Austen Chat

It's Austen Chat's third anniversary! To mark the milestone, we're delighted to share "Jane Austen: Material Girl"—a conversation between authors Paula Byrne and Hilary Davidson recorded at JASNA’s 2025 Annual General Meeting. 
Both have written extensively about the significance of material objects in Austen's life and work. Tune in for their lively discussion of ordinary things—toothpick cases, lace cards, muslin shawls, flannel waistcoats, and more—and their extraordinary importance.
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Paula Byrne is a best-selling biographer, literary critic, and novelist. She is the author of The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, which explores her life through the objects around her; The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood; and the novel Six Weeks by the Sea, which blends fact and fiction to imagine Austen’s visit to the seaside in 1801. As an Austen expert, she has also frequently appeared on television, broadcast on radio, and consulted on period dramas. Beyond her Austen scholarship, Paula has written best-selling biographies about Dido Elizabeth Belle, Mary Robinson, Barbara Pym, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Hardy.
Hilary Davidson is a dress, textile, and fashion historian and curator, and Chair and Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She has curated exhibitions, lectured widely, and published extensively. Her books include Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion, Jane Austen’s Wardrobe, and A Guide to Regency Dress.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep36
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"Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." —Jane Austen, 1796, letter to Cassandra on arriving in London
Jane Austen was very aware of life’s darker side, and beneath the genteel polish and decorum of her novels lurks a world of adultery, theft, seduction, dueling, poaching, smuggling, and more. In this episode, guest Susannah Fullerton, president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, guides us through the sordid underbelly of Georgian and Regency society and explores how Austen uses various crimes and wrongdoing to advance her plots, shape her characters, and add color to her narrative landscapes.
Susannah Fullerton, a literary historian and author, has been president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA) since 1996. She has lectured extensively on Jane Austen’s life and novels, and her books include Jane Austen and Crime, A Dance with Jane Austen, Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jane & I: A Tale of Austen Addiction, and Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them, among others. Fullerton holds the Order of Australia Medal and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. She is also Patron of the Kipling Society of Australia, a founding member of the NSW Dickens Society and of the Australian Brontë Association, and a Lady Patroness of the International Heyer Society.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep35
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Jane Austen's novels feature a number of characters we might describe as "hypochondriacs" today: Mr. Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove, and Mrs. Churchill, to name a few. Although she never used the word herself, Austen was adept at exploring how the worries and complaints of individuals preoccupied with their health affected the people around them.
Professor Sarah Marsh joins us in this episode to discuss health and medicine in the Regency era, the parallels between the health of individuals and the health of the British nation in Sanditon, and Austen's reflections on her own declining health during the final months of her life.
Sarah Marsh is an associate professor of English at Seton Hill University and director of the Jane Austen Summer Program. She has presented and published extensively on Austen, literature, and medicine, including the article “‘All the Egotism of an Invalid’: Hypochondria as Form in Jane Austen’s Sanditon.” Her forthcoming book, Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688–1818, will be published by Oxford University Press.
For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep34
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"Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion." —Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen often wove needlework and other domestic crafts into her novels in thoughtful and meaningful ways. In this episode, Professor Jennie Batchelor joins us to discuss Austen’s own skill with a needle and explore how she used such “women’s work” to reveal her characters’ strengths and flaws, illuminate their social and power dynamics (think Mrs. Norris and Fanny Price), and reflect their thoughts and feelings.
Jennie Batchelor is a professor of 18th-century and Romantic studies and Head of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She was also the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s Writing (1660-1830) at Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton. She has published widely on women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on early magazines, and on women’s work, dress, and craft. In 2020, she published Jane Austen Embroidery with Alison Larkin, which includes 15 stitching projects based on 18th-century patterns. 
For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep33

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"My dearest Cassandra,
The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation. I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school."
—Jane Austen, September 1, 1796
It's been speculated that Jane Austen may have written nearly 3,000 letters in her lifetime. While only 161 are known to have survived, that small collection offers a wealth of information about her daily life, her friends and family, her writing, and her voice. In this episode, historical sociolinguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade shares insights gained from her study of the language in Austen’s letters—from her vocabulary and spelling to her many instances of linguistic playfulness and clues about her dialect and accent.
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands. A member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, she has published widely in her field. Her works include In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters (2014), an in-depth linguistic analysis of Austen’s correspondence.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep32.

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