March 5, 2014 • 36 mins
She was not a shy spinster who wrote some little books mostly to amuse her own family. She also was not a real-life Elizabeth Bennett. Jane Austen's life was very different from any of her heroines. Here's a link to our show notes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we're
just gonna get two things out in the open at
the beginning of this episode. Thing number one. Jane Austen
(00:24):
was not just a shy spinster who wrote some little
books mostly to amuse herself in her own family. That's
a common rumor. It's a common rumor that is false.
Another common maybe not rumor, but another perception that is false.
She was not like the real life version of Elizabeth
Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, And I think that
(00:46):
dovetails on the rumor like people think that her books
were some sort of personal wish fulfillment scenario, yeah, or
sort of a fictionalization of her own life, and they really,
we're not there. There's a little things that you will
read and Jane Austen books that do have a little
tie into her own life, but for the most part,
(01:06):
these were very, very definitely fictional books from her imagination,
not from real things that had happened to her. Um.
She is one of our most requested writers for sure.
Lots of people asking us to talk about Jane Austen,
so we're going to do that today, talk about her.
Not at all Jane Austen novel like life, um, starting
(01:30):
of course at the beginning. Yeah, it was completely unlike
any of the heroines in her books, just not the same,
not as her fictional world. She was born on December sixteenth,
seventeen seventy five and Steventon, Hampshire, and she was the
seventh child and second daughter of George Austen, who was
an Anglican rector, and his wife Cassandra. And she was
(01:52):
christened the following April five and she spent a little
more than a year after that in the care of
another family in the village. She was close enough her
parents could visit and for her to be brought to
the parsonage to visit as well, and Jane went to
live at home again once she was a toddler. All
of the Austin children, except for her brother George, who
had uh some kind of developmental disability, followed the same
(02:14):
pattern like this was their family practice to yet send
the children away and then bring them back. It was
an extremely successful practice. All of the Austin children lived
into adulthood, which not common at the time, and not
common at the time at all um uh. And by
all accounts uh, they were an exceptionally modest family. I mean,
(02:36):
it's eight children in the end being raised on a
rector's stalary, which was not a lot of money. But
they were exceptionally intelligent and literate. Jane and her siblings
and the many many cousins and friends who would come
to visit them and stay for a while. We're also
really creative and they like to do things like put
on plays together. And they made extensive use of their
(02:57):
father's five hundred volume library, which is really where Jane
cut her teeth on the world of language. And if
you've read any novel by Jane Austen, or even seen
any adaptation for film or television or the screen, you've
probably picked up on the theme that being smart and
articulate can make up for not inheriting a fortune. And
this really was one of the Jane Austen's family's family's values,
(03:20):
having been written down in almost those precise words by
her father's grandmother long before Jane was even born, that
you can make something of yourself even if you didn't
inherit tons of money when Jane was a child. This
is to me where things really diverge. If you are
a fan of Jane Austen, like they're they're definitely interesting
(03:43):
male characters, but the focus is really on the women
and the women's lives and the sort of the other
women and the other sisters and the cousins and the moms,
and yeah, I think most people think of her, uh
in some ways as like a women's writer, really writing
a lot about women, a lot for women. But she
(04:03):
grew up in a house full of boys. She didn't
really have that much exposure to huge groups of women.
I would even call this upbringing overrun with boys. I
mean she had she had all of those brothers, you know,
she was just her and one of her sister, all
of these brothers. Her mother and father ran a boys
school out of their home to try to you know,
(04:26):
make ends meet, and so um, you know, Jane and
her sister would share a room and all the other
bedrooms were full of all these boys. And her father
taught her brothers and all of these other male children.
And so she lived in this like very rowdy, noisy,
boyish environment and kind of what we would think of
as a tomboy kind of sense um until she was
(04:48):
seven and went away to boarding school with her sister Cassandra,
and their cousin named Jane Cooper went to the same
school as well. So from the toddler ages that she
came back from being with a wet nurse in the
village until the age of seven. Uh, noisy boy time
all over the place in Jane Austen's world. It stresses
me out just thinking about it. I kind of love it,
many people do. I'm not great with the loud children
(05:10):
noises well, and the thing that it reminds me of
on on my mom's side of the family, um, I
have there were eleven children total in my generation, um,
and only three of us were girls, so kind of
a similar proportion, um. And I like, I remember like
the boy footsteps thundering up and down the stairs, and
(05:34):
I kind of imagined that it was a little bit
similar growing up happy, growing up in this many many
boys and and uh boys that she was really good too,
and ones who were brought into study at the school.
While I'm like this is stressful, like hey, noisy fun time,
but girls schools at this point in history tended to
(05:57):
be fairly meager and indifferent, and it seems that the
school that Jane went to was really better than most.
But while there, all three of the girls got sick
with what was probably typhus. They did recover, but Jane
Cooper's mother caught the illness while nursing her back to health,
and unfortunately she ultimately died from it. Now, once they
were all well, they all spent another year at home,
(06:20):
with Jane Cooper often being there as well since her
mother had died, and they eventually all went off to
another boarding school, what they only stayed for about a
year before coming home again for good and being taught
at home. Jane's first and perhaps only love was Thomas
Langlois la Foy, and she met him in sev when
he was visiting for the holidays. Well, they fell in
(06:42):
love and were obvious enough about it that it drew
some attention, and soon enough his kids sent him home again,
either to protect Jane from him or to protect him
from Jane. Basically, people did not want them together. It
worked out fine for Thomas, who married an heiress, but
afterwards Jane really he had little in the way of suitors.
For a very long time. Yeah. She he definitely got
(07:05):
the longer end of the stick on that whole breakup. Yeah.
So let's talk about Jane the grown up. She was
not the only writer in her family. Her mother panned
little poems for the children and for the students at
the school. Jane's oldest brother, James, was also a writer
and a poet, and in January of seventeen eighty nine,
he actually started his own magazine, which was called The
(07:27):
Loiterer and it ran for fourteen months. And Jane's first
written works were satires. One was called Love and Friendship,
which satirized romances, and a historical satire called History of England.
When she was around nineteen years old, she wrote an
epistolary novel which, uh, on the off chance you don't
know what that means, it means the novel that's written
(07:48):
as a series of letters, and it was called Eleanor
and mary Anne, which would later become Sense and Sensibility.
Jane's parents stopped teaching in seventeen ninety six, when Jane
was twins, so at this point the house became a
lot quieter. Uh. That year she started working on first Impressions,
which would later become Pride and Prejudice, and about a
(08:10):
year later she started rewriting Eleanor and mary Anne, changing
it from this series of letters into a more linear narrative.
She also wrote her first draft of Northinger Abbey, which
was originally called Susan, between sev seventeen nine, so she
basically banged out the bulk of three novels in as
many years. Super productive. I'm kind of imagining now that
(08:34):
it was not quite so reality in the house and
she had a little headspace to herself. She was like,
let's write some books for real now. Jane's Familey played
a huge part in the process of her writing and
her rewriting of these books. In the evenings, she would
read her work aloud to Cassandra and her parents, testing
out her writing on the family, and she would make
notes to herself of what what worked and what they
(08:56):
responded to and what really needed to be revised. Her
other liked first impressions so much that he wrote to
a publisher to ask how much it would cost him
to publish it at the family's expense. Uh. He got
this inquiry back almost immediately marked declined by return of post,
and Jane got to work rewriting the book again. I
(09:16):
actually I really like this about James Potter, Like he
could have been like, no, this is not a seemly
thing for you to be doing. Novels were not really
respected as a form of literature at this point in history,
and for a woman to be writing novels. There were
other women novelists, but it was still kind of a
groundbreaking thing, and not a lot of published women novelists
(09:40):
in particulars. It is not a career women aspired to now,
and people generally thought that poetry and plays were a
much higher genre of literature than novels, where novels were
kind of trashy and scandalous. So um, the fact that
he supported her in all of this, I really like. Yeah,
it's always uh, sort of refreshing and heartwarming when you
(10:02):
hear about things like that kind of step outside the
boundaries of society's rules in an effort to sort of,
you know, nurse along and nurture somebody's creative spirit. Yeah.
The Austin's pretty much encouraged all their kids too to
do what they wanted to do and to pursue their
own path in life. So a little bit of an exception. Yeah,
(10:24):
and in the midst of all of this writing and rewriting,
an event happened that didn't happen directly to Jane, but
it did really dramatically influence how she lived the rest
of her life. Cassandra was engaged to a man named
Thomas Fowl, and Tom had gone abroad to try to
make enough money to afford to marry, and he and
Cassandra were supposed to get married around Easter of seventeen seven,
(10:46):
but he had not come home and the wedding was
postponed until spring, only for Cassandra to find out many
months after the fact that he had actually died of
yellow fever while he was away in February. Yeah, he
had already passed away when their wedding was supposed to
have transpired, but it took so long for news to
get anywhere at this point that that she didn't know
(11:07):
until much later. He did leave her some money in
his will, not enough to make her totally independent, but
she wasn't completely destitute, and she effectively considered herself to
be a widow at this point. She and Jane had
always been extremely close, but from here on out they
basically were one another's primary companions, and a couple of
(11:28):
years later, there was another dramatic change in Jane's life.
She returned from visiting friends to learn that her parents
were moving to Bath and turning over the parsonage to
her brother James and his family. So Jane and Cassandra
were still mostly dependent on their parents at this point,
so that meant that they were going to be moving
to So Cassandra destroyed all of the letters that Jane
(11:50):
wrote to her about this, and that's something that she
she did with basically, any letter that Jane wrote her
that was extremely personal was destroyed. So we came kind
of glean from that that Jane was pretty upset by
this development. Stevenson was her home and she had, you know,
lived there for whole her whole life, and she and
(12:11):
her sister had to kind of watch as its furnishings
were divided up among their brothers. The books and the
and their father's beloved library were all sold off. The
place that had been their home was now their brother's
home and not theirs anymore. So it kind of shook
the foundations of of Jane's world a little bit well,
and her new location added to that because Bath was
(12:33):
much more urban than Steventon had been, and there were
also many more social demands, and Jane's parents had actually
met in Bath when they were about her age, so
she sort of had this feeling that it was on
her to do list when they moved there to find
a husband. Scholars don't completely agree about how this move
(12:54):
affected her writing. There are some who use the lack
of letters and new manuscripts and new novel was written
in Bath as evidence that the whole thing was so
distressing that Jane just couldn't write. But there are others
who insist that she had always been writing and she
wouldn't let she wouldn't have let moving stop her, so
that they theorized more that she was like rewriting. It
(13:15):
was a revision period rather than a new work period. Um,
but we don't know for sure, don't know for sure,
And regardless, there's a pretty big gap in her writing
output at this point. Yeah, at least in terms of
new content. We weren't see anything. We don't have tons,
unlike that three years where she was just she's like
three men, here are my three new books that didn't
(13:36):
really happen while she was in Bath. Her biggest life
of him during the Bath years actually happened back in Hampshire,
when Jane and Cassandra went to visit their friends, the
Big Sisters in December of eighteen o two. Their brother
Harris Big, asked Jane to marry him while she was there.
They had known each other since they were very young,
and Jane accepted his proposal, but their engagement we lasted
(14:00):
one night. It's possible that being in the BIG's house,
where she and Tom mcfoy had spent time in one
another's company, sort of stirred up old memories of a
more passionate relationship, and whatever the reasons, in the morning,
Jane called the engagement off as gently as she could,
and she and Cassandra, who had planned to stay for
several weeks, asked to be taken home immediately. I can
(14:24):
imagine the awkwardness of yes, I will marry you, and
in the morning going not so much, Yes, I'm gonna
go now. Well, and as with Tom, this all worked
out fine for Harris. He got married to someone else
two years later and they had ten children. Uh. Fortunately,
it also does not seem to have soured Jane's relationship
(14:44):
with with the rest of the big family. They were
still friends after that, even though they had she had
had this extremely awkward, less than twenty four hour engagement
to their brother was kind of funny, uh, And her
one night engagement to Harris By seems to have kicked
started Jamee's desire to write again and actually get her
work published. After all, if she did not get married,
(15:07):
she was gonna have to find a way to manage
once her parents passed away. Yeah, this was the reality
of being a woman at this point. If you did
not have money, either from your family or from your husband,
then you did not have money. That is how it worked.
James brother, Henry, became her literary agent, and he also
got the help of a lawyer named William Seymour. The
(15:28):
first book that they turned their eye to was Northinger Abbey,
which at the time, as we said earlier, was called Susan.
They sold it to a London publisher named Richard Crosby
for ten pounds, and although he advertised the book, he
never actually did anything with it. And Jane also started
on a new book, one that she never finished and
had more direct parallels to her own life than any
(15:48):
of her other books. It was called the Watsons, and
it was about four impoverished daughters trying to find husbands
before their father died. She planned to kill off the
father in the book, but then her own father died
hid in January of eighteen o five after a brief
and sudden illness. One of the saddest parts of that
part of the story is that it fell to Jane
to write to her brother Frank about their father's death,
(16:11):
and after she had written and sent that letter, her
sister got another letter from him that revealed that his
ship was in Portsmouth, and that was not where the
first letter had been sent, so Jane had to do
that all over again. Kind of makes your heart hurt.
Her father had never had much money, but his death
meant that Jane and Cassandra and their mother were basically
(16:35):
completely penniless. They had to move into smaller lodgings immediately.
James Henry and Frank Austin each offered to give them
fifty pounds a year to help make ends meet, and Frank,
who was the most well off, had originally offered a
hundred pounds, but Jane's mother would only accept half of
that amount, so at this point Jane's mother had a
little bit of money of her own, Cassandra had inherited
(16:58):
a little bit from her deceased Yance. Jane, more than
anyone else, was just completely dependent on other people's generosity
for every penny she had. And on top of that,
her brothers, while you know, they seem to have had
good intentions about wanting to look after their mother and
their sisters, but they kind of just took for granted
that whatever arrangements they made were going to be okay
(17:20):
with her. Um. They would make, you know, arrangements for
getting the women from one place to another without consulting
them first, and then Jane would sort of be like, actually,
I am I have plans to be in this place
with these people at that time. UM, it was just
sort of awkward. They all of their moving around had
(17:42):
to happen at the convenience of other people. UM. And
so for about a year they did. They moved around
a whole lot, and it mainly had to live off
the generosity of others. I can imagine that being incredibly stressful.
I do not like that idea much at all, and
know like my independent spirit just like feels all trapped
(18:02):
thinking about it uh. In eighteen o six, Frank, who
was in the navy, suggested that the Austin Ladies actually
share a home with his wife to be because he
would be at sea a lot, and so they lived
together in Southampton for about three years. Then in eighteen
o nine they made the move to Jane's most famous home,
Chotton Cottage. And before we talk about what happened there,
(18:24):
let's take a moment for a word from our sponsor,
back to the the home where Jane Austen got most
of her work that was published during her lifetime completed
and published. Chotton Cottage was part of Edward Austin's estate,
and he offered it to the Austin Ladies when its
tenant died, so Jane, Cassandra, and their mother all moved there,
(18:45):
along with a sister in law in eighteen o nine,
and that same year Jane wrote to Richard Crosby, the
publisher who had bought Susan, asking when he might publish
it uh. He said he didn't plan to do anything
with it, and offered to sell it back to her
for ten pounds, which of course she did not have.
I have I have an audio book that is a
collection of some of the letters to and from Jane
(19:07):
austen Um, and after reading the response to this letter,
there's a sound effect of her just like crumpling up
the paper. Um like ten pounds does not sound like
a lot. But she did not have the money to
buy it back, and the publisher was just not going
to do anything with it. Um. Once they were in
(19:28):
this cottage, the four women lived a pretty quiet life.
Jane and Cassandra shared a bedroom, and Jane would get
up first and play the piano for a while and
then make breakfast for everyone. And she was otherwise exempt
from most of the other household duties as long as Martha,
the sister in law, and Cassandra were there to do them.
And so she spent most of her time writing the
(19:49):
first book that Henry was able to find a publisher for,
with Sense and Sensibility, and it was published in eighteen
tens through Military Library Whitehall at Henry's expense. Its author
was simply listed as a lady. A lady wrote Sense
and Sensibility. A Lady wrote it. It came out at
the end of eighteen eleven, and its first run had
(20:10):
sold out by eighteen thirteen. Jane made a hundred and
forty pounds on it, which gave her a little independence.
I mean, it was not enough money to totally live
off of, but she was no longer one percent dependent
on other people. She could at least go by postage
or planned, you know, a trip to visit a friend
without having to ask other people. For many on Thomas Edgerton,
(20:31):
the publisher at Military Library, was ready for another book
before the printing sold out, so she sold in Pride
and Prejudice for a hundred and ten pounds. Her name
still did not appear on the book. It was simply
printed as being by the author of Sense and Sensibility,
and her identity of the a as the author was
mostly kept secret outside the immediate family for years, so
(20:53):
nobody knew that she was writing these bestselling novels. The
next book, and another sold out print run, was Mansfield Park,
and after that came Emma, which she worked on between
January eighteen fourteen in March eighteen fifteen, and very gradually
a few people outside the immediate family started to learn
that Jane was the person writing all these books, and
(21:15):
for reasons that aren't entirely clear, uh Edgerton was not
interested in publishing a second run of Mansfield Park, and
he didn't publish Emma. Another publisher, John Murray, published it
on commission. So even though she was wildly successful for
him and he was probably making a lot of money,
it's like he wasn't really into keeping that. Yeah. I
(21:37):
don't know if I'd go so far as to say
wildly successful. Like they were definitely successful, but she was not.
She wasn't like she wasn't writing this centuries version of
Harry Potter. Like things were doing pretty well, they were
getting good reviews, but it wasn't like people were lining
up at the docks to get the first printing off
(21:57):
the ship. I'm trying to somehow my brain make that
similar to Oprah's Book Club, and it's not working. Yeah. Um.
It was actually a little later before it became like,
oh this is these are the greatest books and everyone
should read them. Um. As she was working on Emma,
Jane received word that the Prince Regent, George the Fourth
was a fan of hers. His librarian asked her to
(22:20):
come visit Carlton House, which was the Prince Regent's London residents,
which she did. He also told her that she might
dedicate the next book to the Prince Regent, which she
also did her What she actually wrote at the dedication
was very simple. What actually wound up on the you know,
the title page a lot more elaborate. Yeah, so, yeah.
(22:43):
She she definitely had fans and high high places. And
at this point it seems as though things were going
quite well for Jane and the rest of the Austens.
But in eighteen sixteen the family fell on hard times.
The ship that her brother Charles was commanding wrecked in
the Mediterranean. He survived, but he did not get another
command for a decade, and her brother, Frank, and admiral
(23:05):
by this time, was on half pay. Both of these
reversals of fortune were ultimately because England was finally no
longer at war with France, and on top of that,
the bank that Jane's brother Henry was running also failed
and Henry went bankrupt. Henry and Frank at this point
had both still been contributing their fifty pounds a year
to kind of the upkeep of their mother and sisters,
(23:27):
but now neither of them could afford to do it anymore,
and even though Jane was earning money from her books,
this did put a big dent in her finances. Henry
eventually set out to be ordained and he was given
the curacy at Shotton, which helped a little bit. Jane
finally saved up enough money to buy back Northanger Abbey.
She also started working on Persuasion, which at the time
(23:49):
was called The Elliotts. It is my favorite of her books. UM.
I did not totally realize until working on this podcast.
If you have not read Persuasion, I have not. UM.
I love it that the heroine of Persuasion basically has
a second chance, uh to to sort of revive the
first love of her youth when she is a much
(24:10):
older woman. I mean not she's not exceptionally old, but
she's a little older than than the heroines of these
books often are. UM. And I didn't quite realize that
where Jane was at this point in her life was
she she was just about to turn forty. She was.
It was pretty clear to her that it was unlikely
that she was going to have another romance in her life,
(24:31):
and um, that made that book a little more poigant
for me. Also, around the time that Jane turned forty,
she started to feel kind of vaguely unwell since they
didn't like bath. Jane and Cassandra went to Cheltenham to
take the waters there, and Jane thought it made her
feel a little bit better, but by the time they
returned home she was starting to have pain and fevers,
(24:54):
and her letters continue to insist that she was getting better,
but in fact her health decline. Before she became too
ill to write, she started on a book she called
The Brothers, which she never finished. You can't find partial
versions of it, uh and versions of it that people
have completed on her behalf today under the name of Sandton. Eventually,
(25:16):
at the insistence of her family, Jane was moved to
Winchester to be closer to medical care and from there.
On April eighteen seventeen, she wrote out a will, leaving
everything to Cassandra except for two fifty pound legacies. One
was to her brother Henry, who had been her literary
agent effectively for so long, and the other was to
(25:37):
a friend, uh Madame Bijean, who had worked for her
cousin Eliza. Eliza was quite a dramatic character. We've talked
almost not about in this podcast, but she she could
be a subject of her own She was perhaps she was.
It was quite larger than life. On July seventeenth, after
briefly rallying, Jane had some sort of seizure. Uh afterward,
(26:01):
Cassandra sat with her for six hours with her sister's
head on a pillow in her lamp, and sister in
law Mary took over for two hours in the middle
of the night, with Cassandra returning to her post at
about three in the morning, and Jane died approximately an
hour later on the morning of the eighteenth of eighteen seventeen.
Let her written to their niece Fanny. Cassandra wrote of Jane,
(26:23):
she was the son of my life, the guilder of
every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow. I had not
a thought concealed from her, and it is as if
I had lost a part of myself. Their brother Henry,
secured permission for Jane to be buried in the Winchester Cathedral.
They had a very early morning funeral so as not
to interrupt the church services that would happen later in
(26:44):
the day, and while the casket was open, Cassandra caught
cut some locks of Jane's hair, some to keep and
some to give to others. At least one of these
survives until today. Her obituary reads Miss Jane Austen, youngest
her of the late Reverend George Austin, rector of Steventon
in the Country, an authoress of Emma Mansfield Park, cried
(27:06):
and prejudice and sense and sensibility. Her manners were gentle,
her affections aren't. Her candor was not to be surpassed,
and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.
The marker for her burial place, on the other hand,
makes no mention of the books. I don't I don't
really say. Ah, he's so kind of a secret. I
(27:30):
mean this was that was really the first public announcement
of all of these books being attributed to her, and
her cause of death, we still don't exactly know. For
many years, people pointed to Addison's disease because it fits
some of the symptoms that she described when she wrote
about how she felt in her letters. But Addison's also
(27:51):
caused vomiting and dehydration, which she said nothing about, and
she had additional symptoms that are not normally associated with Addison's.
A lot of speculation of exactly what happened. She was
only forty one and uh, the the that was the
youngest age at which any of her siblings passed away.
They all the rest of them all lived to much
(28:11):
older ages than she did. Um As executricks of the estate,
Cassandra had Catherine and the Elliotts, which were renamed north
Inger Abbey and Persuasion published together as a one book
after Jane's death. This volume contained a biographical note that
named Jane Austen as their author, and this was the
first time that her actual name had appeared on any
(28:33):
of her books. In eighteen sixty nine, James Edward, who
was one of Jane's nephews, wrote a memoir of Jane Austen.
This presents her a sort of a spinster who wrote
to amuse herself and her family. So it's really the
genesis of that ongoing characterization, which is not so much
accurate to know. She definitely like she started having a
(28:55):
goal of becoming a published writer and making enough money
to have some measure of independence based on her writing.
It was not sort of a I'm going to sit
here in the corner and pleasantly right and maybe it
will amuse all of you. And I'm sure he wrote
that through a lens of tenderness, like he didn't mean
to make her seem smaller or less in charge of
(29:16):
her life than she was, but it kind of did
mess with her public image historically. Yeah. Well, and as
we alluded to earlier, she did make some money off
of her books while she was alive, and their print
runs generally did sell out, but it was really about
a hundred years before they came popular to the way
that they are today. Her books started to get scholarly
(29:37):
attention in the nineteen twenties as as uh you know,
literary theorists and critics started to recognize them as masterpieces,
and that is really when they became the sort of
worldwide phenomenon that they are now. Jane, who I know
is near and dear to your heart, She's very near
(29:58):
and dear to my heart. I love her quite a lot,
and I used this episode as an excuse to buy
every Jane Austen thing that I wanted. So I now
have this immense volume of her collected letters that's like,
it's it's huge, it's it's it's as long as a
(30:19):
Harry Potter novel, one of the long Harry Potter ones. Um.
I also there are annotated versions of her books which
I love, that have the story on one page and
then on the facing page they are all these notes
about what's going on, which like it makes them twice
as long as the books normally are, but there's so much,
but like four times as rich. Yeah, they're like there
(30:41):
are things where as a modern reader you might not
pick up on the fact that this thing this person
said just now was a marriage proposal, um, but it
was so Yeah. I bought the the three of those
for the three of her books that I did not
already have, I've to biographies. Was very much a Jane
(31:05):
Austen shopping spree at my house. But that's all good
stuff I love that you will treasure for years. Yeah,
I will. I will, definitely will. I have this like giant.
I already had sort of a giant collection of Jane
Austen stuff, and now you have a Jane Austen situation. Yeah,
my own, my own book that does not exist in
reality as a published thing, is very heavily Jane Austen influence.
(31:29):
So this was my wish fulfillment episode. Do you also
have listener mails? Yes, I do. This is from Alec
Alex says I've recently discovered your lovely podcast, and I've
really been enjoying listening to all the varied topics you
guys have talked about. Great work I did. However, I
want to make a quick point concerning your recent podcast
(31:51):
on the Pueblo Revolts. When discussing the ancient origins of
the Pueblo peoples, you use the term anasazi in your description.
I don't blame you for this choice at all, as
it is overwhelmingly common to use anasazi in modern history
and archaeology, but more recently it has become more of
a touchy subject. The reason is that anasazi is actually
a Navajo word taken by Europeans to refer to the
(32:13):
ancient people that had built the pueblos they saw as
they came into what is now the American Southwest. They
often had Navajo guides when and when asking them who
built those pueblos, it is commonly believed that they replied
with the term anasazi, which translates loosely to enemy of ancestor.
As someone who is studying archaeology, I thought I should
(32:33):
bring this to your attention. Is it is really ashamed
that the term we've adopted for these ancient peoples isn't
even from their own dialect in the archaeological community. Many
of us have taken to referring them as ancestral pueblo,
which isn't exactly perfect, but is certainly better than referring
to them as the enemies of our ancestors. Hopefully this
doesn't just seem like political correctness for the sake of
(32:55):
political correctness to you, and you'll keep it in mind
for future discussions. Keep up the great work. Like I
had no idea me either. Um, I had no idea.
And then when I went to because you know, I
I want to innately trust everything or our listeners sent
to us, but occasionally we get corrections that are themselves
not correct um. And so I went to try to
(33:15):
confirm this, and it took some doing to to find that.
I mean, I'm sure we will get notes from people
are like you could have read that at Wikipedia, but
we try to do our resources from primary sources as
much as possible. Um. And so it yeah, it took
a little doing to find out that that really is
the case. I had no idea. And now, as a
(33:36):
personal side note, I have this moment of laughter because
many moods ago. I used to manage a hair salon,
and I remember at one point, I don't know if
this company is still around, but there was a hair
care line called Anes Sauce. Yeah. Well now I'm like,
that is weird. Yeah. And I can't remember who I
was talking to. I was talking to somebody and they
were like, oh, yeah, I found that. I found that
(33:57):
out when I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and
I was like, I've read that book and that did
not stick in my head me either. And I also
want to have a little note about quote, political correctness. Yeah,
I kind of want anybody who's gonna say something about
political correctness substitute the words being respectful, because that's really
(34:18):
all the political correctness is. We get a lot of
flaks sometimes for quote trying to be political politically correct.
What we are trying to be is respectful of other people. Yeah,
that's like part of the goal of this whole podcast.
So what yah other people. Yeah, do not feel the
need to apologize if there is something that you feel
(34:39):
like it's motivated from political correctness, because what that really
really boils down to you is not being disrespectful of
other people. Yeah, And like disregarding important historical elements that
would inform our knowledge. Yeah, it would be awesome if
we had a word that was neither ancestral pleblo since
(35:00):
that's like a Spanish word that was made to describe
the houses that people lived in, and also not anasazi,
since that is a Navajo word like that does not
mean what it should mean in the way it has
been adopted. Nope, so thank you very much for bringing
that to our attention. I had no idea. Uh. If
you would like to write to us, you can. We're
(35:21):
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and our pinterest is
at pinterest dot com slash missed in history. If you
would like to learn a little bit more about what
we have talked about today, or more specifically, what Jane
Austen wrote about extensively as a core concept and all
(35:44):
of her writing, you can come to our website, put
the word marriage in the search bar and you will
find but truths through the centuries, a timeline of marriage.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how Stuff Works dot
Com for more on this and thousands of other topics
(36:04):
because it has stuff works dot com. This episode of
Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought to you by
Linda dot Com. You can learn it at Linda dot com,
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(36:28):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and we're
just gonna get two things out in the open at
the beginning of this episode. Thing number one. Jane Austen
(00:24):
was not just a shy spinster who wrote some little
books mostly to amuse herself in her own family. That's
a common rumor. It's a common rumor that is false.
Another common maybe not rumor, but another perception that is false.
She was not like the real life version of Elizabeth
Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, And I think that
(00:46):
dovetails on the rumor like people think that her books
were some sort of personal wish fulfillment scenario, yeah, or
sort of a fictionalization of her own life, and they really,
we're not there. There's a little things that you will
read and Jane Austen books that do have a little
tie into her own life, but for the most part,
(01:06):
these were very, very definitely fictional books from her imagination,
not from real things that had happened to her. Um.
She is one of our most requested writers for sure.
Lots of people asking us to talk about Jane Austen,
so we're going to do that today, talk about her.
Not at all Jane Austen novel like life, um, starting
(01:30):
of course at the beginning. Yeah, it was completely unlike
any of the heroines in her books, just not the same,
not as her fictional world. She was born on December sixteenth,
seventeen seventy five and Steventon, Hampshire, and she was the
seventh child and second daughter of George Austen, who was
an Anglican rector, and his wife Cassandra. And she was
(01:52):
christened the following April five and she spent a little
more than a year after that in the care of
another family in the village. She was close enough her
parents could visit and for her to be brought to
the parsonage to visit as well, and Jane went to
live at home again once she was a toddler. All
of the Austin children, except for her brother George, who
had uh some kind of developmental disability, followed the same
(02:14):
pattern like this was their family practice to yet send
the children away and then bring them back. It was
an extremely successful practice. All of the Austin children lived
into adulthood, which not common at the time, and not
common at the time at all um uh. And by
all accounts uh, they were an exceptionally modest family. I mean,
(02:36):
it's eight children in the end being raised on a
rector's stalary, which was not a lot of money. But
they were exceptionally intelligent and literate. Jane and her siblings
and the many many cousins and friends who would come
to visit them and stay for a while. We're also
really creative and they like to do things like put
on plays together. And they made extensive use of their
(02:57):
father's five hundred volume library, which is really where Jane
cut her teeth on the world of language. And if
you've read any novel by Jane Austen, or even seen
any adaptation for film or television or the screen, you've
probably picked up on the theme that being smart and
articulate can make up for not inheriting a fortune. And
this really was one of the Jane Austen's family's family's values,
(03:20):
having been written down in almost those precise words by
her father's grandmother long before Jane was even born, that
you can make something of yourself even if you didn't
inherit tons of money when Jane was a child. This
is to me where things really diverge. If you are
a fan of Jane Austen, like they're they're definitely interesting
(03:43):
male characters, but the focus is really on the women
and the women's lives and the sort of the other
women and the other sisters and the cousins and the moms,
and yeah, I think most people think of her, uh
in some ways as like a women's writer, really writing
a lot about women, a lot for women. But she
(04:03):
grew up in a house full of boys. She didn't
really have that much exposure to huge groups of women.
I would even call this upbringing overrun with boys. I
mean she had she had all of those brothers, you know,
she was just her and one of her sister, all
of these brothers. Her mother and father ran a boys
school out of their home to try to you know,
(04:26):
make ends meet, and so um, you know, Jane and
her sister would share a room and all the other
bedrooms were full of all these boys. And her father
taught her brothers and all of these other male children.
And so she lived in this like very rowdy, noisy,
boyish environment and kind of what we would think of
as a tomboy kind of sense um until she was
(04:48):
seven and went away to boarding school with her sister Cassandra,
and their cousin named Jane Cooper went to the same
school as well. So from the toddler ages that she
came back from being with a wet nurse in the
village until the age of seven. Uh, noisy boy time
all over the place in Jane Austen's world. It stresses
me out just thinking about it. I kind of love it,
many people do. I'm not great with the loud children
(05:10):
noises well, and the thing that it reminds me of
on on my mom's side of the family, um, I
have there were eleven children total in my generation, um,
and only three of us were girls, so kind of
a similar proportion, um. And I like, I remember like
the boy footsteps thundering up and down the stairs, and
(05:34):
I kind of imagined that it was a little bit
similar growing up happy, growing up in this many many
boys and and uh boys that she was really good too,
and ones who were brought into study at the school.
While I'm like this is stressful, like hey, noisy fun time,
but girls schools at this point in history tended to
(05:57):
be fairly meager and indifferent, and it seems that the
school that Jane went to was really better than most.
But while there, all three of the girls got sick
with what was probably typhus. They did recover, but Jane
Cooper's mother caught the illness while nursing her back to health,
and unfortunately she ultimately died from it. Now, once they
were all well, they all spent another year at home,
(06:20):
with Jane Cooper often being there as well since her
mother had died, and they eventually all went off to
another boarding school, what they only stayed for about a
year before coming home again for good and being taught
at home. Jane's first and perhaps only love was Thomas
Langlois la Foy, and she met him in sev when
he was visiting for the holidays. Well, they fell in
(06:42):
love and were obvious enough about it that it drew
some attention, and soon enough his kids sent him home again,
either to protect Jane from him or to protect him
from Jane. Basically, people did not want them together. It
worked out fine for Thomas, who married an heiress, but
afterwards Jane really he had little in the way of suitors.
For a very long time. Yeah. She he definitely got
(07:05):
the longer end of the stick on that whole breakup. Yeah.
So let's talk about Jane the grown up. She was
not the only writer in her family. Her mother panned
little poems for the children and for the students at
the school. Jane's oldest brother, James, was also a writer
and a poet, and in January of seventeen eighty nine,
he actually started his own magazine, which was called The
(07:27):
Loiterer and it ran for fourteen months. And Jane's first
written works were satires. One was called Love and Friendship,
which satirized romances, and a historical satire called History of England.
When she was around nineteen years old, she wrote an
epistolary novel which, uh, on the off chance you don't
know what that means, it means the novel that's written
(07:48):
as a series of letters, and it was called Eleanor
and mary Anne, which would later become Sense and Sensibility.
Jane's parents stopped teaching in seventeen ninety six, when Jane
was twins, so at this point the house became a
lot quieter. Uh. That year she started working on first Impressions,
which would later become Pride and Prejudice, and about a
(08:10):
year later she started rewriting Eleanor and mary Anne, changing
it from this series of letters into a more linear narrative.
She also wrote her first draft of Northinger Abbey, which
was originally called Susan, between sev seventeen nine, so she
basically banged out the bulk of three novels in as
many years. Super productive. I'm kind of imagining now that
(08:34):
it was not quite so reality in the house and
she had a little headspace to herself. She was like,
let's write some books for real now. Jane's Familey played
a huge part in the process of her writing and
her rewriting of these books. In the evenings, she would
read her work aloud to Cassandra and her parents, testing
out her writing on the family, and she would make
notes to herself of what what worked and what they
(08:56):
responded to and what really needed to be revised. Her
other liked first impressions so much that he wrote to
a publisher to ask how much it would cost him
to publish it at the family's expense. Uh. He got
this inquiry back almost immediately marked declined by return of post,
and Jane got to work rewriting the book again. I
(09:16):
actually I really like this about James Potter, Like he
could have been like, no, this is not a seemly
thing for you to be doing. Novels were not really
respected as a form of literature at this point in history,
and for a woman to be writing novels. There were
other women novelists, but it was still kind of a
groundbreaking thing, and not a lot of published women novelists
(09:40):
in particulars. It is not a career women aspired to now,
and people generally thought that poetry and plays were a
much higher genre of literature than novels, where novels were
kind of trashy and scandalous. So um, the fact that
he supported her in all of this, I really like. Yeah,
it's always uh, sort of refreshing and heartwarming when you
(10:02):
hear about things like that kind of step outside the
boundaries of society's rules in an effort to sort of,
you know, nurse along and nurture somebody's creative spirit. Yeah.
The Austin's pretty much encouraged all their kids too to
do what they wanted to do and to pursue their
own path in life. So a little bit of an exception. Yeah,
(10:24):
and in the midst of all of this writing and rewriting,
an event happened that didn't happen directly to Jane, but
it did really dramatically influence how she lived the rest
of her life. Cassandra was engaged to a man named
Thomas Fowl, and Tom had gone abroad to try to
make enough money to afford to marry, and he and
Cassandra were supposed to get married around Easter of seventeen seven,
(10:46):
but he had not come home and the wedding was
postponed until spring, only for Cassandra to find out many
months after the fact that he had actually died of
yellow fever while he was away in February. Yeah, he
had already passed away when their wedding was supposed to
have transpired, but it took so long for news to
get anywhere at this point that that she didn't know
(11:07):
until much later. He did leave her some money in
his will, not enough to make her totally independent, but
she wasn't completely destitute, and she effectively considered herself to
be a widow at this point. She and Jane had
always been extremely close, but from here on out they
basically were one another's primary companions, and a couple of
(11:28):
years later, there was another dramatic change in Jane's life.
She returned from visiting friends to learn that her parents
were moving to Bath and turning over the parsonage to
her brother James and his family. So Jane and Cassandra
were still mostly dependent on their parents at this point,
so that meant that they were going to be moving
to So Cassandra destroyed all of the letters that Jane
(11:50):
wrote to her about this, and that's something that she
she did with basically, any letter that Jane wrote her
that was extremely personal was destroyed. So we came kind
of glean from that that Jane was pretty upset by
this development. Stevenson was her home and she had, you know,
lived there for whole her whole life, and she and
(12:11):
her sister had to kind of watch as its furnishings
were divided up among their brothers. The books and the
and their father's beloved library were all sold off. The
place that had been their home was now their brother's
home and not theirs anymore. So it kind of shook
the foundations of of Jane's world a little bit well,
and her new location added to that because Bath was
(12:33):
much more urban than Steventon had been, and there were
also many more social demands, and Jane's parents had actually
met in Bath when they were about her age, so
she sort of had this feeling that it was on
her to do list when they moved there to find
a husband. Scholars don't completely agree about how this move
(12:54):
affected her writing. There are some who use the lack
of letters and new manuscripts and new novel was written
in Bath as evidence that the whole thing was so
distressing that Jane just couldn't write. But there are others
who insist that she had always been writing and she
wouldn't let she wouldn't have let moving stop her, so
that they theorized more that she was like rewriting. It
(13:15):
was a revision period rather than a new work period. Um,
but we don't know for sure, don't know for sure,
And regardless, there's a pretty big gap in her writing
output at this point. Yeah, at least in terms of
new content. We weren't see anything. We don't have tons,
unlike that three years where she was just she's like
three men, here are my three new books that didn't
(13:36):
really happen while she was in Bath. Her biggest life
of him during the Bath years actually happened back in Hampshire,
when Jane and Cassandra went to visit their friends, the
Big Sisters in December of eighteen o two. Their brother
Harris Big, asked Jane to marry him while she was there.
They had known each other since they were very young,
and Jane accepted his proposal, but their engagement we lasted
(14:00):
one night. It's possible that being in the BIG's house,
where she and Tom mcfoy had spent time in one
another's company, sort of stirred up old memories of a
more passionate relationship, and whatever the reasons, in the morning,
Jane called the engagement off as gently as she could,
and she and Cassandra, who had planned to stay for
several weeks, asked to be taken home immediately. I can
(14:24):
imagine the awkwardness of yes, I will marry you, and
in the morning going not so much, Yes, I'm gonna
go now. Well, and as with Tom, this all worked
out fine for Harris. He got married to someone else
two years later and they had ten children. Uh. Fortunately,
it also does not seem to have soured Jane's relationship
(14:44):
with with the rest of the big family. They were
still friends after that, even though they had she had
had this extremely awkward, less than twenty four hour engagement
to their brother was kind of funny, uh, And her
one night engagement to Harris By seems to have kicked
started Jamee's desire to write again and actually get her
work published. After all, if she did not get married,
(15:07):
she was gonna have to find a way to manage
once her parents passed away. Yeah, this was the reality
of being a woman at this point. If you did
not have money, either from your family or from your husband,
then you did not have money. That is how it worked.
James brother, Henry, became her literary agent, and he also
got the help of a lawyer named William Seymour. The
(15:28):
first book that they turned their eye to was Northinger Abbey,
which at the time, as we said earlier, was called Susan.
They sold it to a London publisher named Richard Crosby
for ten pounds, and although he advertised the book, he
never actually did anything with it. And Jane also started
on a new book, one that she never finished and
had more direct parallels to her own life than any
(15:48):
of her other books. It was called the Watsons, and
it was about four impoverished daughters trying to find husbands
before their father died. She planned to kill off the
father in the book, but then her own father died
hid in January of eighteen o five after a brief
and sudden illness. One of the saddest parts of that
part of the story is that it fell to Jane
to write to her brother Frank about their father's death,
(16:11):
and after she had written and sent that letter, her
sister got another letter from him that revealed that his
ship was in Portsmouth, and that was not where the
first letter had been sent, so Jane had to do
that all over again. Kind of makes your heart hurt.
Her father had never had much money, but his death
meant that Jane and Cassandra and their mother were basically
(16:35):
completely penniless. They had to move into smaller lodgings immediately.
James Henry and Frank Austin each offered to give them
fifty pounds a year to help make ends meet, and Frank,
who was the most well off, had originally offered a
hundred pounds, but Jane's mother would only accept half of
that amount, so at this point Jane's mother had a
little bit of money of her own, Cassandra had inherited
(16:58):
a little bit from her deceased Yance. Jane, more than
anyone else, was just completely dependent on other people's generosity
for every penny she had. And on top of that,
her brothers, while you know, they seem to have had
good intentions about wanting to look after their mother and
their sisters, but they kind of just took for granted
that whatever arrangements they made were going to be okay
(17:20):
with her. Um. They would make, you know, arrangements for
getting the women from one place to another without consulting
them first, and then Jane would sort of be like, actually,
I am I have plans to be in this place
with these people at that time. UM, it was just
sort of awkward. They all of their moving around had
(17:42):
to happen at the convenience of other people. UM. And
so for about a year they did. They moved around
a whole lot, and it mainly had to live off
the generosity of others. I can imagine that being incredibly stressful.
I do not like that idea much at all, and
know like my independent spirit just like feels all trapped
(18:02):
thinking about it uh. In eighteen o six, Frank, who
was in the navy, suggested that the Austin Ladies actually
share a home with his wife to be because he
would be at sea a lot, and so they lived
together in Southampton for about three years. Then in eighteen
o nine they made the move to Jane's most famous home,
Chotton Cottage. And before we talk about what happened there,
(18:24):
let's take a moment for a word from our sponsor,
back to the the home where Jane Austen got most
of her work that was published during her lifetime completed
and published. Chotton Cottage was part of Edward Austin's estate,
and he offered it to the Austin Ladies when its
tenant died, so Jane, Cassandra, and their mother all moved there,
(18:45):
along with a sister in law in eighteen o nine,
and that same year Jane wrote to Richard Crosby, the
publisher who had bought Susan, asking when he might publish
it uh. He said he didn't plan to do anything
with it, and offered to sell it back to her
for ten pounds, which of course she did not have.
I have I have an audio book that is a
collection of some of the letters to and from Jane
(19:07):
austen Um, and after reading the response to this letter,
there's a sound effect of her just like crumpling up
the paper. Um like ten pounds does not sound like
a lot. But she did not have the money to
buy it back, and the publisher was just not going
to do anything with it. Um. Once they were in
(19:28):
this cottage, the four women lived a pretty quiet life.
Jane and Cassandra shared a bedroom, and Jane would get
up first and play the piano for a while and
then make breakfast for everyone. And she was otherwise exempt
from most of the other household duties as long as Martha,
the sister in law, and Cassandra were there to do them.
And so she spent most of her time writing the
(19:49):
first book that Henry was able to find a publisher for,
with Sense and Sensibility, and it was published in eighteen
tens through Military Library Whitehall at Henry's expense. Its author
was simply listed as a lady. A lady wrote Sense
and Sensibility. A Lady wrote it. It came out at
the end of eighteen eleven, and its first run had
(20:10):
sold out by eighteen thirteen. Jane made a hundred and
forty pounds on it, which gave her a little independence.
I mean, it was not enough money to totally live
off of, but she was no longer one percent dependent
on other people. She could at least go by postage
or planned, you know, a trip to visit a friend
without having to ask other people. For many on Thomas Edgerton,
(20:31):
the publisher at Military Library, was ready for another book
before the printing sold out, so she sold in Pride
and Prejudice for a hundred and ten pounds. Her name
still did not appear on the book. It was simply
printed as being by the author of Sense and Sensibility,
and her identity of the a as the author was
mostly kept secret outside the immediate family for years, so
(20:53):
nobody knew that she was writing these bestselling novels. The
next book, and another sold out print run, was Mansfield Park,
and after that came Emma, which she worked on between
January eighteen fourteen in March eighteen fifteen, and very gradually
a few people outside the immediate family started to learn
that Jane was the person writing all these books, and
(21:15):
for reasons that aren't entirely clear, uh Edgerton was not
interested in publishing a second run of Mansfield Park, and
he didn't publish Emma. Another publisher, John Murray, published it
on commission. So even though she was wildly successful for
him and he was probably making a lot of money,
it's like he wasn't really into keeping that. Yeah. I
(21:37):
don't know if I'd go so far as to say
wildly successful. Like they were definitely successful, but she was not.
She wasn't like she wasn't writing this centuries version of
Harry Potter. Like things were doing pretty well, they were
getting good reviews, but it wasn't like people were lining
up at the docks to get the first printing off
(21:57):
the ship. I'm trying to somehow my brain make that
similar to Oprah's Book Club, and it's not working. Yeah. Um.
It was actually a little later before it became like,
oh this is these are the greatest books and everyone
should read them. Um. As she was working on Emma,
Jane received word that the Prince Regent, George the Fourth
was a fan of hers. His librarian asked her to
(22:20):
come visit Carlton House, which was the Prince Regent's London residents,
which she did. He also told her that she might
dedicate the next book to the Prince Regent, which she
also did her What she actually wrote at the dedication
was very simple. What actually wound up on the you know,
the title page a lot more elaborate. Yeah, so, yeah.
(22:43):
She she definitely had fans and high high places. And
at this point it seems as though things were going
quite well for Jane and the rest of the Austens.
But in eighteen sixteen the family fell on hard times.
The ship that her brother Charles was commanding wrecked in
the Mediterranean. He survived, but he did not get another
command for a decade, and her brother, Frank, and admiral
(23:05):
by this time, was on half pay. Both of these
reversals of fortune were ultimately because England was finally no
longer at war with France, and on top of that,
the bank that Jane's brother Henry was running also failed
and Henry went bankrupt. Henry and Frank at this point
had both still been contributing their fifty pounds a year
to kind of the upkeep of their mother and sisters,
(23:27):
but now neither of them could afford to do it anymore,
and even though Jane was earning money from her books,
this did put a big dent in her finances. Henry
eventually set out to be ordained and he was given
the curacy at Shotton, which helped a little bit. Jane
finally saved up enough money to buy back Northanger Abbey.
She also started working on Persuasion, which at the time
(23:49):
was called The Elliotts. It is my favorite of her books. UM.
I did not totally realize until working on this podcast.
If you have not read Persuasion, I have not. UM.
I love it that the heroine of Persuasion basically has
a second chance, uh to to sort of revive the
first love of her youth when she is a much
(24:10):
older woman. I mean not she's not exceptionally old, but
she's a little older than than the heroines of these
books often are. UM. And I didn't quite realize that
where Jane was at this point in her life was
she she was just about to turn forty. She was.
It was pretty clear to her that it was unlikely
that she was going to have another romance in her life,
(24:31):
and um, that made that book a little more poigant
for me. Also, around the time that Jane turned forty,
she started to feel kind of vaguely unwell since they
didn't like bath. Jane and Cassandra went to Cheltenham to
take the waters there, and Jane thought it made her
feel a little bit better, but by the time they
returned home she was starting to have pain and fevers,
(24:54):
and her letters continue to insist that she was getting better,
but in fact her health decline. Before she became too
ill to write, she started on a book she called
The Brothers, which she never finished. You can't find partial
versions of it, uh and versions of it that people
have completed on her behalf today under the name of Sandton. Eventually,
(25:16):
at the insistence of her family, Jane was moved to
Winchester to be closer to medical care and from there.
On April eighteen seventeen, she wrote out a will, leaving
everything to Cassandra except for two fifty pound legacies. One
was to her brother Henry, who had been her literary
agent effectively for so long, and the other was to
(25:37):
a friend, uh Madame Bijean, who had worked for her
cousin Eliza. Eliza was quite a dramatic character. We've talked
almost not about in this podcast, but she she could
be a subject of her own She was perhaps she was.
It was quite larger than life. On July seventeenth, after
briefly rallying, Jane had some sort of seizure. Uh afterward,
(26:01):
Cassandra sat with her for six hours with her sister's
head on a pillow in her lamp, and sister in
law Mary took over for two hours in the middle
of the night, with Cassandra returning to her post at
about three in the morning, and Jane died approximately an
hour later on the morning of the eighteenth of eighteen seventeen.
Let her written to their niece Fanny. Cassandra wrote of Jane,
(26:23):
she was the son of my life, the guilder of
every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow. I had not
a thought concealed from her, and it is as if
I had lost a part of myself. Their brother Henry,
secured permission for Jane to be buried in the Winchester Cathedral.
They had a very early morning funeral so as not
to interrupt the church services that would happen later in
(26:44):
the day, and while the casket was open, Cassandra caught
cut some locks of Jane's hair, some to keep and
some to give to others. At least one of these
survives until today. Her obituary reads Miss Jane Austen, youngest
her of the late Reverend George Austin, rector of Steventon
in the Country, an authoress of Emma Mansfield Park, cried
(27:06):
and prejudice and sense and sensibility. Her manners were gentle,
her affections aren't. Her candor was not to be surpassed,
and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.
The marker for her burial place, on the other hand,
makes no mention of the books. I don't I don't
really say. Ah, he's so kind of a secret. I
(27:30):
mean this was that was really the first public announcement
of all of these books being attributed to her, and
her cause of death, we still don't exactly know. For
many years, people pointed to Addison's disease because it fits
some of the symptoms that she described when she wrote
about how she felt in her letters. But Addison's also
(27:51):
caused vomiting and dehydration, which she said nothing about, and
she had additional symptoms that are not normally associated with Addison's.
A lot of speculation of exactly what happened. She was
only forty one and uh, the the that was the
youngest age at which any of her siblings passed away.
They all the rest of them all lived to much
(28:11):
older ages than she did. Um As executricks of the estate,
Cassandra had Catherine and the Elliotts, which were renamed north
Inger Abbey and Persuasion published together as a one book
after Jane's death. This volume contained a biographical note that
named Jane Austen as their author, and this was the
first time that her actual name had appeared on any
(28:33):
of her books. In eighteen sixty nine, James Edward, who
was one of Jane's nephews, wrote a memoir of Jane Austen.
This presents her a sort of a spinster who wrote
to amuse herself and her family. So it's really the
genesis of that ongoing characterization, which is not so much
accurate to know. She definitely like she started having a
(28:55):
goal of becoming a published writer and making enough money
to have some measure of independence based on her writing.
It was not sort of a I'm going to sit
here in the corner and pleasantly right and maybe it
will amuse all of you. And I'm sure he wrote
that through a lens of tenderness, like he didn't mean
to make her seem smaller or less in charge of
(29:16):
her life than she was, but it kind of did
mess with her public image historically. Yeah. Well, and as
we alluded to earlier, she did make some money off
of her books while she was alive, and their print
runs generally did sell out, but it was really about
a hundred years before they came popular to the way
that they are today. Her books started to get scholarly
(29:37):
attention in the nineteen twenties as as uh you know,
literary theorists and critics started to recognize them as masterpieces,
and that is really when they became the sort of
worldwide phenomenon that they are now. Jane, who I know
is near and dear to your heart, She's very near
(29:58):
and dear to my heart. I love her quite a lot,
and I used this episode as an excuse to buy
every Jane Austen thing that I wanted. So I now
have this immense volume of her collected letters that's like,
it's it's huge, it's it's it's as long as a
(30:19):
Harry Potter novel, one of the long Harry Potter ones. Um.
I also there are annotated versions of her books which
I love, that have the story on one page and
then on the facing page they are all these notes
about what's going on, which like it makes them twice
as long as the books normally are, but there's so much,
but like four times as rich. Yeah, they're like there
(30:41):
are things where as a modern reader you might not
pick up on the fact that this thing this person
said just now was a marriage proposal, um, but it
was so Yeah. I bought the the three of those
for the three of her books that I did not
already have, I've to biographies. Was very much a Jane
(31:05):
Austen shopping spree at my house. But that's all good
stuff I love that you will treasure for years. Yeah,
I will. I will, definitely will. I have this like giant.
I already had sort of a giant collection of Jane
Austen stuff, and now you have a Jane Austen situation. Yeah,
my own, my own book that does not exist in
reality as a published thing, is very heavily Jane Austen influence.
(31:29):
So this was my wish fulfillment episode. Do you also
have listener mails? Yes, I do. This is from Alec
Alex says I've recently discovered your lovely podcast, and I've
really been enjoying listening to all the varied topics you
guys have talked about. Great work I did. However, I
want to make a quick point concerning your recent podcast
(31:51):
on the Pueblo Revolts. When discussing the ancient origins of
the Pueblo peoples, you use the term anasazi in your description.
I don't blame you for this choice at all, as
it is overwhelmingly common to use anasazi in modern history
and archaeology, but more recently it has become more of
a touchy subject. The reason is that anasazi is actually
a Navajo word taken by Europeans to refer to the
(32:13):
ancient people that had built the pueblos they saw as
they came into what is now the American Southwest. They
often had Navajo guides when and when asking them who
built those pueblos, it is commonly believed that they replied
with the term anasazi, which translates loosely to enemy of ancestor.
As someone who is studying archaeology, I thought I should
(32:33):
bring this to your attention. Is it is really ashamed
that the term we've adopted for these ancient peoples isn't
even from their own dialect in the archaeological community. Many
of us have taken to referring them as ancestral pueblo,
which isn't exactly perfect, but is certainly better than referring
to them as the enemies of our ancestors. Hopefully this
doesn't just seem like political correctness for the sake of
(32:55):
political correctness to you, and you'll keep it in mind
for future discussions. Keep up the great work. Like I
had no idea me either. Um, I had no idea.
And then when I went to because you know, I
I want to innately trust everything or our listeners sent
to us, but occasionally we get corrections that are themselves
not correct um. And so I went to try to
(33:15):
confirm this, and it took some doing to to find that.
I mean, I'm sure we will get notes from people
are like you could have read that at Wikipedia, but
we try to do our resources from primary sources as
much as possible. Um. And so it yeah, it took
a little doing to find out that that really is
the case. I had no idea. And now, as a
(33:36):
personal side note, I have this moment of laughter because
many moods ago. I used to manage a hair salon,
and I remember at one point, I don't know if
this company is still around, but there was a hair
care line called Anes Sauce. Yeah. Well now I'm like,
that is weird. Yeah. And I can't remember who I
was talking to. I was talking to somebody and they
were like, oh, yeah, I found that. I found that
(33:57):
out when I was reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and
I was like, I've read that book and that did
not stick in my head me either. And I also
want to have a little note about quote, political correctness. Yeah,
I kind of want anybody who's gonna say something about
political correctness substitute the words being respectful, because that's really
(34:18):
all the political correctness is. We get a lot of
flaks sometimes for quote trying to be political politically correct.
What we are trying to be is respectful of other people. Yeah,
that's like part of the goal of this whole podcast.
So what yah other people. Yeah, do not feel the
need to apologize if there is something that you feel
(34:39):
like it's motivated from political correctness, because what that really
really boils down to you is not being disrespectful of
other people. Yeah, And like disregarding important historical elements that
would inform our knowledge. Yeah, it would be awesome if
we had a word that was neither ancestral pleblo since
(35:00):
that's like a Spanish word that was made to describe
the houses that people lived in, and also not anasazi,
since that is a Navajo word like that does not
mean what it should mean in the way it has
been adopted. Nope, so thank you very much for bringing
that to our attention. I had no idea. Uh. If
you would like to write to us, you can. We're
(35:21):
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and our pinterest is
at pinterest dot com slash missed in history. If you
would like to learn a little bit more about what
we have talked about today, or more specifically, what Jane
Austen wrote about extensively as a core concept and all
(35:44):
of her writing, you can come to our website, put
the word marriage in the search bar and you will
find but truths through the centuries, a timeline of marriage.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how Stuff Works dot
Com for more on this and thousands of other topics
(36:04):
because it has stuff works dot com. This episode of
Stuff you Missed in History Classes brought to you by
Linda dot Com. You can learn it at Linda dot com,
an online learning company with more than seventy seven thousand
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