Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since the author’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading researchers. Along the way, we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in. In episode 5, we look what kind of author Austen was, and what we can learn about her view of her profession through the pages of Northanger Abbey.
From a young age Jane Austen harboured lofty writerly ambitions. Her early works, known as juvenilia, are diverse in subject matter, reflecting her wide reading taste. As well as stories that parody some of her favourite novels, such as The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson (1753), there are also witty takes on the essays of British politician Joseph Addison and writer Samuel Johnson, the author of the first English dictionary.
She even tried writing her own history of England. In this short text, 15-year-old Austen proudly declares herself a “partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”, eschewing dates and presenting information from historical fiction, such as Shakespeare’s plays, as fact.
Bentley Edition of Jane Austen’s Novels (1833)
Though she was always a writer, she wasn’t a published one until Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811. By her death in 1817, Austen had published four of her six novels and earned nearly £700 – a modest fortune, but enough to grant a measure of independence to an unmarried woman otherwise reliant on her brothers.
Yet Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral, makes no mention that she was a writer. Publishing anonymously and disliking literary celebrity, she remained largely unknown as a writer in her lifetime despite occasional, reluctant contact with London’s literary circles.
Her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey – written in 1799 but published posthumously – clearly reveals her views on writing and reading books. It follows Catherine Morland, whose love of gothic fiction warps her sense of reality. It brims with Austen’s defence of the novel, dismissed at the time as frivolous women’s entertainment. It also reflects her juvenilia in its parody of gothic fiction – a genre Austen loved deeply, which is reflected in the bookshelves at her home in Chawton.
Naomi Joseph, CC BY-SA
In the fifth episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, Naomi Joseph visits Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire with Louise Curran, lecturer in 18th-century and Romantic literature. Curran is an expert in letter writing, the development of the novel and literary celebrity.
In the lovely red brick cottage where Austen wrote and revised all six of her novels, Curran explains why Austen shied away from the limelight: “You can sort of see it in the kind of writer she is, I guess. I think there is that tension for her really writing the kinds of novels that she wanted to write, that took, as she famously put it, those three and four families in a country village, and are involved with those sort of little matters.”
Later on, Anna Walker sits down with two more Austen experts – Kathryn Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at the University of Oxford, and Anthony Mandal, a lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University – to discover what Northanger Abbey reveals of Austen’s professional life.
As Mandal explains: “The decade [Austen] was publishing in was a heyday for women’s fiction. It was a period when women outnumbered men as novelists … but the reputation of the novel was really low. It was seen as this kind of distracting form of writing, and particularly of reading. It was a waste of time. It stopped you from being a dutiful daughter or wife or mother.”
Austen wasn’t convinced. Sutherland explains that the writer was “hugely ambitious for her own talent and she saw the novel as a moral force as well as a form of entertainment. And that’s essentially what Northanger Abbey is about … the power of the novel both to lead you into misinterpretation, but ultimately, if you become a good reader, to lead you into a wise judgement of the world around you.”
Listen to episode five of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re craving more Austen, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles celebrating the anniversary.
Disclosure statement
Kathryn Sutherland, Louise Curran and Anthony Mandal do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.
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