Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the history and future of calligraphy, handwriting, type design and all things lettering.
Join me, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher, as I connect with artists, historians, stationary experts and more from around the world to uncover the stories behind the letters and the journeys of those who bring them to life.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: In today's episode, I'm delighted to be speaking with Sophie Reynolds, who is the head of Collections, interpretation and engaging engagement at Jane Austen's house in Chawton in the beautiful English county of Hampshire. Jane Austen, as you may well know, is a world renowned English author born in 1775. Note that it's her 250th birthday. Happy birthday to Jane. And moved to this very house in Chawton in 1809. Here she spent her days writing and published all six of her globally beloved novels, including Emma, Sense and Sensibility and my personal favourite, Pride and Prejudice. Today, Jane Austen's house is a cherished museum, housing and honouring a great collection of Austen treasures which visitors travel from all over the world to see. We will get into all these lovely treasures shortly, but in the absence of Jane herself, Sophie has kindly agreed to talk all about Jane's writing from this period. With studies in English and Theatre at York and an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmith's Son, Sophie has also worked in the VA Department of Theatre and Performance for 10 years and has been at Jane Austen's house for six years. Sophie is one of the incredible team at the house tasked with bringing to life the celebrations of Jane Austen's 250th birthday this year, which we will come onto shortly as well. Sophie, a huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. Thank you so much for being here, Laura.
[00:01:47] Speaker C: Thank you so much. It's so lovely to be here.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: It's great. And I wanted to start by sort of plunging ourselves immediately back into the 80s, because it's a sort of little time capsule really that you've got in terms of the house and the museum and everything that you, you teach and sort of share with the world. I just wanted to sort of take ourselves back there, set the scene for us. So can you give us a general sense of what life was like for Jane and who she was when she was beginning to write these novels?
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So the story actually begins a little bit earlier. So by the time she gets to Chawton, she's already been writing for most of her life. I mean, the thing that I think not everyone always knows about Jane Austen is that she was writing from a really, really early age. She was writing prolifically from around the age of 11. And her teenage works, as we now call them, her Juvenalia, are extraordinary. They're really wild, they're hilarious, they're quite unsettling, they bit scary in some places. They're nothing like her adult novels, but she's really finding her way. She's writing short stories, she's writing plays, she reads all the time. But by the age of 11, she's finished her formal schooling, she's just at home. To be fair, her father is a teacher. I mean, he's a. He's a reverend. He's. Reverend Austin was many things. He's a clergyman. He is essentially a gentleman farmer. He's also a teacher. Her family is incredibly creative. They're all writers actually. So she's only following in her older brother's footsteps, so it's sort of what was probably expected. Don't suppose anyone thought it was anything special really. But she starts writing all these stories. Then as she gets a bit older, when she's sort of 19, 20, she starts writing full length novels and she writes three at that point. They were called Eleanor and Marianne, which later of course became Sense and Sensibility, first Impressions, which of course became Pride and Prejudice and Susan, which then became Catherine, which then became Northanger Abbey. So she has three novels, they're all draft. Then her life is kind of turned upside down. When she's 25, her father suddenly decides he's going to retire. Well, suddenly it's really hard to know any of these things. Jane Austen's life history is fiercely contested in many ways. There isn't an awful lot of evidence about some of the things that we believe about her life. But essentially he packs up with his wife and his two daughters and they move to Bath. And for the next eight years, the Austen women, essentially, because Reverend Austin actually doesn't survive all that long. He dies. So then the, the three women, Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother, who's also called Cassandra, are essentially homeless. They don't have much money because when the father dies, lots of the money dies with him. So they're kind of living in quite a sort of hand to mouth way. They live in lodgings in Bath. They move to different, different lodgings, to be honest, getting sort of less and less good as time goes on. They go on long visits to stay with friends and relatives. Then they move to Southampton. They live with their brother Frank and his wife. To be honest, he's in the navy, so he's not really there, but they live with his wife, and he contributes to the, you know, pay the bills, which helps. Late 1808, their brother Edward sort of comes good. He's incredibly rich, which we probably don't have time to go into how that happened, but he's a very, very wealthy landowner, and he said, actually, look, I'll give you a house on one of my estates for life. Like, he doesn't give it to them. He lets them live in it.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:15] Speaker C: And it's the house which I'm now privileged to work. It's such a joy to work at Jane Austen's house. It's this. It's a cottage. But you've been there. I mean, you know, it's a pretty nice house. I don't think any of us would think it was. Was too shabby.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Nowadays, it's not a cottage in the typical sense of how you imagine a cottage. It's got a lot of land and space.
[00:05:36] Speaker C: It's a beautiful house. However, compared to the manor house, up, modest.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:42] Speaker C: And it would have been quite full, actually. So it has the three Austen women. They also lived with their friend Martha Lloyd, because Jane and Cassandra's probably their best friend since childhood. Her mother had died a couple of years earlier. They take her in. They also sort of, you know, they have all these brothers and they all have loads of children, so they come and stay a lot of the time. And in those at that period, the idea of, like, going to stay with family wasn't a couple of days. It would have been weeks and weeks, if not months. So the house is full of lot of the time with visiting family, friends, children. Obviously the sort of the core for women who live there permanently. Servants. They would have had probably three, probably two female servants and a man, possibly other servants coming in for the day but not living in. So it's quite a busy household. So it is a nice, generously sized house, but it's quite busy. However, the really important thing, I think, from Jane's point of view is that it's the first time you. Since she left Steventon Rectory eight years earlier, that she has a fixed settled home that is permanent. It's not going anywhere. They're not about to have to move. She has a room of her own, like, space to spread out. When they're in lodgings in Bath, it would have been very cramped. Like Bath townhouses look huge from the outside, but actually, you know, a lot of the time that's, you know, one or two social rooms that are big, like the actual living Areas are quite cramped, so they would have been really squeezed in.
So for the first time in a really long time, she's able to kind of, you know, like, put down roots. And the other women in the household, Cassandra especially, really take up the reins of looking after the household. So they would have had servants, but they would have been lots they had to do themselves. They weren't as rich as their social standing would have liked them to be, so they're kind of always playing catch up. They are gentry class, but they're not well off. So there's a lot of making do and mend, making things look a bit better externally than they really are. A lot of, I would probably say, like, mincing behind the scenes, if you know what I mean, and making, you know, sewing and mending things and all of that. But as much as possible, Martha, Cassandra and their mother, mainly, mainly Cassandra and Martha probably take all of that housework off Jane's shoulders. They're like, we will do this, we'll manage the meals and the servants and, you know, all the housework stuff. Jane has apparently, according to all the sources, very few household jobs. She has to make the breakfast, which is probably tea and toast, not arduous. And she looks after, and this is my favourite thing, she looks after the sugar, the tea and the alcohol. So she has some important household essential items. She's on the essentials, yeah. Other than that, she's pretty much free. So she writes. And obviously there are other things they do. There are a lot of social obligations.
It's an era where socialising was really, really important. They would have had visitors come and see them, they would have gone out on visits, they still went to stay with relations, they still were looking after all the nieces and nephews. Between all the brothers, they had over 30 nieces and nephews, so they were always coming and going. Yeah, yeah. But essentially, for the first time in a really long time, she has the ability to write. And it's really obvious, like, it's not the case that she doesn't write at all.
Whilst she's living in Bath, living in Southampton. There are bits and bobs, there's Lady Susan and there's the Watsons, both of which are reasonably experimental. So it feels like in that period, she's experimenting, she's trying stuff. She's not really not quite able to get things to happen. She's now in her early 30s and she really clearly has this amazing energy and drive and probably partly that's financial because she's the only person in the Household. Well, no, Martha doesn't have any money, but her sister Cassandra had a legacy. She has a little bit of her own money. The mother has a little bit of money. Jane doesn't really have anything. So, you know, there's a financial incentive to get something published, and she chooses Eleanor Marianne. She rewrites it. So the most frustrating thing about Jane Austen's studies is that none of her manuscripts survive. So we don't know what Eleanor and Marianne looked like. All we know is the published version of Sense and Sensibility. But, you know, like, we think, judging on, like, all these different sources and family recollections and things like that, we think it was quite extensively revised. Certainly is no longer a story written in letters, although letters in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are really important. So you can see how it could have gone from an epistolary story to a narrative story. She rewrites it. Then, with the help of her brother Henry, who is in the militia, she gets a publisher. And the publisher she gets is a military publisher, because that's what Henry can get. He's actually never published a novel before, but he's like, okay, like, let's. Okay, we'll do it. But he publishes it on commission, which essentially means she was self publishing. She pays for it. Sense Sensibility is published, does pretty well. Then Pride and Prejudice, Then she starts writing. Then she sort of. She's obviously got a couple under her belt. It's really fascinating that she gets Northanger Abbey out. We have to call it Northanger Abbey, even though at the time she was, like, playing around with it. She called it Catherine, because annoyingly, in the meantime, a novel called Susan had come out. So she was like, I need to rewrite this, rename the central character. What are we going to do? What are we going to call it? And then she's working on it, and then she writes a note that she's going to put on at the beginning, like a prologue, a sort of preface, saying, oh, you know, time has gone past. You know, 13 years have gone by since I wrote this novel. You've got. The reader must bear in mind that things are no longer current. But then she decides not to publish it. So she writes to her niece Fanny, saying, Ms. Katherine is on the shelf, and I don't think she's going to come down for a while. So that, to me, is absolutely fascinating, that she looks at Northanger Abbey and critics generally think Northanger Abbey is like, the least strong of all her novels. And I'm there kind of like, shouting at them from behind my computer. I'm like, yeah. She. She knew that it was the first one. She wrote it. It's quite immature.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: But she knew that she wasn't actually going to publish it. But obviously, you know, she. So she starts writing afresh and she writes. What does she write? She writes. Oh, my God, you're gonna have to cut this bit. She. She writes Mansfield Park.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Okay. I should be giving you ideas.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: No. Okay, we'll give you a nice clean edit. So she needs to. She starts writing new stories, new novels. She writes Mansfield park, she writes Emma, she writes Persuasion. Although Persuasion has never published in her lifetime, she's starting to get ill. So in 1816, autumn, 1816, we start sort of getting clues that she's ill.
Most. A lot of what we know about her life is from her letters. So the letters that survive mainly to Cassandra. So we know that she has various symptoms. She's not able to get out and about as much as she would like. She's not able to. She doesn't have as much energy.
Then in the spring of 1817, persuasion is finished. She started writing a new novel, which we now call Sanditon. She called it the Brothers, but, like, as a working title, I didn't think that was, like, sort of set. She's writing Sanditon. She writes 12 chapters and she puts it down. And essentially that's the end of the story. She moves to Winchester with Cassandra to be closer to the doctor, and she dies. So that's sort of the end of her lived story. But her novels had been quite successful. They weren't. They weren't blowing the roof off the publishing industry, but they were selling well. So after her death. And the other part of the story, which, again, is fascinating and we don't really have an answer for, is that during her lifetime, she never put her name on any of her published works. They were always. Sense and Sensibility was by a lady. Pride and Prejudice was by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and sort of go on from there.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: I think that they then become by the author of Pride and Prejudice, because that's the one that does best in her lifetime. So then after her death, Cassandra looks after. Essentially inherits her estate.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: And Cassandra and Henry publish Northanger Abbey and Persuasion as a joint edition. It's four volumes. And then, like, they sell fine. They sell okay. After a while, they do drop out of print. There's a bit of a gap. Then George Bentley picks them up. This is a date, I don't know, off Top of my head. Somewhere in the late 19th century, he publishes them all in Bentley Standard editions, and they've never been out of print since then.
And they have grown and grown in popularity. In 1870, her nephew writes a memoir of her. And clearly that doesn't come out of the blue, like it's in response to popular interest in her as a writer and in her life. So she's got quite popular by then. But there's definitely a feeling that this memoir sort of pushes that a bit more, pushes her identity as a writer a bit further out there. And I mean, essentially, she's been riding a wave ever since. And I think now more than ever. I mean, it's an extraordinary story, actually, because most, like 99% of writers have completely the opposite journey, where they have like a fanfare when their works are published and they're famous, then and then they go downhill quite quickly. Whereas Jane Austen has exactly the opposite. And she is now generally thought to be that one of the best and most famous and most loved writer in the English canon, generally. Generally often said to be second only to Shakespeare. And Shakespeare is like a completely different thing. Like Shakespeare is on a totally different scale. So I think we could say that of the.
Of the novelist, she's right up there. She certainly, perhaps ties with Dickens. I would say she's better than Dickens, willing to die on that hill. She's certainly more human. I would say she is also. She is of all writers, and she spoiled me. And I think most people that love Jane Austen, she spoiled me for any other writer because there is not a word out of place. It's totally perfect. Her prose is spare and elegant and precise, and her stories are perhaps not. Perhaps not believable, perhaps not completely realistic, but they are made up of characters that are realistic. They're essentially. I. So I feel like on the main, the novels are kind of fairy tales, but they are so relatable, they're just elevated from real life. They are aspirational, perhaps, in a way like that, but they also, when you start digging into them, they tell you so much about life in her period, life for women, life for people that don't quite have an easy life, like they don't quite have enough money, or they're probably not going to marry very well, or they're not quite. They don't have housing security. That's one of the main themes. And it's interesting because that obviously is something that she's drawing very heavily on her own life.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. She's very good at painting A picture. It is incredible how each of the books capture something about society. It's not just, you know, brilliance with words and characters and all the things that you need to write a good novel or book and tell a story, but it's weaving through in a very clever way. They're funny, they're so full of humour and yeah, it's. They're great reads.
[00:17:19] Speaker C: They also haven't aged at all. Like the. It's extraordinary when you try reading other novels written around that time. Like, the most popular novelist when Jane Austen was writing was Walter Scott. If you try and read his novels now, they are very hard to read. They're dense, they are old, feeling heavy. Her novels aren't anything like that. They still feel like they could have been written yesterday.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: And that's the other thing about her now is there's a relatively modern phenomenon of reinterpretation, re adaptation. And obviously that's like, really pushes her kind of fame and popularity as well, because people want to know, like, what all of these new things came from. But there is a huge industry. Jane Austen is now like a huge, huge industry, both in publishing, in film and tv, and in, you know, gosh, books about Austen, adaptations of the novels, prequels and sequels and fan fiction of all types. Like, it's just that it's a huge, huge business as well.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's an inspiration, isn't it? It's somebody who, you know, it was unlikely at that time to produce something that good. Maybe, as you say, it wasn't immediately recognized, its worth wasn't immediately recognized, which I think probably a lot of people would relate to. But then, you know, unfortunately, she doesn't get to see the. All the glory and the, you know, the love that she has now.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: But, yeah, I think. And people talk a lot about, like, oh, what would Jane Austen think? And I think the question is almost. I mean, it's completely unanswerable. Like, she wouldn't. I think she wouldn't, like, understand the level. The level of fame that Jane Austen has is extraordinary. And all over the world, her name is kind of a byword for a certain type of literature and character. And I think she would be completely, like, blown away, overwhelmed, not be able to understand it.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:19:18] Speaker C: But it's also really interesting what you just said about, like, how this doesn't happen very often. I mean, this literally never happens. Somebody.
It's happened, what, a handful of times that you get an artist, a writer of this kind of genius. I'm sorry, that's such a corny word. But she's a genius. And she comes out of nowhere, as so many do. Like, Shakespeare and Dickens also came out of nowhere with, like, you know, humble backgrounds. And people obviously love to argue about, like, how could that have happened?
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:49] Speaker C: But it can happen. And just once in a blue moon, there's something special happens. Yeah.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: And in some ways, I guess there's, you know, not to take it away from Dickens and Shakespeare, but when we look through history, we kind of expect there to be these famous male figures dotted around in all these sort of different industries and even within art. But when it's a female writer, you know, and my historical knowledge of the education system and society probably isn't quite up to scratch, but I'm fairly aware that the same sort of levels of education wasn't, you know, it wasn't equal. Society didn't give those opportunities to everybody. And so for her to have done it so modestly, you know, sort of didn't. She wasn't putting it out there to be the best novelist or, you know, the most famous. But.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: No. Although I think she knew she was really good.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I hope so. I really hope so.
[00:20:47] Speaker C: I don't think we need to worry about that. I think she knew that she was very good.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: I think she had concerns about whether the readership of the time would get it. There are some comments that she made when Mansfield park was published. In fact, this is fascinating. When Mansfield park was published and it was the most out there of her novels, it was bringing up the themes and subject matters that was difficult at the time.
It's gently pulling at the strings around the Church of England, essentially the slave trade. Like, she pulls up these themes and it was the least well received of her novels. And I think this is extraordinary. So she kept a list of everyone's opinions of it, like her family, her friends, but also sort of more public reactions, reviews. Like, it was never formally reviewed, but she kept notes of everything. And I think that says that she was, I don't know, concerned. She was just aware that it was. She had done something a little bit out there with it. And she was just keeping careful track of how this had gone down. And people's opinions were very mixed. And, like, her family had positive things to say, but I think it just shows. And then the next novel is Emma, and that is straight back to form. That's like. Because essentially she's writing for money. Like, she's. She's doing her art. She is. She's not compromising anything. But at the same time, she's like, I also need it to sell. So I'm gonna. I'm not perhaps gonna push that quite so much in the next one. I'm gonna go back to nice, safe story of a woman.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: What they want.
[00:22:20] Speaker C: Give them what they want. I'll still be very, very clever. And Emma. Emma is still challenging the conventions, but more subtly, it's just a bit more under the radar. So you can read it without feeling challenged, especially if you were a clergyman or someone like that. You don't need to feel worried about Emma. Like, you can get it, but you don't have to see it.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:40] Speaker C: And the other thing that I was just thinking that as well, I absolutely love this. I mean, love to hate this is when Pride and Prejudice was published. It was very. It was successful. It was very popular at the time. And the playwright Richard Jaradin wrote that it was far too clever to have been written by a woman. Which just speaks so volumes, doesn't it? I mean, it's great.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that is.
[00:23:03] Speaker C: And that. Love to hate, love to hate. But also, like, Jane Austen wasn't putting her name on the title page, but she was saying, by a lady, she wasn't beating about the bush. And there were novelists at the time and later, I mean, George Eliot obviously springs to mind, who put male names on their novels because they knew they would sell better. And I love the fact that Jane Austen never did that.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And I have to ask some questions about how and when she was writing. Is there any indication, as you say, it's really hard to kind of track these things unless it's in a letter or, you know, been passed down in some way. But do we know?
[00:23:39] Speaker C: Kind of.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Did she get up in the morning and start writing? Did she have a routine about writing? Did she take her book out into a field and write? You know, I think there's a writing table at the house. Right?
[00:23:50] Speaker C: There is a writing table at the house. Okay. So. No, we don't know that stuff. We know that she got up and played the piano. So she was a good amateur pianist. And the story goes that the rest of the household didn't love her playing. Perhaps they just didn't like piano music in general.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: That resonates with me, Jane. Don't worry, I've been there.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: So the story goes, according to the memoir, the story is that first thing in the morning. So they would have breakfast at about 10 o' clock in the morning, but they would get up, obviously earlier, particularly in the summer when it's light, they'd get up and do some work. So kind of household chores, clearing out the fires, lighting fires, getting water from their well, like all of that stuff. So that was going on, and Jane Austen took an hour or so to play the piano at that point, whilst everyone was busy. Then she made the breakfast and they presumably all sat around together and had their tea and toast. And then I think it probably would have depended on the day. She probably would have wanted to write, but perhaps people were paying calls. I think actually that normally happened a bit later in the day, so maybe it's the morning time. Their meals are quite interesting. So they had breakfast around 10 and then they had dinner at some point in the afternoon. And it varies greatly, depending on how fashionable you are, where you live. If you're in London, you probably have dinner later, maybe even like six o' clock, something like that in the country, maybe three, something along those lines. And then tea later, after dinner. And then there's this lovely story, isn't there, which I don't know properly, about how, as dinner gets later and later in the town, afternoon tea kind of becomes a thing, and then a lunch sort of becomes a new meal, but that's a bit later on. So she essentially is in a period where they have two main meals in the day. So probably writing was squeezed in between those two, in between paying calls, receiving visits, doing other things. She loved doing lots of things that we love doing. She loved going shopping, she loved walking, she went out a lot. And she writes in her letters about going on walks, both sort of country walks, and when she's living in Bath, she talks about walking around Bath and things like that. So she's a country girl, she loves getting out there, but she also gets her writing done. And then in the evening, probably. And again, it's very variable, but. And it depends on the time of year and who's staying with them and things like that. But probably after dinner, the household sort of came together. Together probably in the drawing room. Certainly in the kind of the months of the year where it's getting dark early on, they would have gathered together to save light, so they would have had candles, they might have had some forms of lamp, but. And they would have had fires. But they're not hugely wealthy, so they're not going to have fires in every room. Candles are expensive, so they probably are in one room and they're probably sewing, I think, most days. And we know that the Austen family read aloud a lot of the time, and I think that's something that they did as a Family, but also it really helps, lighting wise, if one person is well lit and can read from a novel and the others are getting on with their knitting. I don't knit, but I understand if you're a good knitter, you don't need to have any light, you can just do it. So there's things like that going on. Then if there are members of the family staying, we know that sometimes, if there were lots of nephews and nieces, they would push back the furniture and Jane would play country dances on the piano and they would have, like, little impromptu dances and things like that. So there's. Sometimes there's stuff like that going on. Sometimes they have neighbours that come for dinner. So the most wonderful story.
I'm really aware this isn't about writing, but this is about reading.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: They're all good stories. We're here for it all.
[00:27:22] Speaker C: So when Pride and Prejudice is published in January 1813 arrives, she gets her author's copy a day early. She gets on the 27th of December. Proper publication day is the 28th. What am I talking about? She gets her first copies on 27th January. Proper publication day is 8th of January. This is why the dates are so confusing. On 29th January, she writes a letter to Cassandra and she tells her that the very day of the book's coming, which is the 27th, they had their neighbour, Miss Ben, over for dinner, and Miss Ben was a spinster living in the village. She was not well off. She was in the novels. We could think of her in terms of Miss Bates in Emma. So she is really down on her luck. She doesn't have much money, so Mrs. Austen and Jane invite her to dinner and then after dinner they tell her that they've got a new novel. It's just arrived from London. They don't tell her that Jane is the author, but they read it to her. They read her half the first volume, which is about six and a half chapters. So they literally probably sit her down for maybe two hours and read out this book to her without.
Yeah, exactly. But, like, the pressure was obviously enormous because Jane is there going, like, this is my first public, like, outing for this work. Literally, I'm holding my first published copy. Like, it's too late to get out. Fortunately, Miss Ben likes it a lot. She admires Elizabeth. And Jane writes to Cassandra. She says something like, fortunately, she admired Elizabeth. I really do not know how I could have. She says, I don't know how I would cope with people that don't like her. She really is the you know, the finest heroine that I've ever seen in print. And so Ms. Ben comes back a few days later and they read her another chunk. And then Jane writes to Cassandra a few days later, and she's like, the second reading didn't please me so well, my mother didn't get the voices quite right. Like, she's starting to, like, sort of pull it apart a bit more. And I think, you know, that's hard, like, as a writer, once it's published, it's set down, you can't do anything to change it. But she's also noticing, like, issues with the typeset. Like, she says, some of the paragraphs have been scratched, squashed together, and, like, not everything has come out quite right. She's like, there might as well have been no suppers at Longbourn, because something's happened and they've sort of chopped things up. So she's starting to pick holes in it a little bit. But, yeah, essentially we know that on the very day that she got her first copy, she sat down in the drawing room and read a whole load of it aloud to her neighbor. I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing to envision that.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, incredible. Can you imagine. God, the ticket price for that?
[00:29:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I know, I know.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Do we know much about.
I don't know if you get these questions very often, but sort of the paper and the ink or materials that she would have written.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Yes. So this is good timing, this question, because last year, last October, we opened a new sort of permanent exhibition in the house called Jane Austen and the Art of Writing, which looks. Tries to look at sort of everything we know about Jane Austen as a writer, and sort of looks at everything we've been talking about, like, her kind of writing life, her, you know, her history of writing, what she was doing. But it also tries to look at the physicality of writing and what we know from the very few sort of surviving scraps. And there really isn't very much to go on, but. So, as I was saying earlier, the most frustrating thing is that the manuscripts weren't kept, and we don't know quite who destroyed them. Could have been the publisher themselves. They might have returned them to Jane and then she chucked them away. But essentially, it wasn't thought to be of value, which, obviously, today they are kind of the most valuable thing. And, like, if you could find anything, that would be what you'd want.
So the only manuscripts that we have that we can glean this kind of information from are the manuscripts that weren't published. So we've got Lady Susan, we've got the Watsons, and we've got a chapter of Persuasion. Because when she finished writing Persuasion, she decided that the last chapter, last two chapters, actually weren't quite what she wanted them to be. So she actually scrapped the whole of those two chapters and rewrote them, which is a good decision, actually. It's a much better ending that she gives it. But it means that we have two chapters of Persuasion that weren't sent to the publisher, so they stay. So those are really useful and they do tell us a lot. And we kind of have to take on trust that she wrote all her novels in the same way. But it does look, from those three, she wrote in little booklets that she made herself. So she would have bought big sheets of paper from the stationers and paper at that period, you could buy different types of paper, but essentially it was mainly made from rags, which I find my head very difficult to get around my head how that would have worked. But I have. I have sort of spent some time sort of trying to understand this. And I think essentially the rags were pulped. They were sort of broken down, soaked and beaten and broken down into, like, fragment that then could be sort of washed together and you drain off the water and you'd have this pulp and then you could make that into paper, sort of. You'd squidge it onto a frame, scrape it, so it's really thin, dry it out. So that's the kind of paper. And there were. There were actually paper mills all over Hampshire. She's actually living in a paper manufacturing district.
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:42] Speaker C: Which I don't know is particularly relevant, but, like, it just happens to be that there are paper mills around and they're often obviously, on rivers because they. They use the water to. As part of the process. So there's a paper mill in Romsey. I think that, like, some of her papers have been tracked down to. So there is a really wonderful paper conservator at the Bodleian who I spoke to when we were creating the Art of Writing exhibition. And he's done the most extraordinary work, looking essentially at the watermarks in the surviving manuscripts and piecing together, like, which pages sat next to each other, you know, where they were produced, when they were produced. The watermark tells you the name of the maker, but also the year of manufacture. So that helps us to date not necessarily when she was writing, but when she bought the paper, when the paper was made. So that's like a really incredibly niche area that you can drill down into.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great.
[00:33:34] Speaker C: And we've got some of that information then in terms of ink, she would have written with a quill. Obviously, it's pre the invention of steel, metal, nibbed pen. So she would have written with a goose quill.
Also turn all of this reading into quills. Like, you get very obsessed on this stuff. You have to get it right.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:55] Speaker C: So. So to make a quill pen, you need the wing feather of a goose. It needs to be a chunky feather, and you strip off all of the soft, fluffy bits. So it has ruined period dramas for me because they never do that. You always have, like, a whole feathery feather, don't you? And they're writing with it.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: So that's a fake.
[00:34:16] Speaker C: Yeah, you need to cut off all of those feathery bits. So. Which makes sense because they're annoying. Like, they're gonna get in the way. And so you want it to be, like, as much like a pen as possible. So you just want the spine with perhaps a little twiddle at the end, like a little flag at the end of it. So then at the base of the quill, you cut the nib. And actually, she probably didn't do that herself. It was quite a tedious, like, difficult thing to do. You probably just bought them from a stationery shop. Like, that was absolutely. And she probably also bought her ink from. From a stationer's shop. However, interestingly, another little nugget that I gleaned is that. So the quill is a poor. Is made of a porous substance, so it soaks up the ink. So you could probably write with a quill for about 10 minutes. And then it starts to get really soft. So you just put it down, pick up another one. You have lots. Start writing with your new one. And then once your first one has dried out, you can swap back and use that one. And they probably. I mean, depending on how much you're writing with them, they last a few days or, like, maybe a week. And what you might do is mend it. And there's just such a lovely scene in Pride and prejudice where Ms. Bingley is talking. She's trying to flirt with Mr. Darcy, and he's not having any of it. And he's trying to write his letter, and she's really bugging him, and she's like, oh, you write so beautifully. Oh, you write such long letters. And she's like, let me mend your pen for you, because I'm really good at mending pens. And he's like, no, thanks, I always meant my own. So they probably, they probably weren't cutting their own, but they would have like just trimmed it. You would have had a little knife as part of your stationery kit to just like sharpen it up if you start, if it gets a bit blunt. And then ink wise, they would have used iron gall ink. And everyone gets excited because in the museum collection we have this really wonderful book actually. It's a wonderful handwritten notebook by Martha Lloyd, who lived with them the whole time in Chawton, and it's her household book. So it's essentially her collection of recipes. I mean, I don't know about you, but like my mum did this, like she would. It's pre Pinterest age. You just write out all the recipes. Your friends give you recipes or you, you know, you pick things up and you write them into your book. So Martha did this, which is really helpful because it tells us so much about what they were eating.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: And well done, Martha.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: Exactly. She's so useful. The front of the book is recipes and then she's turned it over and written from the back a whole load of kind of household y stuff. Like she's got some remedies in there, she's got some kind of health things, but she's got cleaning stuff and she's got a recipe how to make ink. So everyone is just like totally, totally enchanted with this idea. But I'm unfortunately, I have been told by a very eminent scholar that it's so unlikely that they would have been making it themselves. Like maybe they did once in a while, but in general they just would have gone and bought their ink.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: It's like me with bread.
[00:37:00] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: I love the idea of it. I'll write that recipe out. But will I actually make the bread?
[00:37:04] Speaker C: Probably not. You probably do it like once and you're like, oh, this is delicious, but.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Gotta try complicated recipes or something.
[00:37:11] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. But it does mean from the recipe we do know, like she would have been buying the same kind of ink and it's essentially made from oak galls, which, like, we have an oak tree in the garden of the museum. It's probably one of my favourite things, actually, and no one really knows this, but there's an oak tree in the garden of the museum and it is a descendant of an oak tree that Jane Austen planted. So the, the one she planted has gone, but an oak apple from that tree, a sort of sister sapling sprung up. That one is still there.
[00:37:42] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: So that's a sort of living link with her.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah. I love It. She's embodied in nature. She's everywhere there, isn't she? That's just. That's so lovely. And so when we look at the sort of her penmanship and how she was writing, is there a particular style at that time? I know when I came in the kitchen, you had some beautiful recipe books. I don't know if that was Martha Lloyd's or. I think there was somebody that they were following a recipe that had been written by them.
[00:38:12] Speaker C: Yeah. They were probably the facsimiles of Martha's book, which actually is now back from the conservator. But it was starting to fall apart, so it was having a little bit of hospital treatment, which, I'm glad to say, went very well.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Good, good.
[00:38:25] Speaker C: She's out the other side. Yes. So I am not an expert in handwriting, but Jane Austen's handwriting is very distinctive. It's exquisitely neat and beautiful. It's very small. She. It's a copper plate, kind of, you know, sort of traditional, beautiful handwriting. But so something that is really interesting about it is that the time she was living in, paper and postage were expensive. So we have the manuscripts that we were talking about earlier. But the other thing, the other sort of incredible resource that we have are Jane Austen's letters. And they're mostly written to her sister, Cassandra. Cassandra was two years older than her, and they were just best friends. They were incredibly close their whole lives.
Obviously, when they were. They lived together most of the time, so they weren't writing to each other. Yeah, but Cassandra was.
She was kind of a classic older sister, I think. Like, she was very sensible and dependable, and she was always being called over the brothers. Quite a few of the brothers wanted Cassandra to come and help, particularly when their wives were, you know, gonna have a baby. So they would be like, let's get Cassandra. She can come stay for, like, three or four months. She can look after the kids. She can help with the childbirth. So there were, you know, considerable times in Jane Austen's life when she and Cassandra were apart. And in that time, they wrote to each other nearly every day. A letter quite often is written over a course of several days, and then it would be posted, and then it seems like Jane Austen would pretty much start writing again immediately. And Cassandra was presumably doing the same thing. So her letters tragically, don't survive, but Jane's do. And I know that everyone is fascinated by this at the moment because of the BBC adaptation of Ms. Austen, which is based on Jill Hornby's book.
So there are 161 letters written by Jane Austen that survive in the world that we know about. There were probably several thousand written, and Cassandra destroyed most of them. And it's a really interesting question that we won't ever be able to answer about quite why that was, but there are probably very good reasons that she did that. And up until reasonably recently, like, I'd say, like, up until maybe 30 or 40 years ago, critics and Austen scholars were very hard on Cassandra, and they were like, she destroyed them. She made a bonfire of them. This is, you know, this is appalling. She has denied the world this information, but you've got to think about it from her point of view and what was in those letters. I mean, even in the ones that survive, there are some quite interesting. Well, Jane Austen says some quite difficult things in some of those letters. She's quite rude about people. She's quite mean. There are one or two things that are really pretty close to the wire. So I think probably Cassandra was just looking after Jane's legacy, as Jill Hornby argues, and was. So, in a way, we could turn that on its head. And instead of thinking Cassandra destroyed all these letters, we could think she saved 161 of them. Like, that wasn't normal. None of Cassandra's letters survive. Yeah, most people's letters don't survive, but she obviously thought, okay, actually, Jane Austen's meteor was. You know, her star was rising by Cassandra's death. People were, you know, there was a kind of rage in the Victorian era. There was kind of autograph hunting and, you know, sort of celebrity. You know, the age of celebrity was sort of beginning.
So I think she saved some, and I think we can be grateful to her for that rather than criticizing her for getting rid of the other ones. Anyway, the point is that there are 161 letters, and of those, to be honest, that isn't even quite true. We have the text of 161. We don't have the manuscripts of 161. So there was an amazing Austen scholar called Deirdre Le Fay who passed away a couple of years ago, but she basically devoted her life to tracking down, I mean, all areas of Austen studies, but in particular the letters. And I could show you. So she. She published a collection. Here it is. Yeah, it's my copy with. I use it every day. The pages are all falling out.
But essentially, that is the transcripts of all the letters. She traveled around tracking them down. Quite a lot of them are in museums. Quite a lot of them are in America. There are various Collections, particularly the Morgan, I think, has got about 50 of them. It's got a big chunk. The Morgan Library in New York, in the uk, they are held at various institutions. The Bodien has some. The British Library, and we have 16, which is like 10% of them. So we're, you know, really proud of that in a way, particularly because so many of them were written from this house. So that's sort of so special to bring them. Bring them home. But, yeah, essentially we can look at the letters for more of this sort of understanding about how she wrote and her penmanship. And one of the things I love best about her letters. I'm sorry, this is such a long answer to your question, but there are letters where she so post it. She's always thinking about how much things cost, and it costs a lot of money to send a letter, so it's there.
The cost is decided by distance traveled and weight of letter. So she wants to write as closely as she possibly can, squeeze as much on as possible.
So there's a thing in this period, which people will have heard of, called crosswriting, where you get to the end of the page and you've written on both sides of the page, and then instead of taking a new page, you turn it 90 degrees and write cross. Really hard to read. But she does that occasionally.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:58] Speaker C: And then the other thing she does is she turns it 180 degrees and she writes upside down. So we. One of the letters in our collection, she's got to the end, and then she's like. She's got a postscript, essentially. So she just turns it over and, like, writes it between the lines. And it's amazing. And, like, we can tell people to do that, but always like, God, Cassandra must have just known. Like, she would have. Like, she would have just understood that something Jane is going to do, because you could almost miss it or not understand or not be able to read it. And then you would fold up your sheet so you wouldn't write over the whole of both sides, you would leave a gap where you would write the address. And so you'd fold up your sheet, seal it with wax, so none of your letter is on the external parts, but she would in particular, she would write on every other little bit. So it's almost like origami. You have to open it up and then find the bits of the letter on every other surface. But you'd fold it, seal it, and then it would be sent by the post. And there are some of the letters as well. Like, she's Written, taken by care of, so and so. And she's like, great, I'm not going to have to pay for this one. Like somebody's just going to hand deliver it for me so I can stretch out and write over a few more sheets. But in general, they're really, really concise and squeezed in.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: Incredible. It's so fascinating, isn't it, how.
I mean, letter writings, as in writing a letter, is almost a whole nother subject of how that's changed over the years and obviously how many of us are still doing it, writing letters to each other and the sense of communication in that. And there wasn't other ways to do it when you were far away from each other and how, you know, the conversation style or your writing style and how she would have written to Cassandra versus somebody else. It's fascinating. So we were obviously lucky enough to have Tracey Trussell, a graphologist who studies handwriting, and she was studying a sample of Jane's handwriting, which unfortunately happened to be her will. And so she talks about that in episode two in series one, but you've heard it and kind of gleaned from it some interesting facts. Some of the things that she mentions, some of the pressure patterns, the right slant, the close word spacing, which is what you've just said, and again, that light pressure suggesting extreme fatigue. I probably shouldn't paraphrase this in any way.
[00:46:08] Speaker C: I think it. I mean, I think it's fascinating, but I suppose I would like Tracy to look at a sample of her writing from earlier on in her life because obviously when she wrote her will, she had got to a point where she was really ill, like it was nearing the end of her life and for most of her life she's not in that situation.
So she is. I think of her as somebody with a huge amount of energy and life force, I think. So I think it would be fascinating. Let's get her back. Let's get her back for another episode.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, do a bonus because, like, her handwriting also obviously changes throughout her life. And there's an amazing website, actually, that you may not have seen, but it's this incredible resource called Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscript, and that was pulled together by Catherine Sutherland, who is one of the sort of leading academics in Austen studies. And she's pulled together all the existing manuscripts, not the letters, but the fiction manuscripts. So starting with the teenage writings, so you can look at those. And then it would be fascinating to compare that to what her writing is like an 11 year old's handwriting, meaning it put most 11 year old's handwriting to shame. Probably not in her era. I mean, everyone was taught handwriting then in a way that we aren't now.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:24] Speaker C: And the other thing, and I think you'll just love this, I love this so much thinking about the physicality of her writing and how she wrote. We know especially from the Watsons, she's writing into manuscripts, right. So she's not writing onto single sheets of paper. She's right. She's made herself a little book. And if you, if you're doing that, you're kind of, you've set, you've made your, you've made your own life a bit harder for yourself because it's your first draft. If you want to go back and change things, it's quite hard to. You'd have to do a lot of crossing out, which she doesn't do, or you'd have to rewrite your whole booklet then. This is what's so incredible. There are a couple of places in the Watson's manuscript where she does go back and change her mind or she adds bits, she's gone back and she's like, I need to add something in here. But there's literally no space because she's written right to the like, there's no margin. She's written right to the edge of the paper. So she makes herself a little post it. She cuts a little piece of paper and pins it with a pin into place and she cut them all from the same sheet of paper. She knew exactly how much space she was going to need and cut her big sheet of paper up into little post its.
She's so controlled. She knows how much space she needs, she knows how much she wants to write, how much space that's going to take up. And we know, you know, from the watermarks in the paper. Exactly. They were all cut from the same sheet. They, she's pinning them in. There are a number of places. So I got incredibly excited about that and I was like, she invented the post it.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:49:01] Speaker C: So she didn't invent this technique of going back and amending, but she does embrace that way of working. So you go back and use pin on your little, your little like addendum.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. How beautiful. Incredible.
This has been brilliant. Thank you so much. I could ask a thousand more questions, but before we go, could you give us a brief overview of the kind of scope of activities happening at the house for the 20th anniversary? Can you do that? In a nutshell, I don't know. I mean, we'll direct everyone to the website to find out more. But I know you're doing a lot that you. This year.
[00:49:35] Speaker C: We are doing so much this year. So we opened the Art of Writing the end of last year. This year we have an exhibition called Austin Mania, which runs for the whole year and celebrates the 30th anniversary of the iconic and much beloved film and TV adaptations of 1995, most sort of famously. And obviously the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which is many, many, many, my people's favorite adaptation. But also there was Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility, there was Persuasion with Amanda Root, and there's Clueless, which is also fabulous Austin adaptation, although a little bit left wing.
Left wing. Left wing. Left. Left field.
Left field. Yeah, that's what I meant. So those are sort of permanent things that you can see at the house. We've got various things coming and going throughout the year, and we've tried to squeeze those into five festivals, kind of for our own sanity, but also to help with sort of visitor experience. So we know that people come from all over the world to the house, and we want to sort of put things together so that they can make sort of as much of their trip as possible. So in January, we had a Pride and Prejudice festival, which was, I mean, just joyous. The next one will be in May. We've got a Sense and Sensibility themed festival. Then in July we've got an Emma themed festival. In September we've got Persuasion. And then in December we've got a kind of finale of the whole thing, which will be bringing together sort of celebrations of all the novels and of Jane Austen, sort of all her works, her life, sort of right around the actual anniversary of the birthday. But also, obviously in the run up to Christmas, which wasn't such a big deal in Georgian England, but obviously is today. So that kind of will finish the year on a high.
[00:51:20] Speaker B: Yeah, love that. And there's a podcast out. You've got a new book as well, and they're both called A Jane Austen youn.
[00:51:29] Speaker C: So the book, oh my gosh, again, it was just so much fun to put together. But essentially that goes. There's a chapter for each month of the year. So for each month we tried to pull out sections of Jane Austen's writing. Something that she does really well is to really pinpoint in her novels when things are happening, sometimes to the exact date, sometimes just to the month. So extracts that are set in that month and things that were happening in Jane Austen's own life or in her world, things she would have been aware of. So we've pulled in some wider things like the French Revolution or the Battle of Trafalgar, things like that. The sort of things she would have. That would have been huge in her world.
And then also sort of brought it up to the present day. So things that have happened since then, really focusing it on the house, things that we do in those months or those seasons, and then really, really beautiful photography of objects in the collection that are sort of linked to those seasons or those months, and beautiful, beautiful images of the house. And then the podcast kind of takes all of that and sort of takes it to a different platform. It's not quite audio version of the book, but it's sort of a sister thing. So they. They exist sort of side by side. Yeah. And that is also called a Jane Austen Year.
[00:52:40] Speaker B: And, well, let me firstly just say thank you so, so much for talking to me today. It's lovely to hear about all the celebrations that are coming, but also knowing that you are this incredible that people can go to, to find out more about, obviously, Jane Austen's life at Chawton, but also beyond that, or the kind of ripple effects that she's. She's given the world. And also all the education side, the engagement offering, there's a huge amount that you do, whether it's resources and obviously events, whether that's in person and online, so people from all over the world can access a lot of the things that you can share. So, yeah, huge, huge thank you for joining me and just kind of giving me answering all my questions. That's my alarm to pick up my children from school.
[00:53:28] Speaker C: Okay, well, we bet we better wrap it up. But no, I mean, gosh, Laura, I wanted to say thank you so much because obviously I missed out that one of the highlights of the Sense and Sensibility Festival in May is going to be you're going to be coming back to Chawton. I know you had a lovely visit there recently, but you're going to be coming back and leading a really wonderful calligraphy workshop for us, which is really exciting.
[00:53:47] Speaker B: I'm so excited. I'm slightly in awe of just obviously Jane Austen's handwriting, which is slightly different to creating the kind of calligraphic styles that we'll be doing. But also what I'm really excited about is that we came on a really sort of frosty January day. And I'm going to be coming back in May when, I mean, who knows? It may be frosty then.
[00:54:08] Speaker C: Totally. It could still be. It could be snowing.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Snowing English weather. Yeah, hopefully something with some, you know, just the nature giving us some spring vibes and probably tipping us into early summer.
[00:54:21] Speaker C: Absolutely. And I have to say, I'm so biased, obviously, but I think Jane Austen's house is one of the most beautiful places to be on a beautiful sunny spring day. It's a really idyllic, sort of feels very private and quiet and hidden away. So, yeah, it is special.
[00:54:36] Speaker B: So to find out more about Jane Austen's house, visit Jane Austen's House or find out more on Instagram aaneaustins House. All the links will be in the today's episode Show Notes. Thank you so much, Sophie, for joining me for the life of letters.
[00:54:50] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:54:51] Speaker A: Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow lettering enthusiast. And for all the details to connect with us, check out the Show Notes. A huge thank you to my producer, Heidi Cullop for ensuring this podcast reached your ears. And finally, to all the guests featured in this series, go check them out.
