 Hi, I'm Will Christie from the Australian National University, the Humanities Research Centre, and I'm talking to Professor Devani Loser from Arizona State University because I've invited Devani to come and give us a lecture at the National Library of Australia tomorrow evening, the 18th of July, to celebrate, if that's the word, the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen. Devani, we're both avid Jane Austen readers and we're both Jane Austen scholars. And I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask us to share with people exactly why it is Jane Austen is still being read, what kind of enjoyment, what she's got to offer, the modern reader in a way, your own history of, as a Jane Austen reader for a start perhaps. Sounds good. Thanks, Will, so much for having me here to Annu and to Canberra. You know, I think I came to Jane Austen like a lot of women of my generation because our mothers introduced us to our books. And in my case, it was my mother putting pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility and one that volume before me and suggesting that I read it. And it was a few times, I think it was about 13, a few times before it took for me the language I found just a little bit challenging. But once I did get into it, my mother was quite insistent about this book. I fell in love with it. And it was only years later I learned that my mother herself had never read the book. She just knew that it was something that an educated person, yes, she knew that it was something an educated person should read. And I think that also speaks to Jane Austen's reputation and power that even someone who hasn't read her knows that her daughter should. That's very interesting. I suppose, like me, I'm sure you've given a copy of Pride and Bridges to all your various nieces and nephews and relations and things like that. That is interesting, that kind of the idea that it's important for your cultural literacy that you found it difficult to read. I did. Which must seem strange to you now. Yes, but I think it helps me in the classroom to get back to that sense of what it was to first encounter her. Because I didn't understand at first that Jane Austen was funny. I didn't understand at first that there was irony or social criticism or how many levels on which her novels could be read. I knew that they were about love. I could enjoy them on that level, but the more that I read them, the more that I studied them, I saw how multi-layered they are. And I think that's what's amazing about Austen and bringing that to my students, getting them beyond the level of the language challenging them to be able to read and reread these sentences that really repay and reward rereading. That's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do with one's work life. Exactly. And that is the challenge, isn't it? As a teacher, you're right. To get beyond, you remember that question that we had to face earlier today when someone said, you know, explain to me or prove to me it's more than Mills and Boone type of thing. Which we just take for granted in a way. But there are a lot of people that want to know that. Sure. And I think the beauty of Jane Austen is that she can be read as Mills and Boone and romance. I mean, I think you're missing a lot if you do that. But she can be read on the surface as a courtship, as you know, a great story of romance. Yes. And it's great if that's what brings you to her. But I hope what keeps people there, I think what keeps people there, is that she's so much more than that. I think you're absolutely right. And I'd go further, I think, and suggest that you can go beyond the romance which you should never leave the romance out of, if you see what I mean. It's still an important part of the novel itself. It's not just a way of seducing people into her social satire. Indeed. It is actually, it's the two of them, not one without the other in a way. Would that be your sense of the way in which she's working? I think so. And I think one of the reasons that it continues to resonate is that Austen produced these couplings that are much more equal, I think, to our eyes than many of the things being written in her time, and I think even in ours. And these strong heroines are as exciting and interesting as the hot heroes that she's produced. Quite right. And yet, of course, they remain heroines. In that sense, they remain in a kind of romantic tension in a romantic entanglement, which is an important part. The novels as well. No, you can't do away with the courtship with Jane Austen, but I think if you stop there, you're making a grave error. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And which explains the question about Mills and Byrne. Do you have many young male students opting to do courses with you on Jane Austen? That's a very interesting question. I would say it's between 10 and 20% of the students in the courses. And one of the things that I talk about in the book, and the making of Jane Austen, is Aldous Huxley, the man who wrote Brave New World, and who co-wrote the Pride and Prejudice screenplay. His father was also a Jane Austen critic. And his father mentions in the 1930s that male readers he believes need to mature before they appreciate Jane Austen. And of course, this is now a century ago. But I think there's something to what Huxley is saying. I find that a lot of our traditional age university students, the females are there and ready to read and meet Jane Austen, where the males seem a little more hesitant about whether she's for them and whether she's theirs. And I think the answer is, yes, she absolutely is for male readers. But that it may take a few more years if Aldous Huxley's father, Leonard Huxley, is right for the typical male university student to understand why Jane Austen is his book to, his author to. What can I say in a way, but I'll confess to you, some of them, I've had some quite tense moments with young male undergraduates in the classroom situation protesting the utter irrelevance of Austen. Finding a way of actually coaxing them into rethinking about it has not at times been easy at all without, in a sense, using the authority that you've got as a teacher and insisting. And again, looking at her history, one of the things that I've been able to make sense of in the book is the way that for many years she was seen as the product, the proud property of the male literati. So in fact, there were plenty of generations of males who felt that Jane Austen was theirs and that she was the great author that they could love together in their elite private men's clubs, as I call them and talk about them there. But at the same time, she was beloved by women readers, many of them quite political and activist and I think that's a fascinating history too. I wonder, Devani, would you mind if I asked you to talk a bit more about the making of Jane Austen, the book that you've just published and the reason that we've asked you to give us a lecture? Sure, and what I feel most proud of in this book is finding new things about how Jane Austen became an icon through a lot of popular modes, things that we haven't looked at quite as closely, the history of book illustration, the history of dramatization and the things that led up to early film as well as how she's been used in political forums and in schools, classrooms, textbooks. Those too were parts of how she became an icon. We tend to look at the famous authors or the well-heeled critics who told us that she was good and to assume that they were the ones who helped us recognize her value and turned her into a literary celebrity but in fact there were all of these other people and popular forums that were a central part of that. So that's what I'm most proud of having brought out in the course of this book and what we'll be talking about in the lecture as well. In the lecture as well. And one of the things that, I've had a chance, the privilege of reading the book and one of the things that you do talk about is for example the popular image of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. I wonder if people realize that this very recent idea of Darcy that we've got from the 1995 BBC series has actually been around for a while, hasn't it? Yeah, so the idea that Darcy first became a character with sex appeal is to do with Colin Firth is in, it's not accurate history. If we go back earlier in 1935 is where I would date it. A real shift in how Darcy is presented as an object of desire on the stage and that in fact it was the stage that led to films first doing this with the character, taking us away from a focus on Elizabeth and her coming to realize Darcy's worth to allowing us to watch Darcy lust after Elizabeth. So I think this is, there's a much longer history to hot Darcy. There is and having said that, of course, the last thing we should ever forget is a terror one in a way that Darcy should never be allowed to eclipse Elizabeth Bennet too. And she's had a really interesting and quite vigorous life politically and socially, hasn't she, Elizabeth Bennet and what she represents. You talk in the book about the way in which she was adopted to some extent as an icon or a paradigm of things like female independence. Would you talk a bit about that? Yes, so the early 19th century, early 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century suffragettes and the new woman movement seems to have lit on Austin and to take up her characters and her writing as things that can be politically engaged at that moment rather than a century before that she becomes relevant to that moment in time. I think it's something that's still happening with her. We seem to go to her to solve political questions of our own time rather than just hers and Elizabeth's been central to that. And having said that, the message is that every time we think in a sense that we have discovered something about Austin, we should actually have a closer look at the fortunes of Jane Austen and her reputation since her death in 1817 that in fact many of these things have been talked about not necessarily in the same way, but they have been in fact discussed before. I mean, we've had 200 years of making use of her and finding ways to love her and for some, not to love her, but I hope there will be hundreds more because I think she repays that level of attention. You hope, but you wouldn't be surprised and certainly personally, I think that there's every chance of that, that we both know that writers, we both teach English literature and we both teach writers that have lost any kind of general appeal at all and if we weren't teaching them in the classroom, we both know they wouldn't be being read at all to some extent. But I'm guessing looking forward that like me, you think that Jane Austen in fact, what we're seeing now is not in a sense of climax but an anticipation. Yeah, I would say and this would go along with the findings in my book. As long as she continues to morph into various kinds of new media, I think she'll continue to travel forward to new generations. So that's one reason I'm not concerned as some are about her being mixed with zombies or other kinds of things because as long as she seems fresh and exciting to new readers, I think she'll continue to travel forward with us and I see that as a good. Right, and I know we're both looking forward tomorrow night. Thank you so much. With people in Canberra at the National Library of Australia because it's going to be our way in a sense of supporting someone. And we both got a career and emotional investment in. So grateful to be here at ANU and so grateful to you, Will Christie and to the HRC for hosting this visit and this talk. Thank you, Devani. Thank you.