The Common Reader

Tuesday is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, so today I spoke to John Mullan, professor of English Literature at UCL, author of What Matters in Jane Austen. John and I talked about how Austen’s fiction would have developed if she had not died young, the innovations of Persuasion, wealth inequality in Austen, slavery and theatricals in Mansfield Park, as well as Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Patricia Beer, the Dunciad, and the Booker Prize. This was an excellent episode. My thanks to John!TranscriptHenry Oliver (00:00)Today, I am talking to John Mullen. John is a professor of English literature at University College London, and he is the author of many splendid books, including How Novels Work and the Artful Dickens. I recommend the Artful Dickens to you all. But today we are talking about Jane Austen because it’s going to be her birthday in a couple of days. And John wrote What Matters in Jane Austen, which is another book I recommend to you all. John, welcome.John Mullan (00:51)It’s great to be here.Henry Oliver (00:53)What do you think would have happened to Austin’s fiction if she had not died young?John Mullan (00:58)Ha ha! I’ve been waiting all this year to be asked that question from somebody truly perspicacious. ⁓ Because it’s a question I often answer even though I’m not asked it, because it’s a very interesting one, I think. And also, I think it’s a bit, it’s answerable a little bit because there was a certain trajectory to her career. I think it’s very difficult to imagine what she would have written.John Mullan (01:28)But I think there are two things which are almost certain. The first is that she would have gone on writing and that she would have written a deal more novels. And then even the possibility that there has been in the past of her being overlooked or neglected would have been closed. ⁓ And secondly, and perhaps more significantly for her, I think she would have become well known.in her own lifetime. you know, partly that’s because she was already being outed, as it were, you know, of course, as ⁓ you’ll know, Henry, you know, she published all the novels that were published in her lifetime were published anonymously. So even people who were who were following her career and who bought a novel like Mansfield Park, which said on the title page by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, they knew they knew.John Mullan (02:26)were getting something by the same author, they wouldn’t necessarily have known the author’s name and I think that would have become, as it did with other authors who began anonymously, that would have disappeared and she would have become something of a literary celebrity I would suggest and then she would have met other authors and she’d have been invited to some London literary parties in effect and I think that would have been very interesting how that might have changed her writing.John Mullan (02:54)if it would have changed her writing as well as her life. She, like everybody else, would have met Coleridge. ⁓ I think that would have happened. She would have become a name in her own lifetime and that would have meant that her partial disappearance, I think, from sort of public consciousness in the 19th century wouldn’t have happened.Henry Oliver (03:17)It’s interesting to think, you know, if she had been, depending on how old she would have been, could she have read the Pickwick papers? How would she have reacted to that? Yes. Yeah. Nope.John Mullan (03:24)Ha ha ha ha ha!Yes, she would have been in her 60s, but that’s not so old, speaking of somebody in their 60s. ⁓ Yes, it’s a very interesting notion, isn’t it? I mean, there would have been other things which happened after her premature demise, which she might have responded to. I think particularly there was a terrific fashion for before Dickens came along in the 1830s, there was a terrific fashion in the 1820s for what were called silver fork novels, which were novels of sort of high life of kind of the kind of people who knew Byron, but I mean as fictional characters. And we don’t read them anymore, but they were they were quite sort of high quality, glossy products and people loved them. And I’m I like to think she might have reacted to that with her sort of with her disdain, think, her witty disdain for all aristocrats. know, nobody with a title is really any good in her novels, are they? And, you know, the nearest you get is Mr. Darcy, who is an Earl’s nephew. And that’s more of a problem for him than almost anything else. ⁓ She would surely have responded satirically to that fashion.Henry Oliver (04:28)Hahaha.Yes, and then we might have had a Hazlitt essay about her as well, which would have been all these lost gems. Yes. Are there ways in which persuasion was innovative that Emma was not?John Mullan (04:58)Yes, yes, yes, yes. I know, I know.⁓ gosh, all right, you’re homing in on the real tricky ones. Okay, okay. ⁓ That Emma was not. Yes, I think so. I think it took, in its method, it took further what she had done in Emma.Henry Oliver (05:14)Ha ha.This is your exam today,John Mullan (05:36)which is that method of kind of we inhabit the consciousness of a character. And I I think of Jane Austen as a writer who is always reacting to her own last novel, as it were. And I think, you know, probably the Beatles were like that or Mozart was like that. think, you know, great artists often are like that, that at a certain stage, if what they’re doing is so different from what everybody else has done before,they stop being influenced by anybody else. They just influence themselves. And so I think after Emma, Jane Austen had this extraordinary ⁓ method she perfected in that novel, this free indirect style of a third-person narration, which is filtered through the consciousness of a character who in Emma’s case is self-deludedly wrong about almost everything. And it’s...brilliantly tricksy and mischievous and elaborate use of that device which tricks even the reader quite often, certainly the first time reader. And then she got to persuasion and I think she is at least doing something new and different with that method which is there’s Anne Elliot. Anne Elliot’s a good person. Anne Elliot’s judgment is very good. She’s the most cultured and cultivated of Jane Austen’s heroines. She is, as Jane Austen herself said about Anne Elliot, almost too good for me. And so what she does is she gives her a whole new vein of self-deception, which is the self-deception in the way of a good person who always wants to think things are worse than they are and who always, who, because suspicious of their own desires and motives sort of tamps them down and suppresses them. And we live in this extraordinary mind of this character who’s often ignored, she’s always overhearing conversations. Almost every dialogue in the novel seems to be something Anne overhears rather than takes part in. And the consciousness of a character whodoesn’t want to acknowledge things in themselves which you and I might think were quite natural and reasonable and indeed in our psychotherapeutic age to be expressed from the rooftops. You still fancy this guy? Fine! Admit it to yourself. ⁓ No. So it’s not repression actually, exactly. It’s a sort of virtuous self-control somehow which I think lots of readers find rather masochistic about her. Henry Oliver (08:38)I find that book interesting because in Sense and Sensibility she’s sort of opposed self-command with self-expression, but she doesn’t do that in Persuasion. She says, no, no, I’m just going to be the courage of, no, self-command. know, Eleanor becomes the heroine.John Mullan (08:48)Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But with the odd with the odd burst of Mariannes, I was watching the I thought execrable Netflix ⁓ persuasion done about two or three years ago ⁓ with the luminous Dakota Johnson as as you know, as Anne Elliot. You could not believe her bloom had faded one little bit, I think.John Mullan (09:23)And ⁓ I don’t know if you saw it, but the modus operandi rather following the lead set by that film, The Favourite, which was set in Queen Anne’s reign, but adopted the Demotic English of the 21st century. similarly, this adaptation, much influenced by Fleabag, decided to deal with the challenge of Jane Austen’s dialogue by simply not using it, you know, and having her speak in a completely contemporary idiom. But there were just one or two lines, very, very few from the novel, that appeared. And when they appeared, they sort of cried through the screen at you. And one of them, slightly to qualify what you’ve just said, was a line I’d hardly noticed before. as it was one of the few Austin lines in the programme, in the film, I really noticed it. And it was much more Marianne than Eleanor. And that’s when, I don’t know if you remember, and Captain Wentworth, they’re in Bath. So now they are sort of used to talking to each other. And Louisa Musgrove’s done her recovering from injury and gone off and got engaged to Captain Benwick, Captain Benwick. So Wentworth’s a free man. And Anne is aware, becoming aware that he may be still interested in her. And there’s a card party, an evening party arranged by Sir Walter Elliot. And Captain Wentworth is given an invitation, even though they used to disapprove of him because he’s now a naval hero and a rich man. And Captain Wentworth and Anna making slightly awkward conversation. And Captain Wentworth says, you did not used to like cards.I mean, he realizes what he said, because what he said is, remember you eight years ago. I remember we didn’t have to do cards. We did snogging and music. That’s what we did. But anyway, he did not used to like cards. And he suddenly realizes what a giveaway that is. And he says something like, but then time brings many changes. And she says, she cries out, I am not so much changed.Henry Oliver (11:23)Mm. Mm, yes, yes. Yep.Yes.Cries out, yeah.John Mullan (11:50)It’s absolutely electric line and that’s not Eleanor is it? That’s not an Eleanor-ish line. ⁓ Eleanor would say indeed time evinces such dispositions in most extraordinary ways. She would say some Johnsonian thing wouldn’t she? so I don’t think it’s quite a return to the same territory or the same kind of psychology.Henry Oliver (12:05)That’s right. Yes, yes, yeah.No, that’s interesting, yeah. One of the things that happens in Persuasion is that you get this impressionistic writing. So a bit like Mrs. Elliot talking while she picks strawberries. When Lady Russell comes into Bath, you get that wonderful scene of the noises and the sounds. Is this a sort of step forward in a way? And you can think of Austen as not an evolutionary missing link as such, but she’s sort of halfway between Humphrey Clinker and Mr. Jangle.Is that something that she would have sort of developed?John Mullan (12:49)I think that’s quite possible. haven’t really thought about it before, but you’re right. think there are these, ⁓ there are especially, they’re impressionistic ⁓ passages which are tied up with Anne’s emotions. And there’s an absolutely, I think, short, simple, but extraordinarily original one when she meets him again after eight years. And it says something like, the room was full, full of people. Mary said something and you’re in the blur of it. He said all that was right, you know, and she can’t hear the words, she can’t hear the words and you can’t hear the words and you’re inside and she’s even, you’re even sort of looking at the floor because she’s looking at the floor and in Anne’s sort of consciousness, often slightly fevered despite itself, you do exactly get this sort of, ⁓ for want of a better word, blur of impressions, which is entirely unlike, isn’t it, Emma’s sort of ⁓ drama of inner thought, which is always assertive, argumentative, perhaps self-correcting sometimes, but nothing if not confidently articulate.John Mullan (14:17)And with Anne, it’s a blur of stuff. there is a sort of perhaps a kind of inklings of a stream of consciousness method there.Henry Oliver (14:27)I think so, yeah. Why is it that Flaubert and other writers get all the credit for what Jane Austen invented?John Mullan (14:35)Join my campaign, Henry. It is so vexing. It is vexing. sometimes thought, I sometimes have thought, but perhaps this is a little xenophobic of me, that the reason that Jane Austen is too little appreciated and read in France is because then they would have to admit that Flaubertdidn’t do it first, you know. ⁓Henry Oliver (14:40)It’s vexing, isn’t it?John Mullan (15:04)I mean, I suppose there’s an answer from literary history, which is simply for various reasons, ⁓ some of them to do with what became fashionable in literary fiction, as we would now call it. Jane Austen was not very widely read or known in the 19th century. So it wasn’t as if, as it were, Tolstoy was reading Jane Austen and saying, this is not up to much. He wasn’t. He was reading Elizabeth Gaskell.Jane Eyre ⁓ and tons of Dickens, tons, every single word Dickens published, of course. ⁓ So Jane Austen, know, to cite an example I’ve just referred to, I Charlotte Bronte knew nothing of Jane Austen until George Henry Lewis, George Eliot’s partner, who is carrying the torch for Jane Austen, said, you really should read some. And that’s why we have her famous letter saying, it’s, you know, it’s commonplace and foolish things she said. But so I think the first thing to establish is she was really not very widely read. So it wasn’t that people were reading it and not getting it. It was which, you know, I think there’s a little bit of that with Dickens. He was very widely read and people because of that almost didn’t see how innovative he was, how extraordinarily experimental. It was too weird. But they still loved it as comic or melodramatic fiction. But I think Jane Austen simply wasn’t very widely read until the late 19th century. So I don’t know if Flaubert read her. I would say almost certainly not. Dickens owned a set of Jane Austen, but that was amongst 350 selecting volumes of the select British novelists. Probably he never read Jane Austen. Tolstoy and you know never did, you know I bet Dostoevsky didn’t, any number of great writers didn’t.Henry Oliver (17:09)I find it hard to believe that Dickens didn’t read her.John Mullan (17:12)Well, I don’t actually, I’m afraid, because I mean the one occasion that I know of in his surviving correspondence when she’s mentioned is after the publication of Little Dorrit when ⁓ his great bosom friend Forster writes to him and says, Flora Finching, that must be Miss Bates. Yes. You must have been thinking of Miss Bates.John Mullan (17:41)And he didn’t write it in a sort of, you plagiarist type way, I he was saying you’ve varied, it’s a variation upon that character and Dickens we wrote back and we have his reply absolutely denying this. Unfortunately his denial doesn’t make it clear whether he knew who Miss Bates was but hadn’t it been influenced or whether he simply didn’t know but what he doesn’t… It’s the one opportunity where he could have said, well, of course I’ve read Emma, but that’s not my sort of thing. ⁓ of course I delight in Miss Bates, but I had no idea of thinking of her when I... He has every opportunity to say something about Jane Austen and he doesn’t say anything about her. He just says, no.Henry Oliver (18:29)But doesn’t he elsewhere deny having read Jane Eyre? And that’s just like, no one believes you, Charles.John Mullan (18:32)Yes.Well, he may deny it, but he also elsewhere admits to it. Yeah.Henry Oliver (18:39)Okay, but you know, just because he doesn’t come out with it.John Mullan (18:43)No, no, it’s true, but he wouldn’t have been singular and not reading Jane Austen. That’s what I’m saying. Yes. So it’s possible to ignore her innovativeness simply by not having read her. But I do think, I mean, briefly, that there is another thing as well, which is that really until the late 20th century almost, even though she’d become a wide, hugely famous, hugely widely read and staple of sort of A levels and undergraduate courses author, her real, ⁓ her sort of experiments with form were still very rarely acknowledged. And I mean, it was only really, I think in the sort of almost 1980s, really a lot in my working lifetime that people have started saying the kind of thing you were asking about now but hang on free and direct style no forget flow bear forget Henry James I mean they’re terrific but actually this woman who never met an accomplished author in her life who had no literary exchanges with fellow writersShe did it at a little table in a house in Hampshire. Just did it.Henry Oliver (20:14)Was she a Tory or an Enlightenment Liberal or something else?John Mullan (20:19)⁓ well I think the likeliest, if I had to pin my colours to a mast, I think she would be a combination of the two things you said. I think she would have been an enlightenment Tory, as it were. So I think there is some evidence that ⁓ perhaps because also I think she was probably quite reasonably devout Anglican. So there is some evidence that… She might have been conservative with a small C, but I think she was also an enlightenment person. I think she and her, especially her father and at least a couple of her brothers, you know, would have sat around reading 18th century texts and having enlightened discussions and clearly they were, you know, and they had, it’s perfect, you know, absolutely hard and fast evidence, for instance, that they would have been that they were sympathetic to the abolition of slavery, that they were ⁓ sceptics about the virtues of monarchical power and clear-eyed about its corruption, that they had no, Jane Austen, as I said at the beginning of this exchange, had no great respect or admiration for the aristocratic ruling class at all. ⁓ So there’s aspects of her politics which aren’t conservative with a big C anyway, but I think enlightened, think, I mean I, you know, I got into all this because I loved her novels, I’ve almost found out about her family inadvertently because you meet scary J-Night experts at Jane Austen Society of North America conferences and if you don’t know about it, they look at scants. But it is all interesting and I think her family were rather terrific actually, her immediate family. I think they were enlightened, bookish, optimistic, optimistic people who didn’t sit around moaning about the state of the country or their own, you know, not having been left enough money in exes will. And...I think that they were in the broadest sense enlightened people by the standard of their times and perhaps by any standards.Henry Oliver (22:42)Is Mansfield Park about slavery?John Mullan (22:45)Not at all, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. And I think, you know, the famous little passage, for it is only a passage in which Edmund and Fanny talk about the fact it’s not a direct dialogue. They are having a dialogue about the fact that they had, but Fanny had this conversation or attempt at conversation ⁓ a day or two before. And until relatively recently, nobody much commented on that passage. It doesn’t mean they didn’t read it or understand it, but now I have not had an interview, a conversation, a dialogue involving Mansfield Park in the last, in living memory, which hasn’t mentioned it, because it’s so apparently responsive to our priorities, our needs and our interests. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think it’s a it’s a parenthetic part of the novel. ⁓ And of course, there was this Edward Said article some decades ago, which became very widely known and widely read. And although I think Edward Said, you know, was a was a wonderful writer in many ways. ⁓I think he just completely misunderstands it ⁓ in a way that’s rather strange for a literary critic because he says it sort of represents, you know, author’s and a whole society’s silence about this issue, the source of wealth for these people in provincial England being the enslavement of people the other side of the Atlantic. But of course, Jane Auster didn’t have to put that bit in her novel, if she’d wanted really to remain silent, she wouldn’t have put it in, would she? And the conversation is one where Edmund says, know, ⁓ you know, my father would have liked you to continue when you were asking about, yeah, and she says, but there was such terrible silence. And she’s referring to the other Bertram siblings who indeed are, of course, heedless, selfish ⁓ young people who certainly will not want to know that their affluence is underwritten by, you know, the employment of slaves on a sugar plantation. But the implication, I think, of that passage is very clearly that Fanny would have, the reader of the time would have been expected to infer that Fanny shares the sympathies that Jane Austen, with her admiration, her love, she says, of Thomas Clarkson. The countries leading abolitionists would have had and that Edmund would also share them. And I think Edmund is saying something rather surprising, which I’ve always sort of wondered about, which is he’s saying, my father would have liked to talk about it more. And what does that mean? Does that mean, my father’s actually, he’s one of these enlightened ones who’s kind of, you know, freeing the slaves or does it mean, my father actually knows how to defend his corner? He would have beenYou know, he doesn’t he doesn’t feel threatened or worried about discussing it. It’s not at all clear where Sir Thomas is in this, but I think it’s pretty clear where Edmund and Fanny are.Henry Oliver (26:08)How seriously do you take the idea that we are supposed to disapprove of the family theatricals and that young ladies putting on plays at home is immoral?John Mullan (26:31)Well, I would, mean, perhaps I could quote what two students who were discussing exactly this issue said quite some time ago in a class where a seminar was running on Mansfield Park. And one of the students can’t remember their names, I’m afraid. I can’t remember their identities, so I’m safe to quote them. ⁓ They’re now probably running PR companies or commercial solicitors. And one of them I would say a less perceptive student said, why the big deal about the amateur dramatics? I mean, what’s Jane Austen’s problem? And there was a pause and another student in the room who I would suggest was a bit more of an alpha student said, really, I’m surprised you asked that. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel in which I’ve seen characters behaving so badly as this.And I think that’s the answer. The answer isn’t that the amateur dramatics themselves are sort of wrong, because of course Jane Austen and her family did them. They indulged in them. ⁓ It’s that it gives the opportunity, the license for appalling, mean truly appalling behaviour. I mean, Henry Crawford, you know, to cut to the chase on this, Henry Crawford is seducing a woman in front of her fiance and he enjoys it not just because he enjoys seducing women, that’s what he does, but because it’s in front of him and he gets an extra kick out of it. You know, he has himself after all already said earlier in the novel, oh, I much prefer an engaged woman, he has said to his sister and Mrs. Grant. Yes, of course he does. So he’s doing that. Mariah and Julia are fighting over him. Mr. Rushworth, he’s not behaving badly, he’s just behaving like a silly arse. Mary Crawford, my goodness, what is she up to? She’s up to using the amateur dramatics for her own kind of seductions whilst pretending to be sort of doing it almost unwillingly. I mean, it seems to me an elaborate, beautifully choreographed elaboration of the selfishness, sensuality and hypocrisy of almost everybody involved. And it’s not because it’s amateur dramatics, but amateur dramatics gives them the chance to behave so badly.Henry Oliver (29:26)Someone told me that Thomas Piketty says that Jane Austen depicts a society in which inequality of wealth is natural and morally justified. Is that true?John Mullan (29:29)Ha⁓Well, again, Thomas Piketty, I wish we had him here for a good old mud wrestle. ⁓ I would say that the problem with his analysis is the coupling of the two adjectives, natural and morally right. I think there is a strong argument that inequality is depicted as natural or at least inevitable, inescapable in Jane Austen’s novels.but not morally right, as it were. In fact, not at all morally right. There is a certain, I think you could be exaggerated little and call it almost fatalism about that such inequalities. Do you remember Mr. Knightley says to Emma, in Emma, when he’s admonishing her for her, you know, again, a different way, terribly bad behavior.Henry Oliver (30:38)At the picnic.John Mullan (30:39)At the picnic when she’s humiliatedMiss Bates really and Mr Knightley says something like if she’d been your equal you know then it wouldn’t have been so bad because she could have retaliated she could have come back but she’s not and she says and he says something like I won’t get the words exactly right but I can get quite close he says sinceher youth, she has sunk. And if she lives much longer, will sink further. And he doesn’t say, ⁓ well, we must have a collection to do something about it, or we must have a revolution to do something about it, or if only the government would bring in better pensions, you know, he doesn’t, he doesn’t sort of rail against it as we feel obliged to. ⁓ He just accepts it as an inevitable part of what happens because of the bad luck of her birth, of the career that her father followed, of the fact that he died too early probably, of the fact that she herself never married and so on. That’s the way it is. And Mr Knightley is, I think, a remarkably kind character, he’s one of the kindest people in Jane Austen and he’s always doing surreptitious kindnesses to people and you know he gives the Bates’s stuff, things to eat and so on. He arranges for his carriage to carry them places but he accepts that that is the order of things. ⁓ But I, you know Henry, I don’t know what you think, I think reading novels or literature perhaps more generally, but especially novels from the past, is when you’re responding to your question to Mr. Piketty’s quote, is quite a sort of, can be quite an interesting corrective to our own vanities, I think, because we, I mean, I’m not saying, you know, the poor are always with us, as it were, like Jesus, but... ⁓ You know, we are so ⁓ used to speaking and arguing as if any degree of poverty is in principle politically remediable, you know, and should be. And characters in Jane Austen don’t think that way. And I don’t think Jane Austen thought that way.Henry Oliver (33:16)Yes, yes. Yeah.The other thing I would say is that ⁓ the people who discuss Jane Austen publicly and write about her are usually middle class or on middle class incomes. And there’s a kind of collective blindness to the fact that what we call Miss Bates poverty simply means that she’s slipping out of the upper middle class and she will no longer have her maid.⁓ It doesn’t actually mean, she’ll still be living on a lot more than a factory worker, who at that time would have been living on a lot more than an agricultural worker, and who would have been living on a lot more than someone in what we would think of as destitution, or someone who was necessitous or whatever. So there’s a certain extent to which I actually think what Austin is very good at showing is the... ⁓ the dynamics of a newly commercial society. So at the same time that Miss Bates is sinking, ⁓ I forget his name, but the farmer, the nice farmer, Robert Martin, he’s rising. And they all, all classes meet at the drapier and class distinctions are slightly blurred by the presence of nice fabric.John Mullan (34:24)Mr. Robert Martin. Henry Oliver (34:37)And if your income comes from turnips, that’s fine. You can have the same material that Emma has. And Jane Austen knows that she lives in this world of buttons and bonnets and muslins and all these new ⁓ imports and innovations. And, you know, I think Persuasion is a very good novel. ⁓ to say to Piketty, well, there’s nothing natural about wealth inequality and persuasion. And it’s not Miss Bates who’s sinking, it’s the baronet. And all these admirals are coming up and he has that very funny line, doesn’t he? You’re at terrible risk in the Navy that you’d be cut by a man who your father would have cut his father. And so I think actually she’s not a Piketty person, but she’s very clear-eyed about... quote unquote, what capitalism is doing to wealth inequality. Yeah, yeah.John Mullan (35:26)Yes, she is indeed. Indeed.Clear-eyed, I think, is just the adjective. I mean, I suppose the nearest she gets to a description. Yeah, she writes about the classes that she knows from the inside, as it were. So one could complain, people have complained. She doesn’t represent what it’s like to be an agricultural worker, even though agricultural labour is going on all around the communities in which her novels are set.And I mean, I think that that’s a sort of rather banal objection, but there’s no denying it in a way. If you think a novelist has a duty, as it were, to cover the classes and to cover the occupations, then it’s not a duty that Jane Austen at all perceived. However, there is quite, there is something like, not a representation of destitution as you get in Dickens.but a representation of something inching towards poverty in Mansfield Park, which is the famous, as if Jane Austen was showing you she could do this sort of thing, which is the whole Portsmouth episode, which describes with a degree of domestic detail she never uses anywhere else in her fiction. When she’s with the more affluent people, the living conditions, the food, the sheer disgustingness and tawdryness of life in the lodgings in Portsmouth where the Price family live. And of course, in a way, it’s not natural because ⁓ in their particular circumstances, Lieutenant Price is an alcoholic.They’ve got far too many children. ⁓ He’s a useless, sweary-mouthed boozer ⁓ and also had the misfortune to be wounded. ⁓ And she, his wife, Fanny’s mother, is a slattern. We get told she’s a slattern. And it’s not quite clear if that’s a word in Fanny’s head or if that’s Jane Austen’s word. And Jane Austen...Fanny even goes so far as to think if Mrs. Norris were in charge here, and Mrs. Norris is as it were, she’s the biggest sadist in all Jane Austen’s fiction. She’s like sort Gestapo guard monquet. If Mrs. Norris were in charge, it wouldn’t be so bad here, but it’s terrible. And Jane Austen even, know, she describes the color of the milk, doesn’t she? The blue moats floating in the milk.She dis- and it’s all through Fanny’s perception. And Fanny’s lived in this rather loveless grand place. And now it’s a great sort of, ⁓ it’s a coup d’etat. She now makes Fanny yearn for the loveless grand place, you know, because of what you were saying really, Henry, because as I would say, she’s such an unsentimental writer, you know, andyou sort of think, you know, there’s going to be no temptation for her to say, to show Fanny back in the loving bosom of her family, realising what hollow hearted people those Bertrams are. You know, she even describes the mark, doesn’t she, that Mr Price’s head, his greasy hair is left on the wall. It’s terrific. And it’s not destitution, but it’s something like a life which must be led by a great sort of rank of British people at the time and Jane Austen can give you that, she can.Henry Oliver (39:26)Yeah, yeah. That’s another very Dickensian moment. I’m not going to push this little thesis of mine too far, but the grease on the chair. It’s like Mr. Jaggers in his horse hair. Yes. That’s right, that’s right. ⁓ Virginia Woolf said that Jane Austen is the most difficult novelist to catch in the act of greatness. Is that true?John Mullan (39:34)Yes, yes, yes, it is these details that Dickens would have noticed of course. Yes.Yes.⁓ I think it is so true. think that Virginia Woolf, she was such a true, well, I think she was a wonderful critic, actually, generally. Yeah, I think she was a wonderful critic. you know, when I’ve had a couple of glasses of Rioja, I’ve been known to say, to shocked students, ⁓ because you don’t drink Rioja with students very often nowadays, but it can happen. ⁓ But she was a greater critic than novelist, you know.Henry Oliver (39:54)Yeah.Best critic of the 20th century. Yes, yes. Yeah. And also greater than Emson and all these people who get the airtime. Yes, yes.John Mullan (40:20)You know.I know, I know, but that’s perhaps because she didn’t have a theory or an argument, you know, and the Seven Types, I know that’s to her credit, but you know, the Seven Types of Ambiguity thing is a very strong sort of argument, even if...Henry Oliver (40:31)Much to her credit.But look, if the last library was on fire and I could only save one of them, I’d let all the other critics in the 20th century burn and I’d take the common reader, wouldn’t you?John Mullan (40:47)Okay. Yes, I, well, I think I agree. think she’s a wonderful critic and both stringent and open. I mean, it’s an extraordinary way, you know, doesn’t let anybody get away with anything, but on the other hand is genuinely ready to, to find something new to, to anyway. ⁓ the thing she said about Austin, she said lots of good things about Austin and most of them are good because they’re true. And the thing about… Yes, so what I would, I think what she meant was something like this, that amongst the very greatest writers, so I don’t know, Shakespeare or Milton or, you know, something like that, you could take almost a line, yes? You can take a line and it’s already glowing with sort of radioactive brilliance, know, and ⁓ Jane Austen, the line itself, there are wonderful sentences.)Mr. Bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice that the experience of three and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. I mean, that’s as good as anything in Hamlet, isn’t it? So odd a mixture and there he is, the oddest mixture there’s ever been. And you think he must exist, he must exist. But anyway, most lines in Jane Austen probably aren’t like that and it’s as if in order to ⁓ explain how brilliant she is and this is something you can do when you teach Jane Austen, makes her terrific to teach I think, you can look at any bit and if everybody’s read the novel and remembers it you can look at any paragraph or almost any line of dialogue and see how wonderful it is because it will connect to so many other things. But out of context, if you see what I mean, it doesn’t always have that glow of significance. And sometimes, you know, the sort of almost most innocuous phrases and lines actually have extraordinary dramatic complexity. but you’ve got to know what’s gone on before, probably what goes on after, who’s in the room listening, and so on. And so you can’t just catch it, you have to explain it. ⁓ You can’t just, as it were, it, as you might quote, you know, a sort of a great line of Wordsworth or something.Henry Oliver (43:49)Even the quotable bits, you know, the bit that gets used to explain free and direct style in Pride and Prejudice where she says ⁓ living in sight of their own warehouses. Even a line like that is just so much better when you’ve been reading the book and you know who is being ventriloquized.John Mullan (43:59)Well, my favourite one is from Pride and Prejudice is after she’s read the letter Mr Darcy gives her explaining what Wickham is really like, really, for truth of their relationship and their history. And she interrogates herself. And then at the end, there’s ⁓ a passage which is in a passage of narration, but which is certainly in going through Elizabeth’s thoughts. And it ends, she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. And I just think it’s, if you’ve got to know Elizabeth, you just know that that payoff adjective, absurd, that’s the coup de grace. Because of course, finding other people absurd is her occupation. It’s what makes her so delightful. And it’s what makes us complicit with her.Henry Oliver (44:48)Yeah.That’s right.John Mullan (45:05)She sees how ridiculous Sir William Lucas and her sister Mary, all these people, and now she has absurded herself, as it were. So blind partial prejudice, these are all repetitions of the same thought. But only Elizabeth would end the list absurd. I think it’s just terrific. But you have to have read the book just to get that. That’s a whole sentence.You have to have read the book to get the sentence, don’t you?Henry Oliver (45:34)Yep, indeed. ⁓ Do we love Jane Austen too much so that her contemporaries are overshadowed and they’re actually these other great writers knocking around at the same time and we don’t give them their due? Or is she in fact, you know, the Shakespeare to their Christopher Marlowe or however you want to.John Mullan (45:55)I think she’s the Shakespeare to their Thomas Kidd or no even that’s the... Yes, okay, I’m afraid that you know there are two contradictory answers to that. Yes, it does lead us to be unfair to her contemporaries certainly because they’re so much less good than her. So because they’re so much less good than her in a way we’re not being unfair. know, I mean... because I have the profession I have, I have read a lot of novels by her immediate predecessors. I mean, people like Fanny Burnie, for instance, and her contemporaries, people like Mariah Edgeworth. And ⁓ if Jane Austen hadn’t existed, they would get more airtime, I think, yes? And some of them are both Burnie and Edgeworth, for instance. ⁓ highly intelligent women who had a much more sophisticated sort of intellectual and social life than Jane Austen ⁓ and conversed with men and women of ideas and put some of those ideas in their fiction and they both wrote quite sophisticated novels and they were both more popular than Jane Austen and they both, having them for the sort of carpers and complainers, they’ve got all sorts of things like Mariah Regworth has some working-class people and they have political stuff in their novels and they have feminist or anti-feminist stuff in their novels and they’re much more satisfying to the person who’s got an essay to write in a way because they’ve got the social issues of the day in there a bit, certainly Mariah Regworth a lot. ⁓ So if Jane Austen hadn’t come along we would show them I think more, give them more time. However, you know, I don’t want to say this in a destructive way, but in a certain way, all that they wrote isn’t worth one paragraph of Jane Austen, you know, in a way. So we’re not wrong. I suppose the interesting case is the case of a man actually, which is Walter Scott, who sort of does overlap with Jane Austen a bit, you know, and who has published what I can’t remember, two, three, even four novels by the time she dies, and I think three, and she’s aware of him as a poet and I think beginning to be aware of him as a novelist. And he’s the prime example of somebody who was in his own day, but for a long time afterwards, regarded as a great novelist of his day. And he’s just gone. He’s really, you know, you can get his books in know, Penguin and Oxford classics in the shops. I mean, it’s at least in good big book shops. And it’s not that he’s not available, but it’s a very rare person who’s read more than one or even read one. I don’t know if you read lots of Scott, Henry.Henry Oliver (49:07)Well, I’ve read some Scott and I quite like it, but I was a reactionary in my youth and I have a little flame for the Jacobite cause deep in my heart. This cannot be said of almost anyone who is alive today. 1745 means nothing to most people. The problem is that he was writing about something that has just been sort of forgotten. And so the novels, know, when Waverly takes the knee in front of the old young old pretender, whichever it is, who cares anymore? you know?John Mullan (49:40)Well, yes, but it can’t just be that because he also wrote novels about Elizabeth I and Robin Hood and, you know... ⁓Henry Oliver (49:46)I do think Ivanhoe could be more popular, yeah.John Mullan (49:49)Yeah, so it’s not just that this and when he wrote, for instance, when he published Old Mortality, which I think is one of his finest novels, I mean, I’ve read probably 10 Scott novels at nine or 10, you know, so that’s only half or something of his of his output. And I haven’t read one for a long time, actually. Sorry, probably seven or eight years. He wrote about some things, which even when he wrote about and published about, readers of the time couldn’t have much known or cared about. mean, old mortalities about the Covenant as wars in the borderlands of Scotland in the 17th century. I mean, all those people in London who were buying it, they couldn’t give a damn about that. Really, really, they couldn’t. I mean, they might have recognized the postures of religious fanaticism that he describes rather well.But even then only rather distantly, I think. So I think it’s not quite that. I think it’s not so much ignorance now of the particular bits of history he was drawn to. I think it’s that in the 19th century, historical fiction had a huge status. And it was widely believed that history was the most dignified topic for fiction and so dignified, it’s what made fiction serious. So all 19th century authors had a go at it. Dickens had a go at it a couple of times, didn’t he? I think it’s no, yes, yes, think even Barnaby Rudge is actually, it’s not just a tale of two cities. Yes, a terrific book. But generally speaking, ⁓ most Victorian novelists who did it, ⁓ they are amongst, you know, nobodyHenry Oliver (51:22)Very successfully. ⁓ a great book, great book.John Mullan (51:43)I think reads Trollope’s La Vendée, you know, people who love Hardy as I do, do not rush to the trumpet major. it was a genre everybody thought was the big thing, know, war and peace after all. And then it’s prestige faded. I mean, it’s...returned a little bit in some ways in a sort of Hillary man, Tellish sort of way, but it had a hugely inflated status, I think, in the 19th century and that helped Scott. And Scott did, know, Scott is good at history, he’s good at battles, he’s terrific at landscapes, you know, the big bow wow strain as he himself described it.Henry Oliver (52:32)Are you up for a sort of quick fire round about other things than Jane Austen?John Mullan (52:43)Yes, sure, try me.Henry Oliver (52:44)Have you used any LLMs and are they good at talking about literature?John Mullan (52:49)I don’t even know what an LLM is. What is it? Henry Oliver (52:51)Chat GPT. ⁓ John Mullan (53:17)⁓ God, goodness gracious, it’s the work of Satan.Absolutely, I’ve never used one in my life. And indeed, have colleagues who’ve used them just to sort of see what it’s like so that might help us recognise it if students are using them. And I can’t even bring myself to do that, I’m afraid. But we do as a...As a department in my university, we have made some use of them purely in order to give us an idea of what they’re like, so to help us sort of...Henry Oliver (53:28)You personally don’t feel professionally obliged to see what it can tell you. Okay, no, that’s fine. John Mullan (53:32)No, sorry.Henry Oliver (53:33)What was it like being a Booker Prize judge?heady. It was actually rather heady. Everybody talks about how it’s such a slog, all those books, which is true. But when you’re the Booker Prize judge, at least when I did it, you were treated as if you were somebody who was rather important. And then as you know, and that lasts for about six months. And you’re sort of sent around in taxes and give nice meals and that sort of thing. And sort of have to give press conferences when you choose the shortlist. and I’m afraid my vanity was tickled by all that. And then at the moment after you’ve made the decision, you disappear. And the person who wins becomes important. It’s a natural thing, it’s good. And you realize you’re not important at all.Henry Oliver (54:24)You’ve been teaching in universities, I think, since the 1990s.John Mullan (54:29)Yes, no earlier I fear, even earlier.Henry Oliver (54:32)What are the big changes? Is the sort of media narrative correct or is it more complicated than that?John Mullan (54:38)Well, it is more complicated, but sometimes things are true even though the Daily Telegraph says they’re true, to quote George Orwell. ⁓ you know, I mean, I think in Britain, are you asking about Britain or are you asking more generally? Because I have a much more depressing view of what’s happened in America in humanities departments.Henry Oliver (54:45)Well, tell us about Britain, because I think one problem is that the American story becomes the British story in a way. So what’s the British story?John Mullan (55:07)Yes, yes, think that’s true.Well, I think the British story is that we were in danger of falling in with the American story. The main thing that has happened, that has had a clear effect, was the introduction in a serious way, however long ago it was, 13 years or something, of tuition fees. And that’s really, in my department, in my subject, that’s had a major change.and it wasn’t clear at first, but it’s become very clear now. So ⁓ it means that the, as it were, the stance of the teachers to the taught and the taught to the teachers, both of those have changed considerably. Not just in bad ways, that’s the thing. It is complicated. So for instance, I mean, you could concentrate on the good side of things, which is, think, I don’t know, were you a student of English literature once?Henry Oliver (55:49)Mm-hmm.I was, I was. 2005, long time ago.John Mullan (56:07)Yes. OK.Well, I think that’s not that long ago. mean, probably the change is less extreme since your day than it is since my day. But compared to when I was a student, which was the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, I was an undergraduate. The degree of sort of professionalism and sobriety, responsibility and diligence amongst English literature academics has improved so much.You know, you generally speaking, literature academics, they are not a load of ⁓ drunken wastrels or sort of predatory seducers or lazy, work shy, ⁓ even if they love their own research, negligent teachers or a lot of the sort of the things which even at the time I recognise as the sort of bad behaviour aspects of some academics. Most of that’s just gone. It’s just gone. You cannot be like that because you’ve got everybody’s your institution is totally geared up to sort of consumer feedback and and the students, especially if you’re not in Oxford or Cambridge, the students are essentially paying your salaries in a very direct way. So there have been improvements actually. ⁓ those improvements were sort of by the advocates of tuition fees, I think, and they weren’t completely wrong. However, there have also been some real downsides as well. ⁓ One is simply that the students complain all the time, you know, and in our day we had lots to complain about and we never complained. Now they have much less to complain about and they complain all the time. ⁓ So, and that seems to me to have sort of weakened the relationship of trust that there should be between academics and students. But also I would say more if not optimistically, at least stoically. I’ve been in this game for a long time and the waves of student fashion and indignation break on the shore and then another one comes along a few years later. And as a sort of manager in my department, because I’m head of my department, I’ve learned to sort of play the long game.And what everybody’s hysterical about one moment, one year, they will have forgotten about two or three years later. So there has been a certain, you know, there was a, you know, what, what, you know, some conservative journalists would call kind of wokery. There has been some of that. But in a way, there’s always been waves of that. And the job of academics is sort of to stand up to it. and in a of calm way. Tuition fees have made it more difficult to do that I think.Henry Oliver (59:40)Yeah. Did you know A.S. Byatt? What was she like?John Mullan (59:43)I did.⁓ Well...When you got to know her, you recognized that the rather sort of haughty almost and sometimes condescending apparently, ⁓ intellectual auteur was of course a bit of a front. Well, it wasn’t a front, but actually she was quite a vulnerable person, quite a sensitive and easily upset person.I mean that as a sort of compliment, not easily upset in the sense that sort of her vanity, but actually she was quite a humanly sensitive person and quite woundable. And when I sort of got to know that aspect of her, know, unsurprisingly, I found myself liking her very much more and actually not worrying so much about the apparent sort of put downs of some other writers and things and also, you know, one could never have said this while she was alive even though she often talked about it. I think she was absolutely permanently scarred by the death of her son and I think that was a, you know, who was run over when he was what 11 years old or something. He may have been 10, he may have been 12, I’ve forgotten, but that sort of age. I just think she was I just think she was permanently lacerated by that. And whenever I met her, she always mentioned it somehow, if we were together for any length of time.Henry Oliver (1:01:27)What’s your favourite Iris Murdoch novel?John Mullan (1:01:33)I was hoping you were going to say which is the most absurd Aris Murdoch novel. ⁓ No, you’re an Aris Murdoch fan, are you? Henry Oliver (1:01:38)Very much so. You don’t like her work?John Mullan (1:01:59)Okay. ⁓ no, it’s, as you would say, Henry, more complicated than that. I sort of like it and find it absurd. It’s true. I’ve only read, re-read in both cases, two in the last 10 years. And that’sThat’s not to my credit. And both times I thought, this is so silly. I reread the C to C and I reread a severed head. And I just found them both so silly. ⁓ I was almost, you know, I almost lost my patience with them. But I should try another. What did I used to like? Did I rather like an accidental man? I fear I did.Did I rather like the bell, which is surely ridiculous. I fear I did. Which one should I like the most?Henry Oliver (1:02:38)I like The Sea, the Sea very much. ⁓ I think The Good Apprentice is a great book. There are these, so after The Sea, the Sea, she moves into her quote unquote late phase and people don’t like it, but I do like it. So The Good Apprentice and The Philosopher’s Pupil I think are good books, very good books.John Mullan (1:02:40)I’ve not read that one, I’m afraid. Yes, I stopped at the sea to sea. I, you know, once upon a time, I’m a bit wary of it and my experience of rereading A Severed Head rather confirmed me in my wariness because rereading, if I were to reread Myris Murdoch, I’m essentially returning to my 18 year old self because I read lots of Myris Murdoch when I was 17, 18, 19 and I thought she was deep as anything. and to me she was the deep living British novelist. And I think I wasn’t alone ⁓ and I feel a little bit chastened by your advocacy of her because I’ve also gone along with the ⁓ general readership who’ve slightly decided to ditch Irish Murdoch. her stock market price has sunk hugely ⁓ since her death. But perhaps that’s unfair to her, I don’t know. I’ve gone a bit, I’ll try again, because I recently have reread two or three early Margaret Drabble novels and found them excellent, really excellent. And thought, ⁓ actually, I wasn’t wrong to like these when I was a teenager. ⁓Henry Oliver (1:04:11)The Millstone is a great book.John Mullan (1:04:22)⁓ yes and actually yes I reread that, I reread the Garrick year, the Millstone’s terrific I agree, the the Garrick year is also excellent and Jerusalem the Golden, I reread all three of them and and and thought they were very good. So so you’re recommending the Philosopher’s Apprentice. I’m yeah I’m conflating yes okay.Henry Oliver (1:04:31)first rate. The Good Apprentice and the Philosopher’s Pupil. Yeah, yeah. I do agree with you about A Severed Head. I think that book’s crazy. What do you like about Patricia Beer’s poetry?John Mullan (1:04:56)⁓ I’m not sure I am a great fan of Patricia Beer’s poetry really. I got the job of right, what? Yes, yes, because I was asked to and I said, I’ve read some of her poetry, but you know, why me? And the editor said, because we can’t find anybody else to do it. So that’s why I did it. And it’s true that I came.Henry Oliver (1:05:02)Well, you wrote her... You wrote her dictionary of national... Yes.John Mullan (1:05:23)I came to quite like it and admire some of it because in order to write the article I read everything she’d ever published. But that was a while ago now, Henry, and I’m not sure it puts me in a position to recommend her.Henry Oliver (1:05:35)Fair enough.Why is the Dunciad the greatest unread poem in English?John Mullan (1:05:41)Is it the greatest unread one? Yes, probably, yes, yes, I think it is. Okay, it’s great because, first of all, great, then unread. It’s great because, well, Alexander Poet is one of the handful of poetic geniuses ever, in my opinion, in the writing in English. Absolutely genius, top shelf. ⁓Henry Oliver (1:05:46)Well, you said that once, yes.Mm-hmm. Yes, yes, yes. Top shelf, yeah.John Mullan (1:06:09)And even his most accessible poetry, however, is relatively inaccessible to today’s readers, sort of needs to be taught, or at least you have to introduce people to. Even the Rape of the Lock, which is a pure delight and the nearest thing to an ABBA song he ever wrote, is pretty scary with its just densely packed elusiveness and...Henry Oliver (1:06:27)YouJohn Mullan (1:06:38)You know, and as an A level examiner once said to me, we don’t set Pope for A level because it’s full of irony and irony is unfair to candidates. ⁓ Which is true enough. ⁓ So Pope’s already difficult. ⁓ Poetry of another age, poetry which all depends on ideas of word choice and as I said, literary allusion and The Dunciad is his most compacted, elusive, dense, complicated and bookish poems of a writer who’s already dense and compact and bookish and elusive. And the Dunceyad delights in parodying, as I’m sure you know, all the sort of habits of scholarly emendation and encrustation, which turn what should be easy to approach works of literature into sort of, you know, heaps of pedantic commentary. And he parodies all that with delight. But I mean, that’s quite a hard ask, isn’t it? And ⁓ yeah, and I just and I think everything about the poem means that it’s something you can only ever imagine coming to it through an English literature course, actually. I think it is possible to do that. I came to it through being taught it very well and, you know, through because I was committed for three years to study English literature, but it’s almost inconceivable that somebody could just sort of pick it up in a bookshop and think, ⁓ this is rather good fun. I’ll buy this.Henry Oliver (1:08:26)Can we end with one quick question about Jane Austen since it’s her birthday? A lot of people come to her books later. A lot of people love it when they’re young, but a lot of people start to love it in their 20s or 30s. And yet these novels are about being young. What’s going on there?John Mullan (1:08:29)Sure, sure.Yes.I fear, no not I fear, I think that what you describe is true of many things, not just Jane Austen. You know, that there’s a wonderful passage in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace where the reprehensible protagonist is teaching Wordsworth’s Prelude.to a group of 19 and 20 year olds. And he adores it. He’s in his mid fifties. And he, whilst he’s talking, is thinking different things. And what he’s thinking is something that I often think actually about certain works I teach, particularly Jane Austen, which is this book is all about being young, but the young find it tedious. Only the aging.You know, youth is wasted on the young, as it were. Only the aging really get its brilliance about the experience of being young. And I think that’s a sort of pattern in quite a lot of literature. So, you know, take Northanger Abbey. That seems to me to be a sort of disly teenage book in a way.It’s everything and everybody’s in a hurry. Everybody’s in a whirl. Catherine’s in a whirl all the time. She’s 17 years old. And it seems to me a delightfully teenage-like book. And if you’ve read lots of earlier novels, mostly by women, about girls in their, you know, nice girls in their teens trying to find a husband, you know, you realize that sort ofextraordinary magical gift of sort Jane Austen’s speed and sprightliness. You know, somebody said to me recently, ⁓ when Elizabeth Bennet sort of walks, but she doesn’t walk, she sort of half runs across the fields. You know, not only is it socially speaking, no heroine before her would have done it, but the sort of the sprightliness with which it’s described putsthe sort of ploddingness of all fiction before her to shame. And there’s something like that in Northanger Abbey. It’s about youthfulness and it takes on some of the qualities of the youthfulness of its heroine. know, her wonderful oscillations between folly and real insight. You know, how much she says this thing. I think to marry for money is wicked. Whoa. And you think,Well, Jane Austen doesn’t exactly think that. She doesn’t think Charlotte Lucas is wicked, surely. But when Catherine says that, there’s something wonderful about it. There is something wonderful. You know, only a 17 year old could say it, but she does. And but I appreciate that now in my 60s. I don’t think I appreciated it when I was in my teens.Henry Oliver (1:11:55)That’s a lovely place to end. John Mullen, thank you very much.John Mullan (1:11:58)Thanks, it’s been a delight, a delight. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Rebecca Lowe, an analytic moral and political philosopher at the Mercatus Center, shares her insights on Solvej Balle’s philosophical novel, On the Calculation of Volume. They dive into the fascinating concept of the container theory of time, exploring how characters experience time differently—some age while others are caught in loops. Rebecca discusses the influence of philosophical training on literature interpretation, thought experiments embedded in narratives, and the moral implications of temporal asymmetry in relationships. It's a thought-provoking conversation connecting philosophy and fiction.

The host shares insights from reading Peter Pan to his children, exploring themes of time, childhood, and the joy of reading aloud. He discusses the appeal of Peter Pan for both kids and adults, highlighting its deeper reflections on memory. The conversation delves into Barrie's metafictional style and the significance of Peter's resistance to adulthood. The host contrasts modern views on childhood and motherhood with Barrie's moral lessons, noting how reading the tale allows parents to embrace their own journeys alongside their children's growth.

Shannon Chamberlain, a former tutor at St. John's College and 18th-century literature specialist, dives into the intricate world of novels. She explores the moral complexities in early fiction from Defoe to Swift, and discusses the evolution of the epistolary form. Shannon links Adam Smith’s ideas to Jane Austen’s themes of self-command and moral perception. A fascinating conversation unfolds on the role of fan fiction, and she shares insights on writing effective mystery novels, all while touching on her own personal projects and literary curiosities.

I was delighted to talk to Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art. We discussed Shakespeare’s most under appreciated plays, the best films, how to teach Shakespeare, humanism, personae, Frank Kermode, the future of the humanities, being supervised by John Carey, A.C. Bradley, what we have learned about Francis Bacon, and more. There’s a transcript below and you can also watch the whole conversation on YouTube if you wish. We also covered Rhodri’s love of Pevsner architectural guides.Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:21 Shakespeare's best and worst plays00:03:14 Performing Shakespeare00:07:33 Pragmatism00:09:13 Early experiences with Shakespeare00:13:52 Teaching Shakespeare00:17:08 Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet00:19:38 Which five critical works?00:23:37 Francis Bacon00:31:31 What have we learned about Shakespeare?00:34:32 Too much Shakespeare?00:41:57 Tragedy00:49:04 Humanism00:54:00 Kermode01:03:59 Quickfire questions This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

My thanks to Catherine Lacey for a great discussion! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence’s best books aren’t his novels, Frances’s conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Victoria Moul has been reading and memorising poetry since she was nine. She recites it at the dentist (‘Aubade’, rather alarmingly) and she recited poems all through her labours when she gave birth. We talked about all sorts of poetry, from ancient to living poets. What I really admire about Victoria is how at ease she is with poems across many centuries and how she can read as a scholar and with great personal emotion. Her Substack Horace & friends is one of my favourites. For the last quarter of this interview, Victoria recited poems which we discussed very briefly, mostly from memory. She must know hundreds by heart.We talked about* Horace* Shakespeare* Ovid* Claudian* Prudentius* Homer* Pindar* Sophocles* George Herbert* John Milton* Ben Jonson* Thomas Hardy* W. H. Auden* Keith Douglas* A. E. Housman* Basil Bunting* Ezra Pound* François de Malherbe* Philip Gross* Chris Childers (anthologist)* Michael Schmidt (anthologist)* Donald Davie* Gillian Allnutt* Marcel Proust* Diana Wynne Jones This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Lamorna Ash, author of 'Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever', is a burgeoning literary voice known for her insightful columns. In this discussion, she explores intriguing connections between literature and sports, the evolving nature of faith in the age of AI, and the necessity of engaging with religious texts in education. Ash raises captivating questions about therapy, critiques modern atheism, and shares surprising insights from the Bible. Her reflections offer a fresh perspective on belief, creativity, and the digital age's impact on spirituality.

Helen Castor, a renowned historian and author specializing in medieval English history, dives deep into the complexities of the 14th century. She discusses the challenges of maintaining long-distance relationships and governance without modern tools. Castor also explores the Paston Letters, the intricacies of Shakespeare's historical narratives, and the impact of classic literature on contemporary storytelling. Reflecting on figures like Edward III and Bolingbroke, she shines a light on the nuances of power and authority during a politically tumultuous time.