The Common Reader

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.HENRY OLIVER: Today I’m talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people’s ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.He’s nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he’s hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people’s manuscripts?OLIVER: Other people’s. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He’s particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke’s many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It’s so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He’d become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people’s manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I’ll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He’d grown up in Wiltshire, he’d known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who’ve used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn’t finish them. He doesn’t publish those manuscripts. So it’s very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.OLIVER: You mean if he’d published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?SCURR: Well, I think there’s two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he’s a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people’s talents.There aren’t that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people’s talents. Most people want to be at the center. They’re happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people’s lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it’s sort of waste paper really. So he doesn’t write his own life. Other people’s lives he’s going to convey to posterity. He doesn’t see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.OLIVER: He’s born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he’s obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it’s dangerous to be there. And he’s really, really upset by that because, it’s like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you’ve never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.And suddenly there’s a war on and you’ve got to go home. So there’s that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey’s childhood, and then he would’ve been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that’s a very important time in his life.And it’s not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it’s different from the others. There’s a different sort of origin. And it’s after he’s done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people’s lives. And now I’ve got my hand in, I might start on those as well.So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we’ll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there’s this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It’s a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.OLIVER: How English is he?SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?OLIVER: Welsh.SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he’s very invested in English customs and stories and people. He’s not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he’s interested in is the inherited ways of living.And he’s very interested in language and different dialects. That’s one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I’d say it’s a very decentered England that’s rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.And there’s a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey’s not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It’s one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn’t want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it’s so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he’s in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he’s an Elizabethan, but at the same time he’s doing a very sort of Baconian project. He’s influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there’s a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he’s stopped and told, “No, you can’t get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can’t I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that’s going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.So there’s another example of someone’s life includes, I wouldn’t be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.OLIVER: And Aubrey’s happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?SCURR: And not just astrology. He’s very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn’t look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he’s got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won’t be that much work. You’ll just get a curate who’ll do it all, and you’ll get the living, and then you won’t have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven’t got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there’s another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn’t want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?SCURR: Well. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he’d seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.I don’t have any reason to think he’s an atheist. He’s got a beautiful way of writing about death and there’s this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they’re short, but everybody’s life is brief.And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there’s these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone’s buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I’d put at the end of that DNB entry where she’s actually buried, that would’ve made sense to do that. And I didn’t do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they’ve got their formula and you need to stick to it.But maybe I’ll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he’s told by people who did know them.There’s an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it’s an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He’s extremely precise. He’ll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he’ll tell you what people’s close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he’s been told that he’s passing on.And then he doesn’t pass moral judgment. He doesn’t adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he’s not going to tell them what to find. He’s not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.He will give you the raw materials, he’ll give you the stories, he’ll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who’ve written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who’ve written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn’t write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn’t to say Mr.Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer’s Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it’s still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I’d written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I’d gone mad actually, because you’re not supposed to do that, are you?I mean, you’re supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would’ve been okay, that would’ve made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.That’s the other thing that you don’t associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.OLIVER: A lot of historians don’t think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won’t remember it exactly—but it’s about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I’m a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.And it’s difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don’t really mean people’s lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I’m actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it’s perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.OLIVER: Why?SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn’t want to make up things for him. As someone who’s come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it’s very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.And, like her, I think that it’s not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It’s about imagining what isn’t in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn’t actually matter that much.There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that’s wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I’d found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they’d say, “Ruth, there you are. You’ve written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don’t you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn’t trespass on somebody else’s ground.And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you’ve been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there’s somebody in Cambridge who’s going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it’s fine. I was doing my thing. She’s doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They’re not rivalrous in that sense.SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate’s book, it’s not just an addition. It’s as much as you can ever do. It’s a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it’s an astonishing thing. Because it’s not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we’ll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?SCURR: As we know, there’s the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it’s very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.And that’s what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon’s death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn’t been aired for a long time, and dies. And that’s the end of Lord Bacon.So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he’s lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s.Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey’s story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king’s physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It’s a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what’s going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let’s build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn’t comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they’ve also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I’m getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I’m extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that’s the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It’s interesting.In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it’s called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It’s going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven’t yet read Vigil. I’m only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That’s it, basically.OLIVER: That shows very good taste.SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen’s The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln’s son. It’s so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn’t want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn’t have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?And then he said he’d got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there’s a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It’s been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.SCURR: But those people aren’t just historical fiction writers. It’s very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn’t matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it’s those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner’s novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that’s a fantastic book. So there’s a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don’t think that’s what I’m following. I think I’m following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.OLIVER: Because they’re all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it’s not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.SCURR: No, no.OLIVER: It’s been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I’m just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I’ve had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don’t regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don’t regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn’t been reviewing them.And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn’t. But here’s an example: Because I’d been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who’s been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn’t make it one of our two, but we think it’s absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it’s so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.And I knew Anne Enright’s writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It’s not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I’d done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?SCURR: Well, we’ve already talked about Janet Malcolm. She’s a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser’s historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it’s like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I’m extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she’s got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?OLIVER: Yes.SCURR: It’s so beautifully constructed. It’s got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it’s got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn’t—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn’t rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral’s head. Right? It’s so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she’s capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you’re actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.OLIVER: I like her because she’s so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he’s boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they’ve been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That’s so important, so wonderful.Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that’s a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won’t let him go. He thought he’d hooked a minnow. He wasn’t expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.And that’s the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else’s life at the center of your book, that’s a humane act. It’s to say, no, I’m going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person’s life. And that’s a very wonderful thing to do.OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it’s just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she’s deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it’s just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You’ve obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.SCURR: I’d never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn’t it?OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—OLIVER: Page 28.SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey’s really got this wrong, or he’s gotten in a muddle about that. She’s not saying, and therefore let’s just chuck it out because it’s inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that’s fine actually.Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he’s got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that’s probably why I couldn’t write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It’s just what they’re doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.OLIVER: Is the genre dying?SCURR: Not so far as I’m aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren’t we? Those things are always dying.OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven’t been listening to that. Why do they say it’s dying?OLIVER: Because you can’t sell these 700-page lives of people.SCURR: We can’t sell most books. I mean, if we’re going to go buy sales . . .OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren’t there. And the whole civilization’s dying routine.SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it’s so changeable, it’s so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?SCURR: I’m like Aubrey; I think that’s going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn’t possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn’t possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn’t think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?SCURR: I’ll ask her. I think she’s supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I’m trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I’m going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.SCURR: Thank you, 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

Naomi Kanakia, novelist, critic, and Substack writer behind Woman of Letters, discusses the online revival of classic-literature conversation. She talks about learning Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, the history and future of the Great Books movement, how rationalist communities engage with classics, debates over defining ‘‘great,‘‘ and reading habits and recommendations.

Hermione Lee, Emeritus Professor of English Literature and leading biographer of Woolf, Fitzgerald and Stoppard, discusses Tom Stoppard’s influences and creative process. She explores his use of ideas, rehearsal vs desk-writing, poetic pastiche, his politics and moral thread, and what makes work feel truly Stoppardian. Short, lively reflections on revivals, film work, and Lee’s own biographical practice.

Julianne Werlin, Duke early modernist who studies literature sociologically and writes Life and Letters. Jeffrey Lawrence, Rutgers scholar of 20th–21st century literature and public criticism who writes Avenues of America. They debate literature and markets, politics in literary talk, Substack’s role for academic voice, academic Marxism, curriculum breadth, and why public platforms matter for the future of the humanities.

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