Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What Did Jane Austen Know About Sex?

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

She wrote some of the most enduring romances in literature. But what did Jane Austen really know about love ... and sex?From longing looks and flirtation, to seduction and elopement, in this episode we're investigating how much of Jane Austen's works was based on experience.Kate is joined by John Mullan, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and author of 'What Matters in Jane Austen?'Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cade Lister, and you are listed to Bertwix the Sheeds. And we're so glad that you are. You are very, very welcome here. But before I can welcome you in any further, halt, stop, do not proceed anymore.

I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, by adults, to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And we have to tell you that because it might get a bit saucy, It might get a bit spicy and you might get a bit offended. But let's be honest, that's what we're all here for, really. Right, on with the show! A Regency drawing room, the perfect setting for a tea party.

Delicious! The clinking of porcelain, the hum of polite, restrained conversation. Our hostess smiles charmingly, elegantly pouring the tea from the pot. Drops in sugar cubes with silver tongs and offers your cream from a... jug. How delightful. Every moment is measured. Every movement means something. If you look about, not everything is as polite as it first appears. That gentleman's eyes lingering on the hostess's daughter. That young woman's hands brushed the side of a man she fancies as she passed him in the corridor. Oh my God, we've all quivered underneath our bodices. Even comments about the weather or about a benign

acquaintance all carry meaning. Welcome to the world. of Jane Austin. And today we're getting beneath Austin's bonnet and finding out exactly what was going on beneath that very polite exterior. Why do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, but beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and of course, Emma. This year marks 250 years since Jane Austen's birth,

and her works are still resonating with us today. Yes, some people have called them boring, but frankly, they are wrong. Something is keeping us turning the pages, watching the remakes, and it can't just be Mr Darcy smouldering at us from the pages, can it? Austin is all about relationships, scandal and society, but how much did she really know about that personally? When she wrote about falling in love, was any of that from her own experience? And what was the rudest and raunchiest thing she ever wrote?

Well, today I'm joined by Professor John Mullen of University College London, author of What Matters in Jane Austen. So straighten your backs, get your fans at the ready. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. Only Professor John Mullen. How are you doing? Fine. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about the one and only Jane Austen, because you are an Austin heavyweight professor of English literature, specialised in the 18th century, you've written on Austin, you've lected Austin. She's your girl. Can you remember when you first encountered her? I can and I'm afraid it's a rather prosaic encounter because I did first encounter, not as I should have done and as I sort of as I would have done if I'd been a passionate 15 year old girl, but I was not.

I was a teenage boy. So I encountered her as an A-level set book, I'm afraid. And I had a very good teacher. So although the A-level set book was persuasion, he also, I think, got us to read a bit more. read Emma as well. And it wasn't an instant conversion, I'm afraid Kate. I mean, I totally, I was enough of a literary snob then, even then, to realize that they were very, very well written.

You know, I saw that the sentences were things of beauty. But I foolishly thought, oh, you know, I've read two of them now and they're about the same thing. They're about, you know, how can you get a husband? And when I was 16 or 17, that didn't immediately switch me on, I'm afraid. That is something that I have heard from students that I've taught Jane Austen to many a time, is that it's sort of the same story happening again and again, that the scope, they don't say the scope of it is quite limited.

They go, oh, God, so boring. That's what I've heard a few times. Not as bad as Mark Twain. What did he say about Austin? Yeah, he said, every time I read it. I feel like beating her over the head with her own shin bone. But I mean, even that, you see, he was talking for effect, as he often did, or writing for effect.

I mean, you should hear the first bit of that every time I read her. So he did keep going back. Yes, yes. And that's the interesting thing. He drove her mad and yet he couldn't kind of put her down, you know. I've never thought of that before. I only focused on the last bit about wanting to. to dig her up and beat her with her own shinbone.

But no, he did go back to that. How interesting. We will start with a very basic question. There is a kind of reputation around Jane Austen in the popular imagination that she was this slightly gentle, genteel, spinster lady who lived in a nice house and liked her sister a lot and wrote these nice stories that she read aloud to people at night. And I never even dreamed that anyone else would want to run.

read them and that she never really experienced any of this stuff herself. What do you say to that? Well, that's quite a lot of that's quite a lot in there, Kate. One or two of those, one or two of bits of that are sort of true. I mean, she did read her novels in progress aloud in the evening to her sort of family, especially to her family. She was genteel, but not rich or anything. and everybody can go and visit her house by the efforts of some big Jane Austen fans in the mid-20th century has sort of been preserved. And if you imagine all the family members who had to live in it, well, her and her mother and her sister and a family friend, she wasn't wealthy.

So when she wrote her novels, she was really, for instance, she was really keen on getting them published and making some money from them, whether she knew or had an idea that she was going to live on beyond her own times. I mean, it's up for debate. I think she did. But she certainly wanted to sell books. She certainly wasn't saying, you know, oh, little me, you know, I'm too modest to get them published. She made great efforts with her brother's help and her dad's help before he died to try to get published.

It took her a long time and she didn't get published till she was in her mid-30s. But she was really keen on selling the books and getting some money because, you know, she totally depended upon her first her father when she was young, but then on her brothers after her father died. So she never had any money of her own until she sold some books. And then deliciously she did. And she loved that. And she went to London and bought some clothes.

That's my girl. That's my girl. But also, I think it would be wrong to think of her as a particularly sort of self-effacing and timid person. I mean, all the evidence we have, and you only have to read some of her surviving letters, that wasn't her character at all. And I think that all the evidence is that she, I think she sort of also knew once she got into the swim of it and had written her first couple of novels, Pride and Prejudice being her second. I think she knew she was much better than her contemporaries. She read all the novelists who were writing at the time. And she must have known how much better she was. And so I'm not sure she would have even been surprised to think that she lived,

her books survived beyond her lifetime. Why do you, I mean, this is very difficult because she's not here to just explain it to us. But where do you think this need to be a writer, this urge to earn her living by writing? where did that come from? Because today if someone says they want to be a writer, you're like, brilliant, go, run free. But also, it's still quite a precarious thing. When she was doing it, for a woman to write books, that was really quite shocking and risky. Where do you think this came from? Yes. I mean, I don't want to disagree with you too much, Kate. Oh, please disagree with me, yeah. Well, it's not, it wasn't so shocking and risky. I mean,

the important thing is Jane Austen, although I said she enjoyed the money she earned, She didn't have to write for a living and she never thought that that's why she was doing it. I mean, she depended on her family to keep her going, sometimes quite precariously after her dad's death. But she wasn't like one or two female contemporaries who definitely wrote sort of to make a living. And the thing is, there were quite a lot of women who published under their own names. Jane Austen was anonymous throughout her lifetime, but there were quite a lot of women. women who published books, both especially novels, and actually until Walter Scott came along in the sort of second decade of the 19th century, most of the best-selling novelists who weren't

most money in Jane Austen's lifetime were women, not men. Oh, look at that. So Vanney Bernie, Anne Radcliffe, Mariah Edgeworth, they were all really successful, commanded quite big advances and were known and admired by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. So by the time she wrote, it would have been a bit different, maybe 50 years earlier, but by the time she wrote, it wasn't actually so strange for a woman to be an author. It was unusual for a woman to write books of history or philosophy or politics, but novels, that was okay.

So she was joining quite a sort of crowded field, actually. Why do you think she stayed anonymous? Why didn't she blazing her name on her books? I'm Jane Austen. I'm here. Well, the first thing is it was really usual, normal, for all sort of novelists to start off anonymous. So almost every great novelist, not just before Jane Austen, but even after, you know, even people like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens.

it wasn't just women, published their first novels anonymously or pseudonymously. And then maybe if you were successful, you gradually decide at a certain stage to reveal yourself. So it was thought to be, as it were, respectable, very different from us, Kate, you know, where authors are always telling you about themselves all the time, okay? Very, very different. It was thought to be respectable to cut off your fictional apps. output from, as it were, your private self. Okay.

So, you know, even later in the 19th century, when Charlotte Bronte, of course, published under a pseudonym, Carabelle, even when Jane Eyre was a bestseller and everybody knew who it was by after a while and she was invited to glitzy celebrity literary parties, but everybody was told in advance, you can't talk to her about her novels. She's not prepared to do that, yes? So you have to pretend that this sort of gap between the... the novelist and the private person exists. So Jane Austen was not being especially modest.

And the guy I've mentioned, who was her most successful contemporary, Walter Scott, he became the best-selling novelist in the world in the years just immediately after Jane Austen's death. But he carried on publishing anonymously. Even though everybody knew it was him. It was like a – I know it seems strange to us, but it was an established convention. And I think Jane Austen, she hadn't died when she did. She was 41 and she'd published six novels. And she was, I think, on the brink of becoming well known.

And after all, the Prince Regent had discovered who she was and sent a special request because he loved her novels to her to dedicate her next novel to him, which she very grudgingly did. So people were beginning to find out. out who she was. One of the most frustrated, I suppose, most fascinating things about the whole Austin story is that she really was cut short just as she was about to make it big, right? Oh, my.

I mean, it's so painful because she was 41. All her family lived pretty much lived into their 70s or 80s, including her mother, a sister. And poor old Cassandra, her sister, one of the reasons I think history has treated her rather meanly is not only did she destroy lots of Jane's letters, but she lived on for sort of another 40 years. And everybody sort of said, oh, the wrong sister, the wrong sister. That's a bit mean. It is mean. It is mean. But imagine if Jane Austen had lived into her 60s, 70s and written another

six, 10 novels, which she would have done. You know, she was still absolutely on it. I mean, it doesn't bear thinking about, does it? No. But I suppose what that kind of, I guess that makes. her even more precious the works that we've got. Yes. She was that she was, her genius wasn't fully recognized in her lifetime. I think she'd be absolutely fuming about that, quite frankly. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. You know, you're right. I think the fact that she was cut short and remember in the, you know, she died at 41. In the previous seven years she'd published six novels or finished six novels. Two of them were published after her death. So she was really, you know, creating at an amazing rate. So, I mean, that does. You're absolutely right.

Make them somehow more precious. You know, it's like the poetry of Keats because he died so young. It gives them an extra voltage, doesn't it? And Jane Austen, we've got these six fabulous novels. Oh, and that's it. I'll be back with John and Jane after this short break. You were saying just earlier that there was this big sort of divide between the author and their private life, which is something that we still grapple with today.

But let's talk about Jane Austen's private life because this woman wrote, they have to be some of the most romantic novels that have ever been published. It is largely focused around, would we say romance, because I think it's more complicated than that, but around relationships. What of her own life did she put into this? Did she have a Mr. Darcy or did it turn out to be a Mr. Wickham? Well, actually, I think she had a Mr. Collins to tell you the truth. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Well, no, that's a bit unfair to it. I mean, we know very little. I mean, there are two relationships of the heart, apparently, that she had we do know about. And the one we know most about in a way is the one where she actually accepted a proposal of marriage. And she was in her late 20s. She was a sort of age that Charlotte Lucas is in Pride and Pride. prejudice or the Anne Elliott is in persuasion. And we know that she accepted a proposal of marriage from a man who was younger than her, just as Mr. Collins is younger than Charlotte Lucas in Pride and

Prejudice called Harris Big Wither. Oh dear. Right. Yeah. It's not a very, it's not a very Mr. Darcy name, is it? And, but he was the brother, his two sisters were really good friends of the Austin family and of Jane and Cassandra. In the provinces, in the countryside in the early 19th century, you know, you couldn't go to kind of, if you're a woman, you didn't go to university and meet somebody. You didn't get a job and meet somebody. So very often it was an immediate circle of friends and even cousins

that you would marry into. And he was going to inherit a really sizable property and a handsome income for life. and it would have made Jane comfortable and secure. That would be the word, that's the word used in Emma of what's going to happen to Harriet Smith when she marries Mr. Robert Martin. She'll be secure, safe forever. And she accepted him one evening and then changed her mind over breakfast. Oh, Jane.

And turned him down the next day. What happened there? Well, that's all we know. But I mean, I think it's pretty clear that what happened was perhaps aided by a couple of glasses of wine. Because Jane Austen liked a tipple. We know that. She did like a tipple. She accepted him presumably for good pragmatic reasons. And then woke up next day or maybe lay sleepless in her bed. Who knows, thinking, what have I done? and I'm sure you'll know, Kate, that the rules of the game, which are there in Jane Austen novels, really, really important to sense and sensibility, her first published novel, that when a man proposes marriage,

the rule, it's not just a rule, it's the law of the land. Once he's proposed, he can't change his mind, but the woman can. So the woman can release him, but he is committed by law. can be taken to court for breach of promise if he tries to dodge it. So Jane Austen had a think about it and then changed her mind. And we presume that that's because she never subloved him or anything. She just... That's a big thing, though, isn't it?

I know that looking back from 2025, you can look at it and go, oh, she put her career first and she knew she didn't love and blah, blah, blah. But that's a big thing to turn that down because security at the time, that was vitally. important. I know. But I mean, if she'd married him, of course, she wouldn't have written the novels, I think. I don't think there's any chance at all she would have written the novels. She would have had, especially if she, you know, she'd had children. There are one or two examples of women of her period who got married and carried on writing, but usually it was because they didn't have any children. And anyway, she would have had lots of children, people I know say, and she would

have died in childbirth, probably. But I mean, that's a possible. too, of course. But she would have had children and she would have lived the life of a good wife. And I think it's vanishingly, you know, extremely unlikely she would have written those novels. So, you know, good that she said no. And she came from a family of good breeders as well. They were big families, weren't they? They were lots of big families. But also people did die. Her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, died after having her eighth child shortly afterwards. So from the effects of childbirth, leaving Jane's brother Edward with all these children, and also, you know, bereft, but I mean, you know, having children killed her sister-in-law.

But of course, Jane's mother had six children and, you know, was Hale and hearty. So lots of big families. What happened to Mr. Bigwither? Where did he go? Was he devastated? Mr. Bigwither went off and married. He found another wife eventually, so we don't have to worry too much about him. But Jane Austen also, I mean, much more tantalizingly because we don't really know.

She had a romance when she was in her late teens, early 20s, who was really quite attractive and dashing. And there is some evidence that his parents who thought that Jane Austen was not a good enough, she wasn't going to bring any money or anything to that match, sort of hurried him away to. And he became a very successful lawyer eventually and also, married quite happily. So Jane Austen, when she was young, was in the market. She would have gone to all those balls and dance with people and, you know, who knows. But there's very, Cassandra weeded the correspondence very carefully. So there's very little evidence of whether her, of the flutters of her youthful heart, as it were. What do we know about that teenage young relationship, that little frisson?

What existing evidence do we have of that, that anything happened to talk? Well, we just have a couple of very early letters from Jane Austen saying, and she'll say, she says something like, you know, we behave disgracefully at the dance together, you know, which might, which will probably, I'm afraid, Kate, it means probably that they danced more than twice together, which was a bit of a sort of naughty thing to do. Shocking. And sort of flirted a bit. It doesn't, I'm afraid, mean anything more complex. Do you think she ever got into anything more compromising? I know we're not supposed to speculate. I know that.

No, no. I think it's fine. I think it's fine. I think it's absolutely fine to speculate. And I think that actually, I will cut to the chase on this one. Did she ever snog somebody? That's totally possible. Okay.

Did she ever have sex? I think that's almost impossible. Okay. Because it would have been such a mad, mad thing. to do. I mean, it would have been really, really crazy, risky, compromising. Sex before marriage, of course, it happened a lot, but for the class of people that Jane Austen belong to, I guess the only way in which, unless you were bonkers, it would happen is if you were basically, if you were a woman, not if you were a man, you're safe, you're fine, fine, help yourself. Absolutely fine. You

you get away with murder. That's the wrong metaphor. Sorry, you could get away with an awful lot. As characters doing her novel, you know, Henry Crawford, he's not married. He has sex with Mariah Rushworth, who is married, and it ruins her reputation. But he sails on absolutely fine to shag again, as it were. So men could get away with anything, especially if they were at all aristocratic. But if you're a woman, I think the only way in which, you know,

you could sort of get away of having sex before marriage is if it was with somebody you were going to marry. But that was much more common, I think. All the evidence is that's much more common amongst the labouring classes where people were very often, you know, there's a lot of evidence from parish records to suggest that couples getting married, the woman is quite often pregnant already, the young woman. But Jane Austen, I think it's very, very unlikely that she ever had sex. But I'm sure she had, as we might say, sexual feelings. Yep. You know, because her novels are full of people, I would say, who have those feelings.

They're full of it. Yes. I was just about to ask you that. So if we've got, and it's completely conceivable that a woman of the lower gentry, gentry, if nothing else, the practicalities of sneaking away to have sex are very difficult. The practicalities are difficult and also, you know, there is. I mean, they are much less, I would say in Jane Austen's Day, in general, people are less kind of obsessively hung up about fallen women and so on than the Victorians were to become. When Lydia Bennett is going off having sex with Wickham in London and Wickham is this practice rake.

And Lydia is only two months past the 16th birthday. I mean, she's young. And he's in his mid-20s. I think even nowadays, you know, quite a lot of parents might think, whoa, I'm not sure this is good. Agreed. And this isn't an age before any kind of reliable contraception as well. Mary, Elizabeth's sister and Mr. Collins, the ghastly Mr. Collins, all sort of say Victorian-type things about it. Mr. Collins actually says her death would be a blessing.

And Elizabeth thinks what a load of all rubbish, you know. Yes, she does, doesn't she? However, you know, everybody also thinks, get her married for goodness sake. Right. You know, get Wickham to marry her. Because otherwise, he's going to dump her and then she's not going to be able to get another husband because she will be sort of damaged goods. There is a lot of this in her novels.

Willoughby, Boo Hiss, seduces Colonel Brandon's 16 again. 16-year-old daughter gets a pregnant. Not daughter. She's his ward. That's right. Yes. And again, he lives to Shag another day, goes off, gets married. Yes, he does.

He does. The only price he pays for it is, as it were, losing Marianne whom he claims that he loves. But he doesn't really pay much of a price. And actually in the last chapter of Mansfield Park, because quite often in the last chapter of her novels, Jane Austen sort of steps in and, as it were, speaks to us, having, kept away for the whole of the novel. She's sort of, and she does actually, you know, almost in an author's voice, she says about Henry Crawford. I can't remember that words, but she said something like, well, you know, as is always the case, he goes on to live his life without any shame or a

program attaching to him. But that's also partly because he's posh and rich. So, you know, generally speaking, not just in the novels, but I think the evidence is it from Jane Austen's letters in her life as well. If you were wealthy and especially if you were aristocratic or semi-aristocratic, you could get away with all sorts of stuff. And after all, the royal family in Jane Austen's day are behaving really, really badly. And it's all being reported in the newspapers, you know, not just the Prince Regent, but most of his brothers, you know, including Queen Victoria's, father. They've all got mistresses and they're all quite open about it. Oh, the absolute dirt bags. They are, aren't they?

I shouldn't say that. Scali-bags. To coin a phrase. Yeah. But also it's public entertainment just like it would be now, just as it has been in our lifetimes, you know. So it's reported in the press, the cavortings of the upper class. Do you think that this is something that Jane Austen would have witnessed in her own social circle, the threat of ruination because it does turn up in her novels a lot that some young girl gets seduced

by some tall rake with a posh accent who promises of the world and then he ditches her and he's off again. Did that happen to anyone around her? Absolutely. She does see all these things around her. She sees a bit the cavortings

of the upper class, the local aristocrat who lives with his mistress, for instance. you know, which you can only do if you're up a class. She must have seen and been heard about, even if only through village gossip, what happened at the lowest end of the scale because, of course, you know,

one of the things unmarried men who look for a sexual outlet, as it were, as far as we know, lots of kind of sexual relationships with servants went on. and some of them, you know, ended in pregnancy and so on. And Jane Austen is totally aware of all that. There's one tantalizing reference to a distant cousin called Fanny, who was clearly having a shotgun marriage.

And it's in one of her letters to Cassandra. And she doesn't explicitly say this. I think she uses the word disgrace of what she's done. But luckily, there's going to be a happy ending because the man's going to marry her. She's obviously, she's writing to her sister. And the point is her sister already knows all about it. So she's frustratingly implicit. But that seems one particular instance of just such a story.

But again, I would say, you know, compared to the Victorians, you know. In a Victorian novel, she either dies becomes a sex worker or goes for a story. That's it. And she seems to quite enjoy herself as well, does Lydia? Yes, she does. And she comes back with Wickham and she's hanging on his arm. And it says something like Lydia was still very fond of our husband. Yes.

Yes. And I think that that's a code word for she's still sexually enraptured. Yes. And Jane Austen expected, I think, her readers to know what she was implying. In your book, What Matters in Jane? Austin, you make the point that a lot of her characters when you look at them, you have incidents of quite sensible men, quite clever men, marrying absolute car crashes of women, just complete headcases. Tell me what your thoughts are on that and why that's in her book.

Yes. Well, there are some notable examples. I mean, the most famous one, which even people who haven't read any Jane Austen know about, is Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, you know. And Mr. Bennett is in some ways an irresponsible person. He's actually to blame for a lot of the disasters that happen to his daughters. And to Lydia, you know, he lets her go to Brighton. And anyway, he's an odd mixture of irresponsibility and just really disarming, amusing, cleverness, you know.

And he's such a clever, sophisticated, subtle man. And he's, until Elizabeth meets Mr. Darcy, he seems to be the only one who understands Elizabeth's sense of humor at all. And she understands his. And there's a wonderful sentence at the end of the first chapter of Pride Bridges. Let's see if I can do it, Kate. Okay. For one of my favorite sentences in all fiction, Mr. Bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice that the, The experience of three and 20 years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.

So there you have it. He's so clever, odd a mixture, quick, quick part, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice. And he's got his wife who doesn't understand him at all. And essentially, he has married her because he fancied her. You know, and she was quite young, we're told. So she probably was 17 or something. He was in his mid-20s, maybe, and he fancied him. Because he's a decent chap, the only way of sort of getting her was to marry her.

And he married her, and they had five children. And actually, there's quite an interesting sentence that people don't always notice because, of course, they're all girls. So none of them can inherit the estate, which is going to go to Mr. Collins, a distant cousin instead. And it said, for many years after the birth of Lydia, the youngest, Mrs. Bennett was sure that they would have a son, which I think means that they had, you know, they had, as we say, an active sex life.

They must have done. But they didn't have another child. So Mr. Bennett is in this marriage with this woman who doesn't understand anything of him, although he's cleverness. And really quite amusingly but distressingly, his diversions. his diversion is sort of mocking her really, which is funny but not good, as they say. But, you know, he married her because he fancied her

and he, you know, must have carried on fancying her. But Mr and Mrs. Palmer and sense and sensibility just the same. Oh, she's lunatic, isn't she? She laughs at everything. Yes. Even when her chickens are eaten. Yes. And her husband,

constantly puts her down. And she just roars with laughter at everything he says. Brilliant tactic, actually. And her mother says, well, you can't get out of it now. You've got her for life. Too late now. And, of course, she's pregnant because he may laugh at her, but he has sex with her. Yes, he is.

Yeah. And Edward Ferris as well. Edward Ferris gets trapped in an engagement to Lucy Steele, another lunatic. Lucy Steele, yes. And he marries her. And of course, I think, don't you? think we guess that, you know, you're asking sex before marriage, she rather like, you know, I don't know, Am Berlin or something, she'd be too clever to give him what he wants until he's sealed

the deal. Yeah, I think he said. Yeah. So she's cunning as Lucy. She must make him really, really want to go to bed with her so much that he's prepared to marry her as rapidly as possible. Yes. Yeah.

And then it says they're having a very happy honeymoon. I'll be back with John and Jane after this short break. There's clearly this sexual tension in her book. If anything that she recognises that men will do very silly things to get their leg over. Do you think that she says very much about women's desires? Or is that... That's such an interesting question, isn't it? Because when a woman marries a man who's an idiot,

you know, like Charlotte Lucas with Mr Collins, or Mariah Rushworth, Mariah Bertram with Mr. Rushworth. She does it for essentially financial reasons to get security, to get a big house in Mariah Bertram's case with no suggestion at all, but she'll find it sexually gratifying. So Jane Austen definitely, it's not a symmetrical thing at all. And I think that we're allowed to sense that the heroines of the novels feel a sort of physical attraction in several of the cases anyway to the men that they love, that love includes physical attraction. But I don't think we get anything like a representation of sort of young women, you know, doing foolish things out of sexual passion.

I don't think we get that. Marianne's probably the closest, isn't it? But even then, that whole story's kind of slapped down. It's like a bad Marriam. You got all carried away there and you got well giddy and it was bad. You're right. She is well giddy and she's sort of punished for it, isn't she? But it's very displaced, isn't it?

It's not we can say that what Marianne is feeling age 17 is sexual passion. And it's certainly there's certain kind of key indicators. Willoughby's really good looking, he's dashing. He's, you know, tireless. He can dance all night and then ride off hunting first thing next morning. And she loves all that. And dancing, of course, in Jane Austen often feels as though it's a bit of a surrogate for sex. And the dancing was physically quite demanding. Lydia, you know, can dance half the night. Marianne dances with Willoughby for hour after hour. And we may say, oh, that's all about sex, really.

But that's us saying it, not Jane Austen telling us it. Because Marianne is certainly, I think she's foolish, but she's not going to be foolish enough to sleep with him. No, yeah, I think you're right, actually. I think, no, I don't think that was ever on the cards. But she would be foolish enough to marry him. Yeah. Yeah, lucky escape.

Yes. And who knows? I mean, there's another plot where he actually, because the point of course, in sensibility is everybody thinks they're engaged. Yes. But he never has popped the question. Scoundrel. There's another novel, which Jane Austen might have written, where he does propose to her

and they're engaged and she thinks, oh, he's going to marry me now. And maybe then she would sleep with him. I don't know. She is a bit of a fool. She is. I think she might do. She might do. But she would have to be engaged, I think, which of course she never is.

What is it about the reoccurring seaside motif in Jane Austen? To catch of the chase here. Yes, the seaside. Beware, beware. Don't go to Brighton, Kate. Absolutely not. Or maybe do, depending on what you're looking for. I don't think I've got the strength anymore.

Oh, Brighton is simply the most sinful place in the whole world. London's nothing on Brighton. Of course, when Lydia's goes to Brighton, chaperoned by a friend who's, you know, Colonel Campbell's wife, who's a very young wife, so she's probably just 17. Of course, she ends up in a terrible mess because in British film or fiction, anybody who goes to Brighton, it's sexually dangerous. But I think the seaside in general, in Jane Austen, it's a place where normal restraints and conventions are loosened. Okay.

Where you might even wear different clothes from slightly more. revealing clothes, but certainly where the sort of rules, the unwritten rules about who can meet whom in what company, you know, and how young women would always have to be chaperoned and things are relaxed. And there's an extraordinary sentence in Mansfield Park where Tom Bertram, who's a sort of, let's say, a sort of rather unrestrained young man. and a very privileged young man. He's the heir to the estate. And he's talking about, you know, having been at the seaside with his friend and his friend's mother who must be, she has children in their teens early.

She must be in her 40s. And he goes down to the promenade and he finds her surrounded by men. And he just says it. And you imagine she's got a parasol and there she is. And, you know, she's chatting with lots of nice young men or maybe not young. men, but maybe her age, who are also on holiday. And the seaside is a place where you can be much less restrained. So it's where Weymouth is where Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have their secret romance in

Emma and contract their secret engagement. And it's not always a bad thing. You know, when Anne Elliott goes to Lyme Regis in persuasion, even though it's November, she gets her bloom back. You go and take the air, don't you, at the seaside? You take the air. Yes. And this man, she doesn't know who it is.

It turns out to be Mr. Elliot, her distant cousin, sees her by the seaside and looks at her in evident admiration, you know, because the sea airs kind of made the sap rise, I think we would say. And then Pride and Prejudice, when the dastardly Wickham wants to seduce, Georgiana Darcy, Mr Darcy's 16-year-old sister, he gets her taken down to Ramsgate. Yes. Because she's vulnerable by the seaside, you know, not surrounded by your usual family, friends, conventions, where you can go, where you can't go.

You wander around flirtations more possible and all sorts of shenanigans are more possible. And that's exactly why Elizabeth Bennett warned her father that it's dangerous to let Lydia go to Bride. Yes, yes, yes, yes. She warns them and he says, oh, you know, she'll just flirt with the officers in the militia there. It'll all be fine. Which is a mad thing to say anyway. A mad thing to say. I mean, you know, Kate, I've got two daughters and none of them are going to Brighton without me. Right. I've just like, oh, no, they'll just have a bit of a flirt. It'll be fine. Who knows what will happen? Oh, no. Don't send your daughters to Brighton. Risky. As a final question. What do you think is the most erotic thing that Jane Austen has ever?

written or the rudest. I mean, because it's all, it's all below the surface, but is there any part for you that is like, yeah, there's no doubt what we're talking about there? I think those are two different things, the most erotic and the rudest. That's very true, actually, yes. I think the most erotic in a way is not the things we've been talking about, which is, as it were, the sex between the lines that does go on in Jane Austen novels. I think, as it were, the throbbiest is in a way, ironically, the letter, the letter that Captain Wentworth writes to Anne Elliot near the end of persuasion. And he's in the same room as her. And it's a crowded

room in an inn in Bath. And we and Anne, who rejected him, of course, eight years earlier, she's persuaded to say no to him, even though she loved him deeply. And now he's back again. And she thinks he's going to marry somebody else. But so. Slowly you become aware as she becomes aware that his old feelings for her were dormant and are coming back to life. And especially they come back to life when he sees her being apparently courted by Mr. Elliot, another man. Nothing like Jane Austen is a connoisseur of jealousy. Jealousy is the great, you know, erotic blue touch paper, I think. Yeah.

That's what gets men going. It's what gets Mr. Knightley going in Emma. when he sees her flirting with Frank Churchill. And the climax of it all in persuasion is they're in a crowded room and Anne Elliott is talking to Captain Wentworth's friend, Captain Harville, about whether whose love, whose feelings last longer, men's or women's. And because Captain Harville's friend, Captain Benick,

who was mourning his lost love who died, has now got and get engaged to another woman. You know, he said he was inconsolable. Now, you know, and Anne is saying, well, women's love lasts longest. And Captain Wentworth can hear this and he's writing a letter. And he writes this letter saying, which he pushes over, he leaves and she reads it on her own and you read it with her. It's there in the novel. And it's an incredible letter.

And the very fact that it's a letter that it's within the conventions and constraints of a letter makes it somehow in a very Jane Austenny way, you know, even more throbby. because we're not in Wuthering Heights. We're in a world of care and compliance and convention, but people are still human beings and their feelings are just as strong. And it says, you know, my heart is as much yours as ever it was. And he says that he's waiting for her response. And the last line is so full of erotic passion. And all it says is a word, a look will be enough.

That is pretty throbby. I would say it's pretty throbby. I'd say so. And he's this really sexy guy. He's clever. He's a war hero. And he's out there waiting to see how she'll respond. And also, you know, how true it is, a word, a look will be enough.

He knows that the moment he sees her, and it'll be in the street with lots of people around. He will know as soon as he sees her, as soon as he looks into her eyes, whether she's on for it. Yeah, that's pretty hot. is, yep, I'd have to agree with that. What about the rudest thing that she's ever written? Did she write rude things? I think she gave some of her character some rude things. And the rudest is Mary Crawford in Bansfield Park, who's very, very worldly and knowing, and who has these terrible friends who are all sort of very posh, some of them with titles, and they all have second homes in Twickenham and Richmond, which is where you go to have affairs. And

Twickenham, Mary Crawford's uncle who looked after when she was young, bought a villa in Twickenham for his mistress. Twickenham's very, very sinful. Not as bad as Brighton, obviously, but pretty sinful. And she says really sort of quite rude things sometimes. And she makes a famous rude joke about the Navy. And she says because her uncle was an admiral, she's talking about admirals. And then she says, of rears and vice-exam. is I will not comment. And then she says, I intend no pun. So she does intend a pun. Yes, she does. That's a booty

joke, Jane Austen. That's naughty, isn't it? I love that. John, you have been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work and more about Jane Austen's rudeness, where can they find you? Where can they find me? I have no online presence at the moment. But I am I am musing it. I think I might start a little Jane Austen substack one of these days. There's lots of me, I'm afraid, on the internet giving talks about Jane Austen. And then there's my book What Matters in Jane Austen, which is where lots of this stuff has its home. Thank you so much for coming in to talk to me. You've been marvellous. It was a pleasure.

Thank you for listening. And thanks so much to John for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcast. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we are delving back into sex work through the ages and join us wherever you found us today. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

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