The gossip

Jane Austen's Paper Trail

This episode of Jane Austen's Paper Trail explores the dual nature of gossip within Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Through exp

Key takeaways

• Gossip in the 18th century was viewed through 'conduct books' as a form of vacuous idleness but served as a vital social tool.
• In Sense and Sensibility, characters like Mrs. Jennings use gossip to drive plot, while others like Eleanor Dashwood fear its impact on reputation.

Main topics

• Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
• Regency Era Social Norms

Notable quotes

Perhaps those unconcealed thoughts were the reason the letters were burned.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound look at how Austen utilized the mechanic

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) You're listening to a podcast from The Conversation. The year is 1841. Cassandra Austin crouches before a crackling fire, casting precious letters from her late sister Jane into the flames. Nearly 25 years have passed since the novelist's death, and she still misses her terribly. In this final act of sisterhood, Cassandra destroys two-thirds of their correspondence, preserving only 160 of Jane's letters. After Jane's death, aged just 41, Cassandra wrote, Perhaps those unconcealed thoughts were the reason the letters were burned, but many Austin fans suspect that Jane's pen was simply too cutting to be entrusted, uncensored, to her legacy. Speaker 4 (0:58) While we may not have Jane's letters, we do have her novels. I'm Anna Walker, Arts and Culture Editor at The Conversation in the UK, and you're listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail. In this podcast, experts uncover the real Jane Austen to celebrate 250 years since her birth. In each episode, with the help of my colleagues Naomi Joseph and Jane Wright, we'll be investigating a different aspect of Austen's personality, interrogating the pages of her novels with leading Austen researchers. Along the way, we'll visit locations important to Jane, to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in. In this episode, we're delving into Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Gossip, and the fear of it, plays a central role in this story. In the rumours that swirl through its pages, we'll find out what Austen herself thought about gossip and the people who spread it. But first, it's time for tea in a place that meant a lot to Jane Austen. Welcome to episode one, Was Jane a Gossip? Speaker 2 (2:07) Tastes delicious. The buns are about as big as our heads and they look huge and they've got lemon curd on the top with a little bit of lemon and it's really lovely. You should cut into yours because you haven't even had breakfast yet. Speaker 4 (2:21) I will, I'm just going to do that now. This is my colleague Jane Wright and Andrew McInnes, reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University. They're digging into the famous buns at Sally Lunn's Tea Rooms in Bath, where Jane Austen herself is thought to have exchanged a tale or two. Speaker 6 (2:37) So Sally Lunn's Tea Room actually dates back to the late 17th century, but these days it's very much styled as a Regency Tea Room. with beautiful chinoiserie style crockery and plates on the wall and gilt edged mirrors and cartoons of the regency period by James Speaker 2 (3:01) Gilray a famous caricaturist Speaker 6 (3:03) James Gilray so Andrew Speaker 6 (3:08) How important was the ritual of taking tea as the setting for a good gossip? Speaker 2 (3:15) I guess it was really important. So it'd be one of the main ways for women to get together and talk privately. And when it's, you know, a busy tea room like Sally Lund's would have been, there's sort of talk all around. So you have that ability to have that private discussion in public. Speaker 6 (3:31) So who do you think Jane would come to Sally Lund's with? Speaker 2 (3:35) Well... When you look at her letters, you can see that she had quite a wide social circle. Young people her own age, sort of older people that she would talk about and discuss. But she came from a very close family and I think she'd really want to come to somewhere like this with Cassandra. Speaker 6 (3:54) Would gossip then be considered in a different way to the way we think about gossip now? Speaker 2 (4:01) It was... part of the culture as it is today. So it was circulating in lots of different forms. We sort of mentioned the caricatures in Sally Lund's as a sort of part of the Regency decoration. And that was ways of spoofing political figures, but also figures of fashion, sort of making a sort of visual joke about people that were being gossiped about at the time. But that gossip was also published in a wide... range of ways. Scandalous memoirs, newspapers and magazines would be making remarks about how people lived. And I think sort of novels, Jane Austen's novels and also other novels that were being published at the time are ways of encoding gossip and also using gossip to sort of drive the plot. Speaker 4 (4:47) And gossip plays a key role in Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's first published novel, where spies are at the heart of the action. The novel follows the Dashwood sisters, pragmatic Eleanor, passionate Marianne, and young Margaret, who are forced to leave their family home upon the death of their father. They move to Barton Cottage in Devonshire, offered to them at a low rent by their mother's cousin. But as they settle into their new life, they encounter secrets, rumours and gossip, often fuelled by the notorious Mrs Jennings, that threaten to aggravate their already precarious situation. Central to all this is an intricate love triangle going on between Eleanor, a young woman called Lucy Steele, and the shy but honourable Edward Ferris. Speaker 6 (5:29) I want to talk about the idea of gossip being different things. So it's liberation, it's intimacy, it's fun, but it's also got a darker side, hasn't it? In Speaker 2 (5:40) the 18th century, gossip was looked down upon as generally a bad thing and was written about in conduct books, which were sort of guides for generally young ladies on how to behave. That's a sort of dismissal of gossip as vacuous idleness. That's kind of the backdrop of how... kind of religiously, I suppose, gossip was viewed at the time. And I think in the world of Austen's novels, gossip sometimes seems like quite a dark, threatening thing. And I think that's one way of thinking about gossiping neighbours as a group of people that enforce certain... social structures and kinds of civility. You can't behave too badly because you need to keep up your reputation, which is a central thing in Sense and Sensibility. Speaker 6 (6:26) It's a very powerful thing as well, this kind of intel, because as you say, reputation was everything, especially for a woman. Speaker 2 (6:33) Yes, and if you get gossiped about, your reputation can be diminished or called into question. So that's how gossip can be a sort of disciplinary thing for society. Austen is really careful in Sense and Sensibility to say that a few of the quite mean and evil characters are reputable and because they have that good reputation they're essentially free to do what they like in private. The reputation that comes with money gives you freedom for quite a lot of bad behaviour. Speaker 6 (7:02) For someone with such a keen eye who like to satirise polite society, do you think Jane both despised and enjoyed gossip. Speaker 2 (7:13) Absolutely. She obviously had quite a sharp pen for the cutting remark. Speaker 6 (7:19) Some people are a bit shocked when they find out how kind of bitchy Jane was in some of her letters. I think Speaker 2 (7:25) she's sort of fabulously bitchy, so... There's a famous example, which is sort of shocking, and I think that's why it's famous, where she says, Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband, suggesting that her husband was so ugly that it would cause a miscarriage. She's doing this for fun, right? It's sort of meant to provoke perhaps involuntary laugh. You can see in places where... She shows her good characters kind of despising gossip. So there's a moment when... In Sense and Sensibility, when Eleanor meets the older Miss Steele, and Miss Steele tells her this story about what's happening between Lucy and Edward, who are sort of secretly engaged, right up to what feels like the present moment. And Eleanor suddenly realises that Anne Steele has been listening at the door rather than getting this news from a proper channel. And she's horrified to have been in an improperly gossiping situation. And I guess... Austen wants us to see that as funny, like it is funny that Eleanor gets this news from a gossip and she feels awful about it. But there's also this side where Eleanor's good sense and sort of virtuousness has been conned into getting this news in sort of ill-gotten ways that make her really uncomfortable. So there's that sort of double-edgedness to Austen's writing where she does say that some of these gossiping characters are. ridiculous and silly and pathetic, but also a lot of the fun and the amusement and the comedy comes from the same characters gossiping and giving the news and driving the plot forward. Speaker 6 (9:01) And that's something that your own research looks at, the idea of silliness and ridiculousness in the romantic tradition. Speaker 2 (9:08) Yeah, Sense and Sensibility has that sort of joy in silliness running through. at least the edges of the novel as a complete counterpoint to all this angst that's going on in the middle. Speaker 6 (9:20) Yes, and I suppose it was a way of, you know, making life, you know, bearable that for a lot of women would have been, you know, quite difficult in terms of the restrictions placed on them. Speaker 2 (9:30) Yeah, it's a sort of alternate route through the world, isn't it? Silliness is kind of, is much more purely liberatory than the gossipy world which can have its sort of dark side and its nastiness. Speaker 6 (9:42) And given that Jane Austen clearly mined her own life for the sort of plots and things that happen in the novel, and from what we've seen in her letters, would your verdict be that she is a gossip? Speaker 2 (9:59) I think she