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