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