UK’s Dr. Paula Byrne on Jane Austen’s 250th Anniversary

The Learning Curve Paula Byrne

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas, Searcy, and I have a guest co-host in with me today, Dr. Helen Baxendale. Welcome back. It’s great to be with you again, Alisha, always a pleasure to join you on the podcast. Absolutely. A pleasure to have you as well. So we’re excited about today’s show, but before we get into that, we’ve got a couple of stories to chat about.

[00:00:46] Why don’t you go first? What’s in the news for you?

[00:00:49] Helen Baxendale: Thanks, Alisha. The story I was tracking this week is in Education Week, and the title of the piece is Reading Comprehension Teaching has Improved but Not Nearly Enough by Sarah Schwartz, and it’s an interesting report on a review paper put out by a guy called Dr. Philip Kaplan, who is at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was the lead author of a. Large group of researchers who analyzed different studies over many years of what teaching practices actually are when it comes to literacy instruction across the United States. And what they found is sort of a glass half full, glass, half empty sort of story.

[00:01:29] On the one hand, what they’re finding is since 2000, the studies that they tracked, observed. More evidence based or research backed practices in terms of classroom instruction on reading. So science of reading is starting to get into the bloodstream and starting to be taken up more.

[00:01:46] Alisha Searcy: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:46] Helen Baxendale: But they’re still of the view that it’s not, you know, not nearly enough.

[00:01:51] And there’s a lot of inconsistency. And the other point that they make, which I think always bears making when we’re talking about science of reading and its adoption across the country. Largely due to, you know, legislative measures and so on is the science of reading is great, but that’s not by any means alone enough.

[00:02:07] It has to be coupled with a knowledge rich curriculum. Students can learn to decode, but they’re not going to comprehend what they’re reading unless they can make sense of it by drawing links to, you know, words that they understand and comprehend. So the richer your background knowledge, the better reader you are.

[00:02:24] And so what the study concludes essentially is it’s great that people are starting to embrace the science of reading, but they also need to embrace wholesale, a kind of knowledge rich curriculum that really builds up the comprehension. For students of what they’re reading. So it’s a hat tip to Edie Hirsch, to Robert Pondiscio, to Emily Hanford, and a bunch of others who’ve been making this point for a while.

[00:02:45] There’s another piece of research now that is corroborating what they’ve been saying, and hopefully it will be heated by trainings of teachers across the country.

[00:02:54] Alisha Searcy: You know, I’m so glad you said that and I, I’m tempted to start interviewing you. You’ve been a guest before. We need to have a conversation.

[00:03:03] To your point, you know, from the policymaker standpoint, I think about what successes we’ve had across the country. I think it’s more than 30 states now that have embraced the science of reading and are implementing policies to move in that direction. But to your point, if the curricular resources.

[00:03:20] Aren’t there and aren’t robust, then we haven’t finished the job, right? Mm-hmm. And so of course there are some policy questions around that. What can be done to ensure that those curricular resources are in place and that they are in fact. Rigorous and allow students to really get the full experience of English language arts.

[00:03:41] We’ll talk about that at a different time, but I’m glad that you brought that up and you raised that issue because sometimes I think we, and I will say this for myself, I think I’m doing the right thing from a policy standpoint, um, but maybe it’s only half the battle. And so those of you who are richly involved in this work and teaching and learning and and developing curriculum could really help.

[00:04:03] And the rest of that conversation. So thank you for that article and stay tuned. Maybe we will have you back to talk more about this and some of the others. The article that I wanna raise is from Education Next, and it’s written by someone I consider a friend. He’s a former coworker. Charlie Barone, who now works for National Parent Union, but his piece is called Rethinking School Accountability.

[00:04:28] If you ever want to talk about accountability, this is the guy to talk with. He worked during the Bush administration during No Child Left Behinds, who’s got a very long history and accountability, and so in this article on Education Next, which is pretty long, but it’s a good read, he talks about. What it means in this new environment.

[00:04:50] Now that this administration, of course, has issued this executive order to dismantle the US Department of Education, we know all of the efforts there and things that have been talked about in the last few months. We know that almost 50% of the staff has been terminated. And so he’s asking the question, what does this mean when it comes to accountability?

[00:05:11] What does it mean when. It’s not clear how many states would seek flexibility under an assessment waiver program, which comes under essa. And if we are moving as a country away from assessments, which it feels like that’s where we’re going, we’re moving away from accountability. I can certainly talk about it in my state, how parents used to be able to get a summative score and really know how their schools are performing, and now you can’t really get that information.

[00:05:42] He’s talking about if you eliminate the requirement that students are tested, as an example in grades three through eight, that that would quote thwart our ability to gauge students’ annual progress. Shifting from testing all students to a sampling model would mean that many parents would no longer get important information on their children’s achievement.

[00:06:02] And so he, you know, has a tremendous body of work around accountability and, and what it is that we need to be doing. He’s also raising some questions about some of the lowest performing schools. And what happens if they get into CSI status, the comprehensive support and improvement status. So those are the schools that are the lowest 5%.

[00:06:26] And you know, states have identified them, but how do they exit those schools? In other words, how are they making sure that students are actually performing? And so I just appreciate Charlie bringing forth this article, talking about the importance of accountability. You know what we measure matters, right?

[00:06:44] And if we’re not measuring how students are performing and then using that information to improve instruction, to provide remedial services for those who need or intervention services, how do we know students are learning? How can we compare? Even how students are doing across the state, much less across the country.

[00:07:02] And of course with moving people out from the testing, the National Center of Education Statistics, another group of people that have been fired from the US Department of Education. How are we even gonna keep track of how students are doing? So I appreciate this. I want people to definitely read this article in Education Next, and these are the important arguments that need to be made and the questions that we need to be asking.

[00:07:27] Helen Baxendale: Very interesting story, Alisha and I enjoyed Charlie’s piece. You’re right, he’s extremely knowledgeable on this issue, and I think you put your finger on something really important in terms of we need to know if students are making adequate progress or if they’re not. And of course, these accountability systems, standardized tests, they’re not in themselves sufficient conditions.

[00:07:48] For making headway on educational excellence, but they’re absolutely essential. And without them, we don’t really know what time it is. So it’s an important piece at a important juncture in terms of, you know, structures that have pertained in American education for a long time seem to be in a little bit of a state of flux at the moment.

[00:08:08] So worth monitoring, definitely.

[00:08:10] Alisha Searcy: Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. I’m looking forward to our show today. We’ve got Dr. Paula Byrne, also known as Lady Bate. She’s a British biographer and novelist and author of The Real Jane Austen and The Genius of Jane Austen. So stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

[00:08:39] Dr. Paula Byrne. Lady Bate is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic. She’s the author of eight highly acclaimed works of nonfiction. Most recently Hardy Women, mother Sisters Wives Muses chosen as a highlight of 2024 in four national newspapers. The genius of Jane Austen, her love of theater, and why she’s a hidden Hollywood was a New York Times editor’s pick.

[00:09:05] Kick the true story of Kick Kennedy JFK’s Forgotten Sister, and the Heir to Chatsworth, a number one bestseller in two countries. Dr. Byrne wrote the tie-in book to the award-winning movie Bell about the true story of the daughter of an enslaved woman who was brought up by the Lord Chief Justice of England in the years leading up to abolition.

[00:09:27] In January, 2013, coinciding with a bicentenary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice, she published an innovative biography called The Real Jane Austen, A Life In Small Things, A Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, and A BBC Radio four Book of the week. By earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Liverpool where she also studied for her MA having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education now to Chester University.

[00:10:02] Dr. Byrne, thank you so much for joining us. We’re excited to have you. Thank you for having me. It’s lovely to be here. Great, so let’s jump in. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the 19th century British novelist, Jane Austen, and you are a celebrated authority on her life and literary works, including pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility. Emma and Persuasion. Can you share with us how you first became interested in Jane Austen, as well as why she remains such a timelessly important literary figure?

[00:10:37] Dr. Paula Byrne: Yeah, so my story was funny enough, you know, I, it was one of those memories that for some reason I suppressed, but when I tell you the story, you’ll realize why, which was when I was 14 and I was studying for G Cs E, you know, sort of exams.

[00:10:51] I had this, you know how people say they have these really inspiring teachers? I, I did not. Think think of that and then think of the opposite, because I just did not, and I had this English teacher who really did not like me and he refused to let me sit for my exam. In English literature though, he said it was fine for English language, so I actually took myself to night school because I was so determined and I thought, I’m really good at literature.

[00:11:14] It’s in one thing I’m really, I know I’m good at, and it was at night school. I had this amazing inspirational teacher and he was teaching. Mansfield Park, I had this little theory that the first Jane Austen you read is sometimes your favorite. And that’s my case. And so I did it at night school and I just didn’t think I’d be the sort of person that would really like Jane Austen.

[00:11:33] ’cause I was very into the Bronte’s and that kind of northern sort of wild mos Yorkshire Wars and Jane Austen’s world felt very different. But I just fell in love with Mansfield Park and it really did, you know, it changed my life. So that was my introduction to Jane Austen. So why does she remain important?

[00:11:52] You know, I think. When you, I’ve read a lot of contemporary women writers who are writing at the same time as Jane and Austen. I’ve read hundreds of novels and most of ’em are really terrible. And it’s only when you read them that you realize how absolutely brilliant and different she is and that she really is doing something very different in writing about for what at, at the time was sort of ordinary people, not aristocrats.

[00:12:18] So she endures for me because. She writes it brilliantly. She’s so funny. We love her characters and you can reread her books. I find that I reread them over and over again and still find something new.

[00:12:31] Helen Baxendale: Paula, your book, the Real Jane Austen explores the key objects and forces that shaped her life, including quote, her father’s faith, her mother’s aristocratic pedigree, her eldest brother’s adoption.

[00:12:43] Her other brother’s Naval and Mil military experiences and her long struggle to become a published author. Can you briefly sketch for us the contours of Jane Austen’s life and highlight for us what you think made her the author that she was?

[00:12:55] Dr. Paula Byrne: I, I mean, I think just simply she was, she came from a very clever, large, cultivated family where you had full access to a really rather remarkable library.

[00:13:05] Her father had over 500 volumes, which was a lot for those times. And she was also the beneficiary of the circulating library system, which was relatively new. So you could sign up for a library and pay a subscription and then get all the latest novels. And so she very. Much thought herself, you know, give a girl a good education and, and she’s made for life.

[00:13:25] And, but the education she had, she did have some formal schooling, but I think more than anything, being surrounded by incredibly clever, funny siblings and then being younger in the group and wanting to impress and outdo her brothers. And I think she was quite a competitive person. So for me, what really shaped her is that sort of wanting to make people laugh, like have brothers laugh.

[00:13:46] Wanting to make her sister laugh. And as I say, her brothers are very literary. They had literary magazines. So you’re come, you’re growing up in that wonderfully fertile environment where you are clever, you need to make your mark, you’ve gotta be funny, you’ve gotta be witty. So I think for me, that’s the thing that really, really shapes her as well as there’s this deep ambition of belief in her own genius, which I think she had.

[00:14:10] Alisha Searcy: Excellent. Jane Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favorable social standing and financial security. And so her writings are critiques of the social sensibilities of late 18th century and early 19th century. Great Britain. Can you provide for our listeners an overview of the larger themes in Jane Austen’s novels?

[00:14:34] Dr. Paula Byrne: It is a big question, and I think one of the really interesting things about Jane Austen, I think she’s a little bit like Shakespeare in that respect, is that there’s something universal about the way that she writes. She almost seems to lend herself to each new age. So for a time in the sixties, people said, oh, we always thought journal didn’t.

[00:14:54] Really engage in politics. But here’s Marilyn Butner writing this book saying, no, there’s a real war of ideas here. And she’s politically conservative, which I don’t agree with. But anyway, and then in the eighties, all the great feminists said, oh, she’s really important to the feminist movement because she, what she’s really doing is she’s writing about economic status.

[00:15:13] She’s writing about women’s stability, she’s writing about propriety, she’s writing about all of the things that we now. Actually believed to be very important in female experience and it feels like she or, and then in the seventies it was like landscape gardening. Oh, she’s really ahead of the curve because she was writing this really interesting stuff about landscape gardening.

[00:15:32] So I feel like she is, so that’s what she’s so brilliant at is, but I, I think of all of those things. Writing heroine centered novels in which most of the heroines are actually downwardly mobile. Like they’re not awkwardly mobile. They don’t have very much money. So we often see them at the beginning of the novels being ousted outta a family home.

[00:15:53] We see that in persuasion. We see that in sense and sensibility, and we certainly, the threat of that looms over Elizabeth Bennett, so we’re not talking about. Apart, remember, and that’s what makes Emma so unusual. Most of her heroines do not have very much money. They do not have economic stability. They do not have a way of providing for themselves and achieving financial status in a environment and time that isn’t able to help you do that, and is indeed frowned upon.

[00:16:22] So I think for, for all of those reasons, I think the female experience and how that plays out and how precarious it is for. Women on the marriage market and what do you do when you don’t have beauty or connections, which are so important in, in that stratified Georgian society. So I think that’s, for me, when I’m thinking about Jane Austen, I think that’s never really, again, really not got old because nowadays we’re more, we think about that more than ever, we think more about female experience than ever.

[00:16:53] Mm-hmm. And these sort of undercurrents, that sort of permeate female experience

[00:16:58] Alisha Searcy: Makes sense.

[00:16:59] Helen Baxendale: Fascinating answer, Paula, and you’ve neatly sort of foreshadowed the question I was gonna ask you, which is a another biographical one, but particularly focused on sense and sensibility, which was Austen’s first novel published in 1811.

[00:17:12] And for our listeners’ sake, it set in the late 18th century and follows the three. Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother as they’re forced to leave the family estate in Sussex and move to a modest cottage on the property of a distant relative in Devon. So, you know, downwardly mobile as, as you alluded to earlier, can you tell us just a little bit more about the novels plot and then the two eldest girls experiences with Love and Heartbreak and, and then if you wouldn’t mind tracing that or drawing any connections you see between the Dashwood Sisters and, and Jane Austen’s own biography.

[00:17:43] Dr. Paula Byrne: Yeah, it’s a really lovely question, Helen, and I think very often in journal’s, novels, she writes about pairs of sisters because she had a sister whom she was devoted to and was her closest friend. So she’s quite unusual again in the 18th century for having a. Two heroines. You mostly, you know, elene are all these cists, all of these 18th century big novels.

[00:18:04] You often just have one heroine and often she doesn’t have a sister, you know, and, and make that sort of makes her vulnerable. But Jane Austen’s very interested in this principle of pairing of just having the two sisters. And she uses this really effectively, this principle of pairing in sense of sensibility.

[00:18:18] Because she can use it to develop ideas about rationality and emotion. So, you know, sense and sensibility. So, you know, one sister exemplifies sensibility, so she’s incredibly passionate and she reads novels of sensibility and, and she’s very sort of excessive and over the top and prone to. Bursting into tears.

[00:18:38] And, and then the other sister is much more self-possessed and poised and rational. And so you start off with this premise of, oh, wow, what, what’s gonna happen to these two girls? And then the romantic one has her heart broken in a very callous and cruel way. And then the rational one also has her heart broken and it a also fairly cruel way.

[00:18:59] But what Jane Austen does is. Because she’s Jane Austen and she’s never gonna simplify. She’s gonna be really nuanced about that. So at the end of the novel, we found this really weird imposition whereby the sensible sister learns to be rational and the rational sister learns that actually emotion’s important and repression can be harmful.

[00:19:18] So she does this lovely thing. So just when you think you are, oh yeah, right? She’s represented. She’s represented that, oh bad, Marianne. You mustn’t be full of sensibility because you know, you can catch cold and die, which is what Mari Nev nearly happens to Marianne. Because she does these romantic walks in, in the rain, and then she gets flu and she captures pneumonia.

[00:19:36] And that is real. That’s a real thing in, in the 18th century. And with medicine not being so great, it’s a real danger, but it doesn’t serve as well as readers if we just demarcate those two things because it’s much more fluid. So you see Eleanor bursting into tears towards the end when she finally gets Herman and then Marianne, you know, learning to be rational.

[00:19:57] But she can, she does all sorts of. Very interesting things with other sisters in that novel. So you have the steel sisters and they pretend to have sensibility. So the point about Marianne’s sensibility, her emotion if you like, is it is very real to Marianne. And the reason we know that’s really real is because we see two other sisters who use sensibility in a very callous way to get what they want and they don’t really have very much feeling.

[00:20:21] So Lucy Steele and her sister, you know, are exemplars and it’s when you compare and contrast and you say. Ah, Marianne’s sensibility. It is very heartfelt. It is very real. It is not wholly satirized by Jane Austen in the way that when Lucy Steel says, oh, I must shed a tear. I feel so terrible about, you know, the Fat Edward can’t marry me, and we know that’s fake.

[00:20:43] So she’s able to use D and then there’s another pair sisters. There’s Lady Middleton and there’s her sister, Mrs. Palmer. And again, so she’s using different pairs of sisters to reflect upon all the different ways in which. If you like rationality and emotion, which is very ru as we all know, sort of istic sort of idea in the 18th century.

[00:21:05] Late 18th century, early 19th century. As she goes on to do, she can use those different pairings to really sort of exploit how nuanced it is. And, and really, I suppose the perfect thing is that you are rational enough, but you, you are still in touch with your emotions and that’s what she seems to be saying in sense of sensibility that.

[00:21:24] Fall in love by all means, but be rational. Perhaps don’t make yourself vulnerable like Marianne does. Don’t go around driving with him in the Baruch so your reputation’s ruined. Don’t believe what he says. So you are, you know, you are getting that kind of wisdom wit as well. But at the same time, it’s nuanced.

[00:21:43] It’s just not crude in the way that a lot of novels that contrasted sense and sensibility at the same time did it in a very over moralistic way, which Jane Austen never does.

[00:21:53] Alisha Searcy: So you talked a couple of minutes ago about, and I think Helen asked how Jane Austen uses things from her personal life and they’re reflected in some of her books.

[00:22:03] And so in the Real Jane Austen, a Life In Small Things, you examine key pieces of material history and artifacts from her life, including a silhouette, a vellum notebook, a topaz cross. A laptop writing box, a royalty check a bathing machine, and many more. Can you talk about some of these objects, their significance in her personal and creative life, and how this approach to biography helps give readers a wider sense of Jane Austen, her writings and her era.

[00:22:37] Dr. Paula Byrne: Yeah, I mean I used it really in the biography ’cause I just didn’t want to write a conventional biography, the sort of cradle to grave, because it can just be very stultifying and I think sometimes you can kind of miss the wood for the trees when you’re going. And that happened and that happened and that happened and that happened and you can lose readers.

[00:22:51] So I had this idea, I mean, really before material culture became a really trendy thing. I just, I have this idea about, I was thinking actually about the Topaz Cross that Jane Austen’s brother bought for her and her sister. He bought each of them a topaz cross and thinking. And that object is still a shorten museum.

[00:23:08] And I’m thinking about the, the sort of iconic, you know, those ideas of icons, that’s these relics if you like. I’m thinking, well, why a cross, not a lock it, which was sort of quite more, a bit more conventional. And I said, well that’s because she was Christian. That’s really interest. Her father was a priest.

[00:23:23] So I’m interested in just weaving in and out and, and then, oh, we see that cross. We see that very topaz cross in Mansfield Park in a very deeply symbolic moment when. William, who’s the naval brother, like Charles, who bought Jane, the cross buys Fanny across, but she doesn’t have a chain. And then the man she doesn’t wanna marry gives her a chain and the man she does wanna marry gives her the chain.

[00:23:45] And the one that fits the chain is the man she wants to marry. So she has this lovely sort of symbolic moment, but she’s using a real object to do that. So I had this idea that maybe I can use objects as sort of portals into the life and into the work and show how she. She weaves them in and initially I thought it’d be nice if I could have almost every object that she owned or was in the house, and then it just didn’t really work for various reasons.

[00:24:10] Another example would be a Cashmere Shaw because she had an aunt who lived in the Indies and I got very interested in. The fact that this aunt went out at age of 16 to find a husband and she was sending Shaws back to Jane Austen and they were sending stuff back and forth across, you know, the oceans.

[00:24:27] And I just got very fascinated in all of those material objects and how important they are and how they come again in the novels. So for me, I just, I really like the idea of, of the objects. I don’t have space today to talk more about them, but it just felt like, to me a really sort of interesting way to sort of.

[00:24:44] As I say, just to have that portal into the world and, and you know, the 18th century is a world where. Things are changing so much and mm-hmm Roads are improving and people can get on public transport. So I kind of wanted to do the carriage thing as well because I was very interested in how people goss around in the 18th century.

[00:25:02] So I was thinking that, and we know that Jameson’s family had this state Ab Baruch, and then they had to sell it ’cause they couldn’t afford it. I just got very interested. Didn’t. And then the check that really, the check object came up really recently. It was found very, very recently in the John Murray archive and it’s a check for the proceeds of Emma.

[00:25:19] And we all got very excited. We all got very excited in journal studies when, when something new comes up, like the ring that came, the ring hadn’t come up when I did my book, but oh my God. There’s another ring, there’s another object. There’s something that belongs to it. Is this almost like this idea of a religious relic?

[00:25:35] And what I’m very curious as about why we. Put so much value into this. So for me it was, it was almost like a structural thing that I was trying to do in the book. And there’s many, many more. I mean, I didn’t even know there was a, a letter box that her brother carved for her. These things come up and we think we know everything about J Peers.

[00:25:53] Oh, why are you write about Jane Austen? We know everything. And then suddenly something else comes up and say, well, that’s a really nice object. Objects tell stories. Always, there’s always a story behind the object, so I’m, I’m interested in picking it up. What does that story, so your brother calls you a letterbox because he knows you value writing.

[00:26:10] That’s really interesting that her brother’s encouraging her to be a writer at the time when lots of women were not encouraged to be writers. So they tell lots and lots of stories.

[00:26:21] Helen Baxendale: I’m sure requires a very perceptive eye though to know what those stories are and to kind of extract them. Paula, so you, you’ve just illustrated for us why your histories of Jane Austen are popular and much more widely read beyond the academy, where a lot of this sort of sleuthing is more often than not done.

[00:26:38] So thank you for that. Fascinating digression. I wanna ask you now about Pride and Prejudice, which I think is probably Austen’s best known novel. It was her second novel published in 1813, not only Jane Austen’s best known novel, but probably one of the most popular novels in all of English literature.

[00:26:57] Could you tell us a little bit about this novel of manners? It’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennett, and what you think Austen is trying to tell us about the difference between superficial and actual goodness.

[00:27:10] Dr. Paula Byrne: I mean, thanks for those kind words, Helen as well. And it, it does remain her most popular work. And again, I think we’re seeing a heroine in Elizabeth Bennett that we haven’t really seen before in the sense that she does not have connections.

[00:27:25] She does not have wealth. She lives by her wit and. One of the things that I think is really interesting about prior to prejudice and all those contexts that you’re talking about is the way that she takes on authority. That there are these great set pieces. There’s like Mr. Darcy’s proposal and there’s no point does he think she’s going to refuse him.

[00:27:43] He, she, he just doesn’t, and you know, we have the. Mr. Collins is terrible proposal to Elizabeth, and, and he keeps, and she’s saying, no, I don’t, I I don’t wanna marry you. And he says, oh, you’re just doing that to make me love you more. And you know, and she said, no, no, no, actually really don’t want to marry you.

[00:27:55] And he’s saying, you, you could never refuse me ’cause you’re too poor to refuse me, which is a bit nasty. And then she does refuse him. And then you see Darcy’s first proposal. And it’s pretty horrible. It’s almost as arrogant as Mr. Collins is. It’s like, well, he doesn’t think for a minute she’s gonna refuse him.

[00:28:09] And then she says, I wouldn’t marry you in the last man unless you, if you were the last man on earth, you know, and you’re not a gentleman. And to have this, Harry to say you are not a gentleman. Your manners are not what they ought to be, which he later says, my manners were not what they ought to be. It was when you said I was not a gentleman.

[00:28:25] She’s forcing us to see what does that mean? Like what does it mean to be a gentleman? And what that means is gentle manners. It’s a gentil gentility, and he has shown arrogance throughout that early part. And it’s, it’s his capacity to admit that he’s wrong and to improve himself and to be humbled. In the way that she’s also needs to feel humble ’cause she gets it wrong.

[00:28:51] And I can’t emphasize enough that this isn’t happening in the, in the 19th century novel, 18, et cetera. It’s not happening that people are making huge mistakes when they’re heroines. They’re normally not making any mistakes and they’re, you know, they’re very improbable events and they’re always incredibly beautiful and, you know, long lost relatives turn up and say, you are really a millionaire.

[00:29:10] And Jane Austen’s not having anything to do with this. She’s saying actually Elizabeth’s not even that pretty. Jane’s the really pretty one. She just has really great eyes. But what she does have is, you know, this wit and this huge intelligence and when she takes Sunday to Catherine and says, you don’t have good manners either.

[00:29:27] You’ve come to my home and you are speaking to me in this way, and this is, you are as bad as my mother. You are criticizing my mother for being vulgar, but you are as bad as her. And she’s taking her on and saying, I will not be bowed. I will not obst absent, headstrong girl. And she says, you know, you should, how you should, you know, kow to me.

[00:29:45] And she just won’t do it. It’s so interesting that. We have a heroine who’s doing this, and I think it would’ve been really shocking at the time, you know, taking on an older woman, an established woman, and I think this plays into her life as well, because obviously I’m interested in, in the moments when biography comes into the novel to the novels, but there were many older, wealthy.

[00:30:07] Rather nasty women in Jane Austen’s life that really made her feel you are the poor relation and put her down and you just can’t help feeling this is a little bit of revenge when you see someone who’s this obnoxious, like lady Catherine who’s leaving, you know, people out in the cold. She’s in the wor carriage and these young girls are freezing cold.

[00:30:26] She doesn’t care and boasting about her hopeless daughter and saying she’d be a marvelous piano player, but’s just that she’s never tried. You know, there’s this sort of silly behavior and obnoxious behavior and it’s, it’s just so revolutionary that you are, you’re getting a novel that is saying, what?

[00:30:39] What are good manners? What is polite society? What does it mean? And actually selfishness causes a lot of problem in society. If we all went around being really selfish and doing what we wanted to do, in a way being like Marianne, then society doesn’t tick quite as long. Much as it does, it does. I think journalism’s also very interested in what can you say and what can’t you say, and how much should you say and how performative.

[00:31:06] Polite society is, so how do you be true to yourself within the confines of polite society? And I think all of these things come up in, in all of our novels actually.

[00:31:17] Alisha Searcy: Wow. I love your energy. There’s so much that we could all learn, especially women during Women’s History month about the heroines, as you talk about in these novels.

[00:31:27] But these days, classic literary works are often dismissed or come under criticism for supposedly not being relevant to the lives of young people in the 21st century. What do you think students these days can learn from Jane Austen’s heroin? Such as Eleanor Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennett and others that can help young people navigate the modern day minefields, if you will, of dating love and relationships.

[00:31:51] Dr. Paula Byrne: I mean, it’s just a great question and it, it is a simple answer I think in some ways, which is who you marry is of the the utmost consequences I spend my life telling my teenage children and my grownup children. This is the most important decision you will ever make. And if you think that’s not important, and if you think Jane Austen is irrelevant because she understands that it’s how important that is, then nothing else matters.

[00:32:19] Small things matter. My. My book’s called like in small things like politeness, like self-respect, like marrying someone who’s an intellectual equal, like saying, I’m as good as you. I may not be as rich as you, but I’m as intelligent as you. All of these things are hugely important and I think anyone reading them, male or female, it’s important to know you can have self-respect.

[00:32:41] You don’t have to marry someone you despise. Like Mr. Collins. You might wanna think about a partner who is. Gentle and kind and maybe likes your family even though your family are pretty awful. You know, all of these things that we all have families, you know, we all have to navigate family relations and the older I get the more relevant I think all this stuff is because I’m like, in-laws are a nightmare.

[00:33:02] Of course. They’re, you know, we all find them difficult and, and it’s, it’s a really difficult, so to say, well, that’s not important. Vastly important. It’s hugely important. It can really make or break the happiness of your life. These things are hugely, hugely important, so I just think we learn as we go.

[00:33:19] More and more we are going, this is important, this, it’s important to human happiness. Self-respect is really important to human happiness. And I think that’s what novels can teach us. And it taught me when I was reading Jane Austen, yeah, my feelings do matter and no one’s gonna put me down if I just because they’re pier than me or they’re richer than me, or they’re this, that and the other.

[00:33:40] My feelings matter too, and I think. Especially for women, it’s important to have role models in which young heroines say, actually, my feelings matter. My self-respect matters. And so I think those are things that just become even more important than I thought they were when I first started writing about Journal Austen 20 years ago.

[00:33:57] Alisha Searcy: I love that.

[00:33:58] Helen Baxendale: Thanks, Paula. Let’s keep that idea going and delve into a, uh, a study of one of her heroines, Emma. Who is the economist, you know, sort of heroine in her novel, published in 1815? Emma is set in the fictional country village of Highbury and it’s surrounding estates, and it involves a sort of the relationships among a small number of families and the difficulties that gentil women.

[00:34:24] Encounter living in Georgia and England. So one of the most interesting things that I think Austen sort of said about this novel was that she was going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. And I think you were anticipating in your last answer, you know, some of the themes that emerged through Emma and why Austen’s novels, and particularly Emma, I think has this currency even today when we’re talking about, you know, what, what contemporary women might learn from her.

[00:34:49] But I’d love to hear you riff on that a little bit.

[00:34:52] Dr. Paula Byrne: I mean, Emma’s, I think is her masterpiece. I think it’s just, it’s Jane Austen at her finest and she’s, I think she’s been quite mischievous when she says, no one’s gonna like her ’cause we all love Emma. You know? And but what, again, so unusual ’cause Emma just gets so much wrong and it’s again, really unusual to have her, her, and keeps getting stuff wrong all the time, and actually is snobbish and she does exploit and use people like Harriet for her own ends.

[00:35:17] She’s such a fascinating. And I think in that novel it feels very like who’s in, who’s out more than any other novel and like just the, I feel it’s a, it’s a novel about shifting class division too. So you’ve got ish people and Emma’s sort of saying, well, I’m not going to go and visit them ’cause they’re ish and then she doesn’t get invited to their party.

[00:35:38] And she says, but I’m not invited to the party. And I wanted to say no, but I wasn’t really invited then. She isn’t fighting, she does go. You know, so it’s, it’s sort of classes starting to change and moed people behave in, in sort of different ways. What I think is so fascinating about Emma is that she says right from the beginning, you know, I’m mistress of my own household.

[00:35:57] I’m rich, so I don’t need to get married. And it’s such a brilliant statement to say who else is saying that in the nine early 19th century who’s saying women are need only need to marry men because they’re poor. If they don’t or they need status or they need a big house, or they want children, or she’s actually, I don’t need any of that.

[00:36:13] I don’t need it. So then what we then have to learn through the novel is well actually being loved by somebody who is worthy and kind as Mr. Knightly is and gentle, and who looks after the Downwardly Mobile people like. Ms. Bates and Mrs. Bates are really important, and that’s what Emma’s got to learn that.

[00:36:34] You know, you don’t despise people because they’re downwardly mobile and she thinks so highly of herself, Emma, and, and, and so with Glory in this take down, you know, that Janson keeps taking her down. She’s doing this with Free and Derek speech, which is just so fantastically brilliant. So going back to it’s a, her much like is so good because she’s, even though journalism’s working really hard via free and direct speech.

[00:37:00] To show that Emma keeps getting things wrong and she’s arrogant and she’s making mistakes, and also she’s interfering people’s lives in a pretty horrible way. She’s meddling in people’s lives morally abhorrent. Stop meddling, Emma. We still like her. We still are drawn to her, her cleverness and her, and again her, her sort of wit and we slightly delight in her getting her comeuppance as well.

[00:37:25] And she’s doing something so clever and she does this again with this authorial voice sort of. Makes us think we really know what’s going on. Except you don’t. The first time you read Amy, you read it and you, you, Jane Austen’s so clever that you, you almost have the same mistakes as Emma and then it’s when you read a second time, you go, ah, she knew all along Jane, didn’t she?

[00:37:43] That ah, that I didn’t see that one there. Ah, I missed that one here. Oh, I’d missed this bit here. So it’s such a genius take down, if you like, of this heroine who seemingly has it all, but also needs to learn. To be kind. I know we, that’s a bit overused now, the be kind. But I always thought Jane Austen’s was about kindness and the importance of kindness, and particularly when you’ve had money and you lose it.

[00:38:10] And there’s something about Jane Austen and Ms. Bates who’s a spinster, who is mocked by everybody. And you know, Jane Austen says, you know, to be poor and a spinster, you are mocked at the idea what is a spinster? What is a spinster’s? Fate in society when you don’t have money, you are depending on apples.

[00:38:27] Mr. Knightley’s Orchard, for goodness sake, that’s how poor you are. So I think it’s so brilliant, but it’s so sort of confined the world of Highbury. It’s very small and yet so many things happen in a very sort of inward way in Emma. It’s very sort of inward, but it’s something I could just talk about really forever.

[00:38:48] But I think what she does to Harriet and the way that she really, Harriet very nearly loses everything. She loses the, the heart of a good man through Emma’s interference and saying, well, actually you are. You are better than that ’cause you’re my friend. Oh, but you’re not good enough for Mr. Knightly.

[00:39:02] Right? Okay. So what, how good are you? You know, it’s just so brilliant on just human behavior that you’re gonna be my friend up. You’re good enough to have a coffee with me, but don’t, I think I have lunch with you. And she’s just good at, I think holding up that mirror to nature that we’re, we can all be a little bit of a snob, frankly.

[00:39:19] We can all be a bit unkind. We can all think that we’re a little bit greater than we are, you know? So I think that’s some of the themes that she’s, she’s interested in.

[00:39:28] Alisha Searcy: Lovely. So as a theater person, I have to ask this question. Your book, the Genius of Jane Austen, originally published over 20 years ago as Jane Austen in the theater, explores the history of Jane Austen adaptations to the stage and why her books work so well on the big screen. So can you talk about Jane Austen’s own love of theatrical productions and why her novels continue to draw such a wide interest from Hollywood and popular audiences?

[00:39:57] Dr. Paula Byrne: I think in a nutshell, ’cause it’s a big question, but in a nutshell, and you know, for the confines of time, I think very simply Pot, she is somebody who is very shaped by 18th century theater.

[00:40:09] So she goes to the theater a lot. So a lot of her comic types she’s seeing on the stage. She’s very, very, very good at dialogue. So if you think of, just as an example, so the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, it’s almost entirely in dialogue. Mr. And Mrs. Been driving the narrative and if you just listen to it or listen to it on an audio book, it feels like you’re at a play, that you’re not reading a novel.

[00:40:31] You’re getting very little authority intervention, little bit to be in a little bit at the end, but you are basically just hearing two people talking, but the dialogue tells you everything you need to know, and she’s learning that. Revelation of character via dialogue through I believe, the theater. I think that’s why not so much of the novels that everyone’s like, oh, she’s picking up from novels.

[00:40:52] And I always thought, no, these are, these are stage types. Like the lively lady is beat tricks in what to do about nothing. Elizabeth Bennett, you know, the clowns are very Shakespearean. The set pieces as moments of FARs that are interspersed with finer comic moments. So I really felt that this was the, the sort of book that hadn’t been written really, that really that enough attention probably hadn’t been paid.

[00:41:17] The fact that she was incredibly shaped and also ’cause she’s such a great comic writer and she loved comic plays. I really wanted to show what that influence was. So what are these comedy types? What are the jokes? What’s happening here? What’s, how is she constructing this set piece? And I think these great set pieces like Lady Catherine and Elizabeth Standoff, Mr.

[00:41:38] Dossey’s proposal. Mr. Collins’s proposal. These are set pieces. These are set pieces that you see in theater. You don’t really see these are novels so much. So I think she’s importing these quasi theatrical techniques into the novel and it’s a huge influence on, on her writing. And one of the reasons we love her characters and her dialogue so much I think is because she’s steeped in this. She knows it. She knows Goldsmith, she knows Shakespeare so well. Thank you, Paula. We could,

[00:42:05] Helen Baxendale: I’m sure happily talk to you all day about this, but I am conscious of your time and so we gotta bring things to a reluctant close here. But one more question before we let you go. We’re currently celebrating Women’s History Month, and of course this year is the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth.

[00:42:22] So I wondered what thoughts you have about that commemoration and what you would hope that the public might understand better about her life and work. From the perspective of sort of 2025 and what you think, you know, Jane Austen still has to teach us about living prudent, happy and good lives, and I wondered if you’d also be kind enough to read us a short passage from one of your books about Austen.

[00:42:48] Dr. Paula Byrne: It’s gonna be a really exciting year, and one of the reasons I’m in England is that there’s, there’s lots of really good stuff that’s going to be coming out this year that I’ve been involved with about Jane Austen’s 250th. And to me it’s just, it’s so thrilling that we’re still obsessed, you know, 250 years on, she’s still being read.

[00:43:06] TikTok love her. She’s on TikTok all the time. I think it’s brilliant. These young people parodying. Enjoying talking about Jane Austen. She’s still being read by young people. We still have so much to learn from her. She’s such a funny writer. I think my wish is that people see how witty she is. How funny she is that she, almost everything she comes out of her mouth is hilarious, especially in the letters.

[00:43:30] If you read the letters. She can’t help but being hilariously funny. And sometimes I think we forget. What a great comic writer. She’s, we get so sort of obsessed with the romance or the characters or the themes that we often forget about the wits, which I think is just so precious for me as I, as a writer of her, it’s that lovely, ironic voice.

[00:43:52] So I’m always flying that flag saying, don’t forget how funny she is. Reread her because she pays rereading. She teaches us to become better readers. Just when we think we might know a novel, you go back and you say, I’ve never heard that before. Listen to audiobooks. I, I’ve been listening to Persuasion on Audiobook and I’m hearing things that I’ve forgotten that I, or I don’t even remember thinking significant because when you read aloud, going back to the question about the theater, when you read aloud, women in journal’s, time read aloud a lot because there was very little.

[00:44:24] Ways of entertainment When you are living in a cottage, you know, in the middle of nowhere you hear things a little bit differently. You hear these sentences that really. Really knock you off your feet. Really? You go, that is such a fantastic sentence. So I think for me it’s just that she’s someone that pays rereading.

[00:44:41] You are always gonna find something a little bit different in the works. So I relish the two 50th ’cause I think it, we still need to keep reading. Author, we need to keep reading authors who care about female experience, particularly in today’s world of, you know, where girls and women are still having a very fraught time.

[00:45:00] I think it’s really important that we read these books where, as I said to you earlier. Female experience is at the center of what Jane Austen’s interested in. She’s not that interested in what men do or think she’s interested in what women think. There’s very few moments in the whole cannon where there’s not a woman in the room.

[00:45:18] As far as I’m aware. There’s one moment where there’s, I. Two men in a room and a woman’s not in a room. So again, very unusual. She’s much more than what women think and feel. So she’s feminist in a very good way, not in a fly the flag. Let’s be trendy way, which I find abhor, she’s feminist in a, what does it really mean to be an equal?

[00:45:36] What does it really mean to care about self respect? What does it, what does it mean to educate myself? All the things that really matter, you know? I think she has so much really to offer us. So for my little passage might be a bit of an odd choice, but I like it. So I’m just gonna read up Passage. I, this is the passage about travel.

[00:45:56] So it’s the Baruch. And I really like writing this chapter because people often think Jane and Austen didn’t travel very much. And I sort of figured out how much she traveled before the age of 14 and how much I’d traveled. And she traveled way more than I had ’cause she often, she had a big family and she would often travel and go to see lots of relations.

[00:46:13] But she’s very interested in female independence and how. What happens when you have to wait for someone to pick you up or you can’t afford your own carriage? And this is a little passage here, and it just starts with it says, um, her father George bought a carriage in 1797. He had the family crest painted on the panels, but he was forced to mothball it.

[00:46:34] The following year, that means lay it down as the result of the introduction of a new tax. Jane Austen’s difficulties arose in returning from her visits to houses such as Rollings. She complained that waiting for her brother to bring her home was the equivalent of waiting for dead men’s shoes. So something quite, she’s annoyed when she says that it’s brilliant and she’s her visit, and this instinct was prolonged.

[00:46:56] I’m sorry for it. What can I do? Her letters Hint at this frustration, my father will be so good as to fetch home’s prodigal daughter from Tara, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk. The hospitals enter at the temple or Mount God at St. James’ and then she turns it into wits. But you said you go from that frustration of why am I always waiting for a man to take me home?

[00:47:15] And then we see these moments in the novels where, oh, Ann Elliot is end of persuasion. She really knows what independence is when she has her own carriage, she can go where she likes and they’re just gonna end on one tiny little sentence on that note. So at the end of the chapter on On The Baruch, I say, one of journal’s happiest Letters, describes her feelings of independence and liberty in London at the time when her literary career was reaching its peak, she rejoices in the experience of being driven unaccompanied around that great metropolis in her brother Henry’s Baruch.

[00:47:47] Hop down. I had great amusement among the pitches and the driving about the carriage been open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much and was ready to laugh all the time. At my being where I was, I could not feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Baruch, and I love that.

[00:48:06] And I want to sort of leave her there sort of. I love this idea of her being in solitary elegance on her own feeling how freeing it is to be in a carriage and go where you want to go. Go to see the pictures in the gallery, go to drive around the street. So I really wanted in my book to bring out that sense of the repressed Jane Austen, who then gets to feel what it’s like to be an independent free woman. So I wanted to sort of end on that note of female emancipation.

[00:48:34] Alisha Searcy: What a perfect way to end this interview. Jane Austen is my kind of lady. As are you, Dr. Byrne. Thank you so much for joining us. Love your energy and all the information you gave us today. Thanks for joining us.

[00:48:47] Dr. Paula Byrne: Thank you for having me.

[00:49:01] Alisha Searcy: Wow. That was a great interview. Very interesting. Right.

[00:49:05] Helen Baxendale: Oh, yes. Paula Byrne is a fascinating person and the thing I most love about her is how infectious, her enthusiasm for Jane Austen in particular, but all the subjects of her biographies is she’s super disarming and just so engaging on the topics of her work, and I think that’s why she’s been such a successful, popular writer.

[00:49:26] She takes these subjects that oftentimes are written about by academics, but Paula manages to make their lives really. Vivid and relatable and engaging for a much broader audience. So it’s been fun to have her on .

[00:49:40] Alisha Searcy: Exactly, I think perfectly said. I couldn’t agree more. I love that. So before we go, we’ve got to get to our tweet of the week, which comes from Anthony Lamesa, some powerful answers about pandemic school closures from Anders Teel in a German newspaper interview.

[00:49:57] Definitely something worth the read. What did you see, Helen?

[00:50:00] Helen Baxendale: So, and his technical, if I am not mistaken, I think he was maybe the chief health officer or equivalent in Sweden during the Covid period, and he became prominent internationally because of course, Sweden bucked the then trend of massive lockdowns and instead said that, you know, Sweden was gonna do it differently and be a lot more selective.

[00:50:25] They were gonna isolate, you know, older people, people who were, you know, particularly vulnerable to Covid, but they were going to certainly keep schools open, keep, you know, most services open and encourage people to, you know, sort of monitor their own risk. And so this tweet is interesting ’cause it comments on, in particular the educational damage that has been wrought across a lot of the West and the German interviewer Ask Anders Tegna, you know, whether he was surprised by all this and in his very.

[00:50:51] Sort of understated Swedish way, I think he says yes. I was very surprised because in Sweden we, we sort of knew that this was gonna be a problem and I guess not to, um, you know, recapitulate the pain and suffering of the covid years too much. But I think it is worth making the point that we did, we did know, you know?

[00:51:09] And so for people to defend what was done during those years on the grounds of like, oh, we didn’t know any better. No, actually we kind of did. And, and certainly, you know, the Swedes, I think are a pretty strong sort of data point to suggest that like. Closing the schools, even at an early juncture, it was pretty clear that was gonna be a bad idea.

[00:51:26] That would have a very serious repercussions for some of the most marginalized. Kids in our society. So a somber, somber tweet, but one, I think it’s worth stressing.

[00:51:37] Alisha Searcy: Definitely something to discuss more. Definitely an article that you wanna check out. Helen, it was wonderful to have you as always, just join us as our guest host, and for our listeners, let’s make sure you join us.

[00:51:50] Next week we’ll have Dr. James Lynn Woodworth, who’s a research fellow at Stanford University’s. Hoover Institution and the recent past commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. We certainly need to hear about that, so look forward to seeing everyone next week. Helen, thanks again for joining us.

[00:52:08] Hope you had a good time today.

[00:52:10] Helen Baxendale: Always a good time with you, Alisha. It was my pleasure to be here and looking forward to next week’s episode. Very topical and timely.

[00:52:17] Alisha Searcy: Definitely. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, this is Alisha. Thank you for listening to the Learning Curve. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate@pioneerinstitute.org/donations.