LIVING WITH JANE AUSTEN: A CONVERSATION WITH JANET TODD

 

On the occasion of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, internationally renowned novelist and scholar Janet Todd offers readers a unique gift: a book that blends personal memoir with a deep and thoughtful engagement with Austen’s timeless works. In this intimate and insightful volume, Todd reflects on how Austen’s novels have guided her through different phases of her life, offering lessons on patience, humour, beauty, and the meaning of home.

With a distinguished career that spans feminist literary scholarship and acclaimed fiction, Janet Todd is one of the foremost voices in Austen studies. Her latest work not only highlights Austen’s relevance in today’s world but also reveals how living with Austen’s characters and stories can shape our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings.

In this interview, Janet Todd shares her inspiration, her personal connection to Jane Austen, and why Austen’s wisdom remains as powerful today as it was over two centuries ago.

  Your new book, written for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, combines personal memoir with literary analysis. What inspired you to write this blend of personal and scholarly reflection?

Cambridge University Press asked me to prepare a new edition of Jane Austen’s complete works to celebrate the 250^th anniversary. Why not, they suggested—at the last minute!—write a book to accompany it. I had just read everything Austen wrote and was filled with new enthusiasm; so, I thought back over my long engagement with her work, realising how it had spoken to every age and circumstance of my life. Over the decades the habits and manners of our culture have changed radically—yet we continue reading Jane Austen’s novels, adapting them, using them, and enjoying them. My book takes the reader on a walk through my life with this now iconic author. I try to answer the question of why, of all early writers in English, she keeps her hold on the public imagination—and why she means so much to me.

  You mention how Jane Austen has inspired and challenged you through different phases of your life. Could you share a specific moment when Austen’s work offered you guidance or comfort?

Through encounters with potential lovers, extended family, irritating and kindly strangers, Jane Austen’s heroines gain self-control, both emotional and just social, as well as a new awareness of self. From Elizabeth Bennet to Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, they learn to adapt to and appreciate different types and classes of people while remaining secure in their own identities. My own life has been one of moving and adapting to new places and I find Jane Austen’s implied advice useful—though hard to follow! Mrs Elton in Emma is a cautionary example of how not to behave in a new environment: instead of waiting and adapting at least at first, she tries to impose herself and her attitudes on her new community. I can relate to that!

As for comfort, that comes from reading. I find the novels an ever present resource and delight in any time of stress or disappointment!

  In your book, you explore how Austen's novels help us understand our own bodies and environment. Could you elaborate on this idea?  

In Jane Austen’s time there was much debate about the connection of mind and body, how one affects the other, how often an ailment that seemed entirely physical turns out to be caused by, or at least influenced by, the mind, how often headaches and nervous diseases resulted from emotions like jealousy or self-pity. Instead of running to contemporary physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions of mercury, would have made matters worse—Jane Austen suggests trying exercise and a change of scene or society.  Her attitude to moaning about one’s ailments is bracing—but not always easy to emulate!

  You’ve had a remarkable career as a literary scholar and author, particularly in feminist studies and women’s literature. How has your perspective on Austen evolved over the years, both as a scholar and a reader?

Moving across three continents during many decades in education, I experienced different ways of reading Jane Austen and her period. Fashions in criticism come and go and we try to make a great author say what we want and what fits the views of our moment instead of listening to what she says. So, during the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement in the United States we read against the grain, wanting to hear Marianne scream in Sense and Sensibility where in fact Austen muffles her anguish. When I was younger—and more serious—I followed critical fashion in noting Austen’s treatment of class or gender. Now I also notice how very funny she can be, especially when she catches the incoherence of our everyday speech.

  Your book is described as “intimate, knowledgeable, and frequently unexpected.” What do you think readers might find most surprising about your take on Austen?

I hope some of my readings will surprise people. To those much younger than me,  I may well seem a voice from the past, saying what is now unfashionable, but I hope is still relevant. If they disagree, I hope I provoke them to argue against me. (I like a good argument!)

I make some unusual claims—that Darcy is easy to mock, that Cassandra Austen may not have burnt Jane’s letters, that the book Mr Austen proposed to a publisher wasn’t an early version of Pride and Prejudice—and others.  I hope my provocative views will provoke new thoughts in the reader. 

  With such a distinguished academic and literary career, including your work on Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft, how does Jane Austen compare to these other pioneering women writers in terms of influence and relevance?

When I was a student at Cambridge and for many years after, Jane Austen was the only pre-Victorian early woman allowed into the canon of English literature. In the later 1960s in the USA I disocvered Mary Wollstonecraft, then largely unknown, and I wanted to write a PhD dissertation on her: the topic was considered too obscure!   Instead, I started a newsletter under her name for other enthusiasts of early writers, and I set about compiling an encyclopedia of the then unknown women. And so I came across the wonderful Aphra Behn, whose name but not work I knew from Virginia Woolf’s mention in A Room of One’s Own. Over the next years I edited the complete works of both Behn and Wollstonecraft and wrote their biographies. Now they are so famous that they have statues in London and Canterbury.

I love details of their lives and I love their innovative work—but are they read for pleasure outside the classroom? Doubtful. You might find someone in a train reading Pride and Prejudice, but very unlikely The Fair Jilt  or A  Vindication of the Rights of Men.

Of the three now iconic figures, I’d rate Aphra Behn as the most experimental, ingenious, extraordinary, and wide-ranging, while Mary Wollstonecraft has had immense influence, not always useful, on women’s social position and is, with her intimate letters, the most knowable and ‘modern’. But for literary appreciation—or pleasurable escapism—we have to turn to Jane Austen. All three are worth reading, studying and enjoying. They are magnificent women.

  You’ve transitioned from academic writing to fiction in recent years. How does writing novels compare to your scholarly work, and has Austen influenced your own fiction writing?

I wouldn’t presume to say I was influenced by Jane Austen! She’s inimitable. But her sentences stick in my mind, reminding me to say what I have to say in fewer words.

When her young niece Anna began sending her stories for comment to her aunt, Jane Austen advised: get the details right—particulars of manners and distances between cities—and don’t write of what you don’t know. Your characters can go to Ireland, but don’t you follow them because you have no idea of the country. When Jane herself didn’t know, she took trouble to find out: aware she was ignorant about the appearance of Northamptonshire, she wrote to ask if there were hedgerows there. Above all—and I have tried to follow this—if in doubt about what you’ve written, however beloved and seemingly fine, cut it out—remember the lopping and cropping that preceded the publication of seemingly miraculous Pride and Prejudice.

  What do you hope readers will take away from your book? Do you think Austen’s novels can still guide us in today’s complex world?

Unlike many women writers of her time, Jane Austen doesn’t seek to teach directly, but much good sense can be gleaned from the self-education of her young heroines. They learn to be stoical about disappointment and pain, and they adapt to being adults living in society by accepting other people’s quirks—and their own. We are so used to advice about loving ourselves and being true to ourselves that we sometimes forget how best to live with other people. Austen’s novels provide old- fashioned but heartening patterns of behaviour for women (and men) even in our more liberated times: so, making life a bit smoother for themselves and everyone else. Think of Elizabeth Bennet at grand Pemberley encouraging Darcy’s shy sister, Anne Elliot with the kindly but rather dim Musgroves in Persuasion, and my favourite, Emma, keeping the social wheels oiled at Hartfield with a valetudinarian father, irascible brother-in law, and fussy sister. They show that people can be caring while still displaying self-esteem—even in a thoroughly patriarchal society such as Regency England.

As for my book, I hope readers will share my enduring enthusiasm for Jane Austen. I hope they’ll be challenged by some of my ideas—and challenge me with theirs. Above all, I hope they’ll enjoy rambling with me through the novels, letters, and funny poems, and laugh a little at what we’ve tried to make of Jane Austen during these last boisterous decades.

 BOOK DESCRIPTION

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that “we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be.” Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels.

Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how - for over half a century - Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life. Part personal memoir, part expert interaction with all the letters, manuscripts and published novels, Janet Todd's book reveals what living with Jane Austen has meant to her and what it might also mean to others.

Todd celebrates the undimmable power of Austen's work to help us understand our own bodies and our environment, and teach us about patience, humour, beauty and the meaning of home

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned novelist and academic, best known for her non-fiction feminist works on women writers including Jane Austen, Aphra Behn and Mary Wollenstonecraft. In recent years, she has turned her hand to writing novels, publishing Lady Susan Plays the Game (2013), A Man of Genius (2016) and Don’t You Know There’s a War On? (2020).

Janet has worked in universities around the world including Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America and India. She was a professor of English Literature at UEA, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities, before becoming president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2008-2015), Cambridge where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham and Lucy Cavendish Colleges. In 2013, Janet was given an OBE for her services to higher education and literary scholarship. Connect with her online at www.janettodd.co.uk.