels all
trapped thinking about it. Uh. In eighteen oh six, Frank,
who was in the Navy, suggested that the Austin Ladies
actually share a home with his wife to be because
he would be at sea a lot, and so they
lived together in Southampton for about three years. Then in
eighteen o nine they made the move to Jane's most
(19:10):
famous home, Chotton cottage. And before we talk about what
happened there, let's take a moment for a word from
our sponsor, back to the the home where Jane Austen
got most of her work that was published during her
lifetime completed and published. Chotten Cottage was part of Edward
(19:32):
Austin's estate and he offered it to the Austin Ladies
when it's tenant died, so Jane, Cassandra, and their mother
all moved there, along with a sister in law in
eighteen o nine. And that same year Jane wrote to
Richard Crosby, the publisher who had bought Susan, asking when
he might publish it. Uh. He said he didn't plan
to do anything with it, and offered to sell it
(19:52):
back to her for ten pounds, which of course she
did not have. I have I have an audio book
that is a collection of some of the letters to
and from Jane Austen Um And after reading the response
to this letter, there's a sound effect of her just
like crumpling up the paper. Um Like ten pounds does
(20:14):
not sound like a lot. But she did not have
the money to buy it back, and the publisher was
just not going to do anything with it um. Once
they were in this cottage, the four women lived a
pretty quiet life. Jane and Cassandra shared a bedroom, and
Jane would get up first and play the piano for
a while and then make breakfast for everyone. And she
was otherwise exempt from most of the other household duties
(20:37):
as long as Martha, the sister in law, and Cassandra
were there to do them, and so she spent most
of her time writing. The first book that Henry was
able to find a publisher for was Sense and Sensibility,
and it was published in eighteen tens through Military Library
Whitehall at Henry's expense. Its author was simply listed as
(20:57):
a lady. A lady wrote Sense and Sensibility. The lady
wrote it. Uh. It came out at the end of
eighteen eleven, and its first run had sold out by
eighteen thirteen. Jane made a hundred and forty pounds on it,
which gave her a little independence. I mean, it was
not enough money to to totally live off of, but
she was no longer one percent dependent on other people.
(21:17):
She could at least go by postage or plan, you know,
a trip to visit a friend without having to ask
other people for many on. Thomas Edgerton, the publisher at
Military Library, was ready for another book before the printing
sold out, so she sold him Pride and Prejudice for
a hundred and ten pounds. Her name still did not
appear on the book. It was simply printed as being
(21:38):
by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and her identity
of the author as the author was mostly kept secret
outside the immediate family for years, so nobody knew that
she was writing these bestselling novels. The next book, and
another sold out print run, was Mansfield Park, and after
that came Emma, which she worked on between January eighteen
(21:59):
fourteen in March eighteen fifteen, and very gradually a few
people outside the immediate family started to learn that Jane
was the person writing all these books. And for reasons
that aren't entirely clear, uh Edgerton was not interested in
publishing a second run of Mansfield Park, and he didn't
publish Emma. Another publisher, John Murray, published it on commission.
(22:23):
So even though she was wildly successful for him and
he was probably making a lot of money, it was
like he wasn't really into keeping that writing. Yeah, I
don't know if i'd go so far as to say
wildly successful. They were definitely successful, but she was not.
She wasn't like, she wasn't writing this centuries version of
Harry Potter. Like. Things were doing pretty well, they were
(22:46):
getting good reviews, but it wasn't like people were lining
up at the docks to get the first printing off
the ship. I'm trying to somehow my brain make that
similar to Oprah's Book Club, and it's not working yet. Um.
It was actually a little later before it became like,
oh this is these are the greatest books and everyone
should read them. Um. As she was working on Emma,
(23:08):
Jane received word that the Prince Regent, George the Fourth
was a fan of hers. His librarian asked her to
come visit Carlton House, which was the Prince Regent's London residents,
which she did. He also told her that she might
dedicate the next book to the Prince Regent, which she
also did. Her what she actually wrote at the dedication
was very simple. What actually wound up on the you know,
(23:32):
the the title page a lot more elaborate. Um. So yeah,
she she definitely had fans and high high places. And
at this point it seems as though things were going
quite well for Jane and the rest of the Austin's,
but in eighteen sixteen the family fell on hard times.
The ship that her brother Charles was commanding wrecked in
(23:53):
the Mediterranean. He survived, but he did not get another
command for a decade, and her brother Frank, an admiral
by this time, was on half pay. Both of these
reversals of fortune were ultimately because England was finally no
longer at war with France, and on top of that,
the bank that Jane's brother Henry was running also failed
and Henry went bankrupt. Henry and Frank at this point
(24:16):
had both still been contributing their fifty pounds a year
to kind of the upkeep of their mother and sisters,
but now neither of them could afford to do it anymore,
and even though Jane was earning money from her books,
this did put a big dent in her finances. Henry
eventually set out to be ordained and he was given
the curacy at Shotton, which helped a little bit. Jane
(24:37):
finally saved up enough money to buy back Northanger Abbey.
She also started working on persuasion, which at the time
was called the Elliotts it is my favorite of her books. UM.
I did not totally realize until working on this podcast.
If you have not read Persuasion, I have not. UM.
I love it that the heroine of Persuasion basically has
(24:57):
a second chance, uh to sort of revive the first
love of her youth when she is a much older woman.
I mean not she's not exceptionally old, but she's a
little older than than the heroines of these books often are. UM.
And I didn't quite realize that where Jane was at
this point in her life was she she was just
about to turn forty. She was, it was pretty clear
(25:21):
to her that it was unlikely that she was going
to have another romance in her life, and um, that
made that book a little more poiant for me. Also,
around the time that Jane turned forty, she started to
feel kind of vaguely unwell. Since they didn't like bath,
Jane and Cassandra went to Cheltenham to take the waters there,
(25:42):
and Jane thought it made her feel a little bit better,
but by the time they returned home, she was starting
to have pain and fevers, and her letters continue to
insist that she was getting better, but in fact her
health declined. Before she became too ill to write, she
started on a book she called The Brothers, which she
never or finished. You can't find partial versions of it,
(26:03):
uh and versions of it that people have completed on
her behalf today under the name of Sandaton. Eventually, at
the insistence of her family, Jane was moved to Winchester
to be closer to medical care and from there. On
April seventeen, she wrote out a will, leaving everything to
Cassandra except for two fifty pound legacies. One was to
(26:26):
her brother Henry, who had been her literary agent effectively
for so long, and the other was to a friend
uh Madame Bijean, who had worked for her cousin Eliza.
Eliza was quite a dramatic character. We've talked almost not
about in this podcast, but she she could be a
subject of her own She was perhaps she was. She
(26:47):
was quite larger than life. On July seventeenth, after briefly rallying,
Jane had some sort of seizure. Afterward, Cassandra sat with
her for six hours with her sister's head on a
hello in her lamp, and sister in law Mary took
over for two hours in the middle of the night
with Cassandra returning to her post at about three in
(27:07):
the morning, and Jane died approximately an hour later on
the morning of the eighteenth of eighteen seventeen. Let her
written to their niece Fannie. Cassandra wrote, of Jane, she
was the son of my life, the guilder of every pleasure,
the soother of every sorrow. I had not a thought
concealed from her, and it is as if I had
lost a part of myself. Their brother Henry, secured permission
(27:31):
for Jane to be buried in the Winchester Cathedral. They
had a very early morning funeral so as not to
interrupt the church services that would happen later in the day,
and while the casket was open, Cassandra caught cut some
locks of Jane's hair, some to keep and some to
give to others. At least one of these survives until today.
Her obituary reads Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the
(27:55):
late Reverend George Austin, Rector of Steventon in the Country
and Authoress of Emma Mansfield Park. Pride and prejudice and
sense and sensibility. Her manners were gentle, her affections aren't
her candor was not to be surpassed, and she lived
and died as became a humble Christian. The marker for
her burial place, on the other hand, makes no mention
(28:17):
of the books. I don't I don't really say. Ah,
he's still kind of a secret, yeah, I mean this
was that was really the first public announcement of all
of these books being attributed to her, and her cause
of death. We still don't exactly know. For many years,
people pointed to Addison's disease because it fits some of
(28:39):
the symptoms that she described when she wrote about how
she felt in her letters. But Addison's also caused vomiting
and dehydration, which she said nothing about, and she had
additional symptoms that are not normally associated with Addison's. There's
a lot of speculation about exactly what happened. She was
only forty one, and uh the the that was the
(29:00):
youngest age at which any of her siblings passed away.
They all the rest of them all lived to much
older ages than she did. As executricks of the estate,
Cassandra had Catherine and the Elliotts, which were renamed north
Inger Abbey, and Persuasion published together as one book. After
(29:23):
Jane's death. This volume contained a biographical note that named
Jane Austen as their author, and this was the first
time that her actual name had appeared on any of
her books. In eighteen sixty nine, James Edward, who was
one of Jane's nephews, wrote a memoir of Jane Austen.
This presents her a sort of a spinster who wrote
to amuse herself and her family. So it's really the
(29:45):
genesis of that ongoing characterization, which is not so much
accurate to know. She definitely like she started having a
goal of becoming a published writer and making enough money
to have some measure of in dependance based on her writing.
It was not sort of a I'm going to sit
here in the corner and pleasantly right and maybe able
(30:07):
amuse all of you. And I'm sure he wrote that
through a lens of tenderness, like he didn't mean to
make her seem smaller or less in charge of her
life than she was, but it kind of did mess
with her public image historically. Yeah. Well, and as we
alluded to earlier, she did make some money off of
her books while she was alive, and their print runs
generally did sell out, but it was really about a
(30:30):
hundred years before they came popular to the way that
they are today. Her books started to get scholarly attention
in the nineteen twenties as as uh, you know, literary
theorists and critics started to recognize them as masterpieces, and
that is really when they became the sort of worldwide
(30:51):
phenomenon that they are now. Jane, who I know is
near and dear to your heart, She's very near and
dear to my heart. I love her it a lot,
and I used this episode as an excuse to buy
every Jane Austen thing that I wanted. So I now
have this immense volume of her collected letters that's like,
(31:15):
it's it's huge, it's it's it's as long as a
Harry Potter novel, one of the long Harry Potter ones. Um.
I also there are annotated versions of her books, which
I love, that have the story on one page, and
then on the facing page they are all these notes
about what's going on, which like it makes them twice
as long as the books normally are, but there's so
(31:37):
much but like four times as rich. Yeah, They're like
there are things where as a modern reader you might
not pick up on the fact that this thing this
person said just now was a marriage proposal. Um, but
it was so. Yeah, I bought the three of those
for the three of her books that I did not
(31:57):
already have, I bought to buy bography was very much
a Jane Austen shopping spree at my house. But that's
all good stuff. I love that you will treasure for years. Yeah,
I will, I will, definitely will I have this like giant.
I already had sort of a giant collection of Jane
Austen stuff, and now you have a Jane Austen situation. Yeah. Yeah,
(32:21):
my own my own book that does not exist in
reality as a published thing, is very heavily Jane Austen influence.
So this was my wish fulfillment episode. Do you also
have listener mails? Yes, I do. This is from Alec
Alex says. I've recently discovered your lovely podcasts and I've
(32:41):
really been enjoying listening to all the varied topics you
guys have talked about. Great work I did. However, I
want to make a quick point concerning your recent podcast
on the Pueblo Revolts. When discussing the ancient origins of
the Pueblo peoples. You use the term anasazi in your description.
I don't blame you for this choice at all, as
it is over willingly common to use anasazi in modern
(33:02):
history and archaeology, but more recently it has become more
of a touchy subject. The reason is that anasazi is
actually a Navajo word taken by Europeans to refer to
the ancient people that had built the pueblos they saw
as they came into what is now the American Southwest.
They often had Navajo guides when and when asking them
who built those pueblos, it is commonly believed that they
(33:25):
replied with the term anasazi, which translates loosely to enemy
of ancestor. As someone who is studying archaeology, I thought
I should bring this to your attention. Is it is
really a shame that the term we've adopted for these
ancient peoples isn't even from their own dialect. In the
archaeological community, many of us have taken to referring them
as ancestral Pueblo, which isn't exactly perfect, but is certainly
(33:48):
better than referring to them as the enemies of our ancestors. Hopefully,
this doesn't just seemed like political correctness for the sake
of political correctness to you, and you'll keep it in
mind for future discussions. Keep up the great work, Alec.
I had no idea me either. Um, I had no idea.
And then when I went to because you know, I
I want to innately trust everything or our listeners sent
(34:10):
to us, but occasionally we get corrections that are themselves
not correct um. And so I went to try to
confirm this, and it took some doing to to find that.
I mean, I'm sure we will get notes from people
are like you could have read that at Wikipedia, but
we try to do our resources from primary sources as
much as possible. Um. And so it Yeah, it took
a little doing to find out that that really is
(34:32):
the case. I had no idea. And now, as a
personal side note, I have this moment of laughter because
many moods ago. I used to manage a hair salon
and I remember at one point, I don't know if
this company is still around, but there was a hair
Caroline called an a Saucy. Yeah. Well, now I'm like,
that is weird. Yeah, And I can't remember who I
(34:52):
was talking to. I was talking to somebody and they
were like, oh, yeah, I found that. I found that
out when I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and
I was like, I've read that book and that did
not stick in my head me either, and I also
read it. I also want to have a little note
about quote, political correctness. I kind of want anybody who's
gonna say something about political correctness substitute the words being respectful,
(35:17):
because that's really all the political correctness is. We get
a lot of flaks sometimes for quote trying to be
political politically correct. What we are trying to be is
respectful of other people. Yeah, that's like part of the
goal of this whole podcast. So what other people do, Yeah,
do not feel the need to apologize if there is
(35:38):
something that you feel like it's motivated from political correctness,
because what that really really boils down to you is
not being disrespectful of other people. Yeah, and like disregarding
important historical elements that would inform our knowledge. Yeah, it
would be awesome if we had a word that was
neither ancestral pleblos, since it's like a Spanish word that
(36:01):
was made to describe the houses that people lived in,
and also not anasazi, since that is a Navajo word
like that does not mean what it should mean in
the way it has been adopted. Nope, So thank you
very much for bringing that to our attention. I had
no idea. Uh. If you would like to write to us,
you can. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(36:22):
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History and on Twitter at missed in History. Our
tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and
our pinterest is at pinterest dot com slash missed in History.
If you would like to learn a little bit more
about what we have talked about today, or more specifically,
what Jane Austen wrote about extensively as a core concept
and all of her writing, you can come to our website.
(36:45):
Put the word marriage in the search bar and you
will find betruths through the centuries, a timeline of marriage.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it has stuff works dot com. E
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