Jane Austen's Books & Adaptations discussion

John Mullan is one of my favorite Jane Austen scholars. I heartily recommend his book What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved to all readers who finished all of Jane Austen's novels.



This thread is a place to compile links to John Mullan's Austenesque (and other) videos and articles.

YouTube videos:

Longer videos:

Jane Austen's heroines, from Elizabeth Bennet to Emma Woodhouse: https://youtu.be/ZP_yIu_d6uI
Professor Mullan discusses the major female characters in Austen's novels, including Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, and shows how she transformed the idea of the heroine in literature.

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility: Is Marianne a hypocrite?: https://youtu.be/mV82iy1Syd8
In this module, Professor John Mullan thinks about the role of money in the novel, focusing in particular on: (i) Marianne's claim that money hardly matters at all ("it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned"); (ii) the sheer extent of Marianne's wealth, and the absurdity of her claim that she barely has enough to live on; (iii) the extent to which characters in the novel are hypocritical about money; (iv) the extent to which money is linked to power, and the extent to which this follows gender lines – focusing in particular on Edward Ferrars and Mrs Jennings; (v) the painstaking precision with which Austen describes the financial situation of the Dashwood family; and (vi) the extent to which characters judge each other based on how wealthy they are.

John Mullan on Mansfield Park: https://youtu.be/vi3lQz7d-dU
The author of What Matters in Jane Austen celebrates the bicentenary of the publication of Austen’s most politically engaged masterpiece.

John Mullan on Jane Austen's writing style and her novel Emma (ignore the YT title, this vid is not about Pride and Prejudice): https://youtu.be/k087iZazynQ

Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë: The Queens of English Literature Debate with Dominic West: https://youtu.be/mP8dllTkpEg
To help you decide who should be crowned queen of English letters we lined up the best advocates to make the case for each writer. They called on actors, including stars Dominic West and Sam West, to illustrate their arguments with readings from the novels. Filmed at the Royal Geographical Society on 26th February 2014.

Shorter bits (up to 10 min):

In 2018, Oxford University Press released a series of short videos to promote a new edition of Sense and Sensibility. They cut an interview with John Mullan into 6 parts:
- Use of Dialogue in Jane Austen’s Novels: https://youtu.be/dQPlL_spNkY
- The Importance of Age in Jane Austen’s Novels: https://youtu.be/yT0QQeJo9js
- The Importance of Money in Jane Austen’s Novels: https://youtu.be/MuFoo3PZGQw
- Sex in Jane Austen’s Novels: https://youtu.be/9U3pNiWrX98
- Proposals and Marriage in Jane Austen’s Novels: https://youtu.be/T1SzUVvH2hU
- Jane Austen’s Writing Style and Voice: https://youtu.be/_K81UJ7vA6k


In 2023, Oxford University Press released a series of short videos to promote their 5th edition of Emma. They cut an interview with John Mullan into 5 parts:
- What makes Austen’s Emma such a revolutionary and experimental work? https://youtu.be/x-ebcwZTz7o
- John Mullan on Jane Austen’s ability to trick her reader https://youtu.be/j3puEotmJAQ
- Why has Austen’s Emma been so popular for film and television adaptations? https://youtu.be/bNP8u22yq-I
- Is there is a particular order for reading Jane Austen’s works? https://youtu.be/0a7SW0R07Yo
- On the rewards of re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma: https://youtu.be/zelNY1KfBKo

Articles by John Mullan:


The Jane Austen Ultimate Quiz: https://www.theguardian.com/books/qui...

- How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
- Ten questions on Jane Austen: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
- Move over Lizzie Bennet – let's hear it for the unsung heroine: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... (John Mullan dedicates his part of the article to Fanny Price)
- Jane Austen: Strictly ballroom: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice at 200: looking afresh at a classic: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
(John Mullan muses on Mr Bennet)
- Are you Elizabeth Bennet, or her mother?: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... (The Jane Austen Book Club review, but mostly on reading books to others in JA works and in JA's life)
- Courtship, love and marriage in Jane Austen's novels: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victo...
- Modernising Jane Austen: 10 traps to avoid (thanks to Melindam for the link): https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

- Why that Jane Austen quotation on the new £10 note is a major blunder: https://www.theguardian.com/business/...



John Mullan reviews other Austenesque works:
Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly review – have we got Austen all wrong?: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Does Love & Friendship improve Jane Austen’s ending?: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places by Margaret Doody – review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London by Hannah Greig – review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
John Mullan on Bridget Jones – Guardian book club: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Michael Suk-Young Chwe – review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Articles on John Mullan or his works:



(Guardian) What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan – review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

(Telegraph) Sex, sea air and stupidity: 5 things we learned about Jane Austen: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/h...
Here are the key things we learned about the novelist from Professor John Mullan's insightful talk at the Hay Festival

Podcasts:

In Our Time, a BBC Podcast: Emma Woodhouse: https://www.test.bbc.co.uk/sounds/pla...
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emma, one of Austen's most popular novels and arguably her masterpiece, a brilliantly sparkling comedy of manners published in December 1815. With Janet Todd Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge John Mullan Professor of English at University College, London And Emma Clery Professor of English at the University of Southampton.


Two for Tea: John Mullan https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kyh...
In this episode of our Two for Tea podcast, Iona Italia talks to Professor John Mullan about the subtlety and genius of Jane Austen: one of most popular and perhaps the most underrated of all the classic English novelists. Focuses on Persuasion.


Shelf Healing: Professor John Mullan Interview https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/...
A lively and entertaining interview with Professor John Mullan about therapeutic reading and his very favourite authors Charles Dickens and Janes Austen. John takes us on a deep dive into what we can enjoy in literature and how he finds humour to be the very best comfort read possible. We travel through literature from Shakespeare, stopping at 18th century literature, then right though to modern day authors and thrillers.


The Art of Manliness: Jane Austen for Dudes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/...
"If you're a dude who's written off Jane Austen's work as I once did, perhaps today's podcast will convince you that there's something in it for women and men alike and encourage you to give her novels a try. My guest is John Mullan, a professor of English and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen? John and I discuss the literary innovation Austen pioneered that influenced the likes of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and will give your social agility a healthy workout. John then explains why soldiers and Winston Churchill turned to Austen during the world wars. We also discuss the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's argument that Austen's work was "the last great representative of the classical tradition of virtues," Austen's idea of manliness, and how a man's choice of a wife will shape his character. And John shares his recommendation for which Austen novel men should read first."

I have read What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved and liked it a lot. :)

Here is an article he wrote about the time when The Austen Project was on its way (Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope for sure):

"Modernising Jane Austen: 10 traps to avoid"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

I love that book. It doesn't mean I always agree with John Mullan, but I enjoy his enthusiasm and love of Jane Austen and her works.

It's so fun to watch his interviews. He's always so excited to talk about free indirect style, and he's thrilled with Emma in particular (my favorite JA novel).

Zuzana wrote: "I love that book. It doesn't mean I always agree with John Mullan, but I enjoy his enthusiasm and love of Jane Austen and her works.

It's so fun to watch his interviews. He's always so excited to ..."

Emma is also my favourite. :)

Melindam wrote: "Here is an article he wrote about the time when The Austen Project was on its way (Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope for sure): ..."

Thanks for the link, Melindam. Mullan wrote for a while for The Guardian. I like his review of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical and there's a fun quiz for Jane Austen's fans, too.

The Jane Austen Ultimate Quiz: https://www.theguardian.com/books/qui...

Oh, what fun! Liked this quiz!! 😅

The Hidden Jane Austen by John Wiltshire - review (part 1)

(view spoiler)[
Noticing and Not Noticing
John Mullan

There is​ no sign that Freud read Jane Austen. Yet in her use of the words ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciously’, Austen might have had some claim to his attention. The words had been around in English since the late 17th century, and when Austen first uses one of them, in Sense and Sensibility, it is in a conventional and wholly un-Freudian manner. Elinor Dashwood’s ghastly, venal sister-in-law, seeing the growing attachment between Elinor and her brother, Edward, observes to Elinor’s mother that Edward must find a wealthy or noble wife. There will be trouble for ‘any young woman who attempted to draw him in’. The implication (Elinor is an unacceptable nobody and should lay off) is so crude that Mrs Dashwood ‘could neither pretend to be unconscious, nor endeavour to be calm’. ‘Unconscious’ here means ‘unaware’, ‘uncomprehending’, ‘unwitting’; this is the way the word is commonly used by Austen’s contemporaries and the way it is used elsewhere in Sense and Sensibility and in Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr Darcy’s proposal, she nonetheless finds herself gratified ‘to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection’. To be ‘unconscious’ is simply not to notice something in the world around you.

Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is showing a special interest in her, ‘nor perhaps refrain (though unconsciously) from giving a more willing assent to invitations on that account’. What does ‘unconsciously’ mean here? Sir Thomas has just presided over the mercenary marriage of his eldest daughter, Maria, to a hugely wealthy man whom she despises, though Sir Thomas believes himself ‘infinitely above scheming or contriving’ – that ‘infinitely’ telling us that we are hearing his own proud self-estimation. So ‘unconsciously’ means not noticing something in himself. The evasive double negative (‘nor perhaps refrain’) emphasises his refusal to admit his own calculations to himself. We would now probably say that his motivation was ‘subconscious’. Acting ‘unconsciously’ means being self-pleasingly blind to his own motives.

Under Austen’s touch, the word is opening up to new possibilities. In her last completed novel, Persuasion, Captain Wentworth acknowledges this when, in the happy afterglow of declaring himself to Anne and being accepted, he explains his past behaviour to her. He tells her that, in the eight years since she was persuaded to reject his first proposal of marriage, ‘he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry.’ His discovery and then his confession of his unconscious devotion to Anne are all the more convincing because the reader has watched and listened while his certain indifference reported early in the novel (‘Her power with him was gone for ever’) has been contradicted by all the signs of revivifying affection. Persuasion was published in 1818, a year after its author’s death, which happens to be the date of the first recorded use of ‘the unconscious’ (noun), by Coleridge, in some characteristically probing but perplexing lecture notes. ‘As in every work of Art the Conscious – is so impressed on the Unconscious, as to appear in it. So is the Man of Genius the Link that combines the two.’

‘Till this moment I never knew myself,’ Elizabeth Bennet cries, somewhat stagily, as she walks alone down a Kent lane. She has just been persuaded by Mr Darcy’s letter that Wickham is a charming rogue whose lies she has all too readily believed. Generations of sixth-formers have been taught that the heroine’s self-knowledge, quite as much as the Pemberley estate, is the prize she eventually gains. What is less often observed is the technical delicacy – unknown in fiction before her – with which Austen has dramatised Elizabeth’s ability to hide her feelings from herself. Think of the way Mr Darcy, having been repulsed in his two previous efforts to get her to dance with him, finally claims her as his partner. At the Netherfield ball our heroine has had to endure two clumsy turns of the floor with Mr Collins, before enjoying a dance with an unnamed officer who has conversed happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a fact, but it is inhabiting her consciousness as her instant response to his ‘application’ is turned into a perplexing reflex. She is left ‘to fret over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself.

John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her life, he devotes himself entirely to her novels. His title might also stir the expectation that the critic will be making explicit what the novelist herself strove to suppress, adding to those studies that have revealed Austen’s unacknowledged awareness of slavery, radical politics or masturbation. But Wiltshire is concerned, as he nicely puts it, with ‘the silences in the novels, not with the silences of the novels’. He reveals how artfully Austen uses silence, reticence and evasion. The hiddenness that he plumbs is contrived by the novelist. While he aims to show ‘how astonishing is Austen’s penetration of the hidden inner motives and impulses of her imagined characters’, this alone would hardly be news. The real point is to show the narrative techniques used to create, and often to withhold, these ‘inner motives’, giving the attentive reader the experience of inferring or discovering what can’t exactly be stated.

Wiltshire has written four books and many articles about Austen’s fiction, but he often seems to be discovering new things. This is as it should be, by his own argument, for ‘Austen readers tend to identify themselves as rereaders.’ Ever since George Henry Lewes, in his long and laudatory essay in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, referred to those ‘like ourselves’ who ‘have read and reread her works’, rereading has been the declared pleasure of all Austen admirers. Lewes had counted his readings – ‘We have reread them all four times’ – and was ready to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated rereadings’. Wiltshire cites their argument that Emma, more than any other of her novels, offers the discerning reader the sharp pleasure of seeing what he or she has failed to discern on an earlier reading. So, for instance, the first-time reader will certainly recognise, through the fog of Emma’s misconceptions, that the smooth, ingratiating Mr Elton has his sights on our heroine (‘handsome, clever and rich’) and has no interest in her stupid, illegitimate stooge, Harriet Smith. Few uninformed readers, however, will grasp from the first what Frank Churchill is up to as he appears to flirt with Emma – how his very appearance in Highbury, after years of good excuses to his father, is tied to the arrival of Jane Fairfax at her aunt’s cramped home in the village. The delight of his scheming is available only to the rereader.

So much is ‘hidden’ by Austen, though invariably in plain sight. It was only on my own nth reading of Emma that I suddenly realised that Mr Perry the apothecary, reliable source of news and advice, and quoted so often by the novel’s main characters, never speaks in the novel. ‘Perry tells me ... ’, ‘Mr Perry said ... ’: he is always being cited, but Austen gives us not a word of his actual speech. Who knows what he says? Of course we don’t get any of his own words: his business is reflecting back the prejudices of his neurotic clients. No wonder he is doing so well (connoisseurs of Emma will know how much turns on his forthcoming purchase of a carriage – the surest sign of affluence in provincial Regency England). If I had read Mary Lascelles’s 1939 study Jane Austen and Her Art carefully enough I would have known about Perry’s silence already, but it seemed for a blissful moment as if the discovery was all mine, as if Austen had carefully folded the joke into the novel to delight someone who reread it long after her death.

Austen aficionados feel confident that when they go back to one of her novels, many such new discoveries await them. Wiltshire proceeds by close reading of particular passages, plenty of which reveal, even to the frequent rereader, narrative refinements that were hidden before. In my own favourite example, when Emma visits Mrs Bates’s home to find Frank Churchill mending her glasses, Wiltshire displays the clues that allow us to discover that Frank and Jane Fairfax have hastily rearranged themselves after an embrace. We are seeing with Emma’s eyes and so will probably miss these clues. Wiltshire supposes no end to such discoveries. In his chapter on Pride and Prejudice, he suggests that Austen encourages us to reread not only in the sense of going back to her novel, but in the sense of turning back to earlier pages during the course of a reading. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are both in the habit of remembering, and sometimes quoting, what a person said earlier in the novel. ‘I do remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments,’ Elizabeth tells Wickham, in reply to this pleasant deceiver’s account of his erstwhile patron’s ‘ill-temper’. But she remembers wrong. The reader who turns back a few chapters will find that Mr Darcy was attempting self-criticism in the face of her own playful mockery.

... (hide spoiler)]

The Hidden Jane Austen by John Wiltshire - review (part 2)

(view spoiler)[Letting your memory trick you is better than having no particular memory at all. Wickham and Lydia, with their shamefully cobbled together marriage, ‘seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the world’. Wiltshire might have gone on to notice how brilliantly Austen allows many of her characters to forget what they have said before. Naturally there is Mrs Bennet, who manages effortlessly to turn from believing that Mr Darcy is ‘a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at all worth pleasing’ to as near the opposite as she can manage. ‘Such a charming man! – so handsome! so tall!’ Everyone notices this, but for Austen the pleasure must have been just as great in having Mrs Bennet announce with feeling in the second chapter that her neighbour Mrs Long ‘is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her’ and then, 52 chapters later, letting her tell her daughters: ‘I do think Mrs Long is as good a creature as ever lived.’ Naturally, she has excellent reasons for her opinion on each occasion. It is difficult not to think that we are all like Mrs Bennet in this respect, and Austen doesn’t restrict self-contradiction to fools and frauds. It is clever, truth-telling Elizabeth who responds to her mother’s advice not to dance with Mr Darcy by saying, with evident sincerity: ‘I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.’ And we know where that leads.

Nothing intrigues Austen more than self-deception. She is the most psychologically plausible of novelists largely because her characters’ dialogue is everywhere inflected by their concealed desires and misguided views of themselves. Wiltshire listens intently in order to marvel at the subtle ways in which such concealment reveals itself. He shows how Mrs Norris’s most unbelievable self-descriptions in Mansfield Park, and some of her cruellest cuts at Fanny, draw on the liturgy or the Bible, as if she ‘has only been able to access Christian idioms in a distorted form’. ‘I am sure I should be the last person in the world to withhold my mite upon such an occasion,’ she declares in the opening chapter, as she deftly ensures that she will incur no expense for the young Fanny’s move from her family home. ‘Wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last,’ she savagely tells Fanny years later, twisting a line from the Gospels. ‘Of course,’ the reader thinks, ‘I should have noticed this before.’ This is indeed how she speaks. She has been a vicar’s wife for many years and has a fund of what Wiltshire calls ‘debased and attenuated sanctimony’.

Austen, as we might say, has as much delight in conceiving a Mrs Norris as an Anne Elliot. Wiltshire devotes most of a chapter to Mrs Norris, fascinated by the creation of a character who is wonderfully absurd as well as nasty because ‘she believes what she proclaims, that she is a really good person.’ Austen is not much interested in hypocrites, the Blifils and Pecksniffs who spout of goodness but know in their hearts that it is all nonsense. There are a few self-knowing schemers among the minor characters: we are invited to imagine how Mr Shepherd, Sir Walter Elliot’s agent in Persuasion, might talk to his widowed daughter, Mrs Clay, when they are alone together. ‘Keep angling for him, my girl, and tickling his vanity, and you’ll get him in the end.’ Or something like that. But for the most part those who act badly still like to think well of themselves. Wiltshire gathers all the little suggestions that tell us of Mrs Norris’s wounded, angry psychopathology and let us believe that she believes herself.

Not all Austen’s fiction is so achieved. Wiltshire, like others before him, notices that in Northanger Abbey she can’t entirely trust to her characters. He isn’t completely charmed by the novel’s amused narrator, who is ‘sometimes more like a compère’. In Sense and Sensibility he points out that Austen compensates for her heroine’s frequent silences, her habitual refusal to express resentment or censure, with a narrative prose that is ‘unremittingly scarifying and judgmental’. He seems close to Lewes’s decisive judgment that ‘all her power is dramatic power; she loses her hold on us directly she ceases to speak through the personae.’ The term ‘free indirect style’ wasn’t available to Lewes to describe the fact that much of the third-person narration is also filtered through the consciousness of one or other of her characters. Wiltshire edited Mansfield Park (‘this magnificent novel’) for the Cambridge edition of Austen and is especially revealing on the way the technique, which hardly existed before Austen, is used here.

His treatment​ of Mansfield Park is alive to the moments at which the narrative picks up the rhythm of a character’s thoughts. He doesn’t say this, but many critics have failed to detect such rhythms at crucial moments and have thus misread the novel, confidently finding the author’s values where there are only a character’s sentiments. When Fanny is transplanted to the tumult of her family home in Portsmouth after eight years at Mansfield Park, the narrative reflects on the appeal of her adoptive home. ‘At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard.’ Yet the ‘desperate’ cadence of this lets us hear how Fanny ‘turns Mansfield into a fantasy world of comfort, even if it is only a comfort made out of negatives’. Sir Thomas hopes that a few months in her cramped and shabby Portsmouth quarters will make her appreciate his household, and therefore do as he wishes and marry Henry Crawford. She is duly appreciative, but the narrative that reports this mimics what Wiltshire calls ‘her nervous hysteria’. For chapter after chapter we have seen her scolded and tormented by Mrs Norris, but now, it seems, ‘the little irritations, sometimes introduced by aunt Norris, they were short, they were trifling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared with the ceaseless tumult of her present abode.’ The stir of cliché and hyperbole is panicky Fanny, not sagacious Jane.

In Mansfield Park, of all Austen’s novels, the use of free indirect style is easiest to miss, partly because the heroine is apparently right-thinking, but more because of the way the narrative moves between characters: this is the Austen novel in which the heroine is most often absent. The Austen novel most dominated by its heroine’s point of view is, of course, Emma. Here free indirect style is used to render the protagonist’s deluded view of her little world, so the reader should always know to be suspicious of what he or she is being told. Despite this we keep being tricked. The narrator follows so closely the progress of the heroine’s attention that all the clues as to characters’ real motives can as easily be missed by the reader as they have been by Emma herself. Wiltshire points at an innocuous few sentences describing the Coles’s ‘rather large’ – for which read, anxiously ostentatious – dinner party, at which Emma thinks Frank Churchill seems to be expressing his amorous interest in her. Distracted by Mrs Weston, she loses sight of him for a while, until she finds Mr Cole entreating her to play his new piano; Frank, who ‘had found a seat by Miss Fairfax’, adds his own ‘very pressing entreaties’. He is in fact using the gathering to find a precious moment or two of closeness to Jane Fairfax. Much of the time he can only exchange looks with her. But, as Wiltshire observes, the clue is ‘slipped into a sentence shaped as if to appear to reaffirm Frank’s courtship of Emma’.

The reader’s attention is minutely rewarded. You can do this sort of thing with any paragraph of Emma. As Wiltshire says, it’s ‘a novel that manages the reader’s own attention in extraordinary ways’. Emma is busily noticing things and not noticing things, and the reader has the chance to share what she notices and to notice what she doesn’t. In life more than one thing is happening at any given moment, and Wiltshire thinks Emma is the English novel that comes closest to representing this. Conventionally enough, he comes to Persuasion last and finds an audaciously different focus on the heroine’s consciousness. After the opening few chapters, we are almost always in Anne Elliot’s head, and because of this we often hear only ‘patches or fragments of conversations’ – not just because she is marginalised by the other characters, but also because, as Wiltshire puts it, ‘her own feelings impede or intercept the incoming communications.’ Anne is always ‘keeping her thoughts to herself’, Wiltshire says – I would say keeping them from herself too. Certainly he is right that the novel’s technical brilliance partly consists of the narrator’s keeping these thoughts from the reader, thus building up ‘a kind of bank, or freight, of painful, unexpressed experience and emotion’.

The last time I read the novel I noticed for the first time a tiny detail that Wiltshire highlights. We are being told that Anne, condemned to play the Musgroves’ grand piano while others dance or talk, is used to giving pleasure only to herself. The fond, tasteless Musgrove parents listen only to their daughters’ playing, even though Anne plays much better. ‘Excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of 14, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste.’ It is easy to be distracted by that surprising mention of her mother (so rarely explicitly in her thoughts) and not to register the opening phrase. As soon as you notice it you know what it means: it echoes that ‘short period of exquisite felicity’ mentioned several chapters earlier, the period of her courtship by Captain Wentworth, before she was persuaded to turn him away. Of course: she must have played to him. But the inexplicit, almost evasive, reference to this is beautifully unclear because it dramatises Anne’s own thinking. She will hardly allow herself to remember that period. Wiltshire alerts us even to ‘the minuscule pause before the repeated “never” (which a lesser writer might have written “never, never”) giving the reader a momentary glimpse of her past happiness with Wentworth, and suggesting the depressive process by which one re-experienced grief drags another in its train’. Old critical hand that he may be, he almost applauds the sheer technical dexterity, which means that, after a decent pause, he will be able to reread those novels. Like her other admirers he will read again, and read her better. (hide spoiler)]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n...

Thank you for sharing all these great resources, Zuzana!

Newish Longer videos

Jane Austen Society of North America: A Close Look at Austen's Genius: A Visit with John Mullan | Episode 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BbTg...
"Happy 2025! This year marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday, and we are delighted to kick off the celebration with professor and author John Mullan as our guest. This month we delve into passages from the four novels published during Austen's lifetime and discuss what the details reveal about her genius as a writer. Join us for this fascinating and insightful episode (and get a sneak peek at one of our plenary speakers for JASNA's 2025 AGM in Baltimore)!"

Die Buch: Courtship, Puzzles & Detective Novels: John Mullan on "Emma" by Jane Austen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUjr3...
"On the feminist book podcast "Die Buch", John Mullan talks to Julia Ritter about Jane Austen's "Emma". They discuss what makes it such a fascinating courtship novel, if Jane Austen would have written a good detective novel and quiz each other on utterances from Austen's characters. "

Pride and Prejudice: Character and Contradiction https://youtu.be/lz-2aifHZQE?si=48O5s...
Jane Austen's House presents its 2023 Annual Lecture, filmed onsite in Chawton with acclaimed Austen scholar Professor John Mullan...
“I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.”

When Elizabeth Bennet says this to her mother about Mr Darcy, she believes that she is speaking the truth. She is destined, like most of Jane Austen's characters, to contradict her words by her actions. In her novels, Jane Austen is a connoisseur of comic self-contradiction. In this talk, we see how she brings characters alive through their inconsistencies in Pride and Prejudice, with some glances at her other novels.

This talk by acclaimed Austen scholar Professor John Mullan was delivered in the Drawing Room at Jane Austen’s House. Whilst a small group enjoyed it live, it was written and filmed for you, our online audience. So grab a cup of tea, sit back and enjoy, wherever you are in the world!

John Mullan: Formas fantásticas en la literatura gótica (inglés) https://youtu.be/k9xLwBipYpU?si=VmbMs...-
Conferencia impartida por el Profesor Lord Northcliffe de Literatura Inglesa Moderna de la University College London, John Mullan, en el curso "El arte fantástico" en el Auditorio del Museo del Prado en febrero de 2019.
John Mullan's lecture on Gothic Literature.


Connell Guides Interview with John Mullan - chopped into three parts:
- John Mullan on Jane Austen's Emma https://youtu.be/k087iZazynQ?si=DyuXa... 15 minutes
- John Mullan on Elizabeth and Darcy's Relationship in Pride and Prejudice https://youtu.be/0CQk2y2DtDc?si=gm6is... 14 minutes
- Prof. John Mullan on Jane Eyre https://youtu.be/lNc86aHuWXk?si=XC7rY... 13 minutes

HistFest: 250 Years of Jane Austen with Amber Butchart, John Mullan and Rebecca Rideal (YouTube video, 1 h 15min)
This event, originally titled '250 Years of Jane Austen', took place on 27 April 2025. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

Renowned for their witty social commentary and clear-eyed depictions of love and marriage, Jane Austen’s novels continue to be read, studied, adapted, imitated and worshipped all over the world. To mark the 250th anniversary of the writer’s birth, this special event celebrated her life and legacy, as well as the iconic Regency fashions of her day.

With fashion historian Amber Butchart, Austen scholar Professor John Mullan and historian, author and HistFest director Rebecca Rideal.

https://youtu.be/T9lBx9IlIjU?si=tQWH7...

Very interesting discussion. Both guests had really interesting things to say. John Mullan is enthusiastic about JA as always, and Amber Butchart's makes Georgian and Regency fashion really intriguing.