Daniel Kodsi (DK): Austen is so rich that one can find things of interest in her from almost any perspective. You yourself focus on the style of her novels: do you think that is informed by your perspective as an English professor?

John Mullan (JM): Yes. One reason that I focus on style is that I am a literary critic, or a teacher of literature. That is my inclination with other writers too. But another reason has to do with what academics who write and talk about Austen have tended to do for much of my life. If you go to the shelf on Austen in a university library, there are a lot of books of literary criticism about her novels. Most of those published in the last forty years focus on what the books are about, with remarkably little about how she writes. This impression is doubled, when, like I do, you teach Austen. You will often find that students are quite keen on Austen, but they come to her novels with a heightened sense of debates about women’s rights, or the uses of wealth, or rank, or some other political or historical aspect of them. They have little idea of why she is better than the host of other novelists who wrote about similar things at the same time, and who are not a tenth—a hundredth—as interesting to read. So my focus on style is also in part a form of pushback against what I think have been the prevailing academic habits of reading Austen.

DK: It doesn’t just seem to be a contrast between the style and what the books are about, because much of Austen concerns character, but character is not one of the topics that you mentioned. Is there a lot of literary criticism on character in Austen, or is it mostly about these political themes?

JM: Waves of academic interpretation come and go in response to previous habits. I am not free of that, and it is probably the case that a lot of people who wrote about Austen in, say, the ’60s through the ’80s had been themselves weaned on character-based literary criticism, and had had enough of it. But it is striking that if you listen to non-academic discussions of Jane Austen’s novels, very often they will fix on character—the behavior of characters, and the subtleties of the behavior of characters. I am talking about quite interesting conversations, not boneheaded ones: not “I don’t like Fanny Price. I do like Elizabeth Bennett”. Often, you will hear readers who are insightful about the nuances of the behavior of these characters, whom they talk about as though they are real people. I think that it is probably a bad thing if there is too much of a distance between academic habits of interpretation and that ordinary approach to reading and discussing her novels. Clearly, one of the things that Austen wanted to do, and which she is brilliant at doing, is give you a sense of the reality of the people in her books. That is not a boring, old-fashioned thing to do. It is very difficult; most novelists can’t do it at all. Or many novelists can do it with one character who is a stand-in for themselves, but nobody else.

Austen, however, has this extraordinary ability to endow minor characters, who may appear only quite fleetingly, with an aura of reality. She gives a sense to the reader that if she had been George Elliot and pursued them—because that is what George Elliot would have done—you would have found out all sorts of further things. Austen is not going to do that. But the people and characters in her novels are never stereotyped, or formulae, or merely convenient props. Again, that on its own, is an extremely difficult thing to do. Yet, on top of that, there is her ability to convince people that the heroines of her novels are living, breathing, complicated, mind-changing human beings.

There were many things that I didn’t get around to talking about in my book, because the chapters tended to be short and thematic, on money or sex or going to the seaside or the weather or whatever. I have a whole list of other things that I would have liked to talk about, though my publisher says that I shouldn’t write another book about Jane Austen too rapidly. Character is one of the things I felt I didn’t do full justice to. The conjuring up of a sense of character is extraordinarily important. Academic critics are hypocritical if they ignore it, because in their novel-loving lives, they don’t ignore it at all.

DK: Right. Indeed, what Austen herself would ask people about Pride and Prejudice was, “Don’t you love Elizabeth?”, I am sometimes struck by the attitude amongst Austen’s most dedicated readers—academics, but also perhaps some old-fashioned Janeites—that her ordinary readers are missing her real virtues. Something like: “we’re the ones who really appreciate the virtues in Austen, which we’ve only come to see after rereading her many times“. What do you make of this attitude?

JM: Two things. First, Austen is one of those writers—like Dickens and maybe Shakespeare—where the large constituency of, as it were, amateur experts, often seem to know more than the constituency of those like me who are paid to know about it. One thing that I really like about writing and doing talks about Jane Austen is the existence of that audience: something in between people who read some Jane Austen 20 years ago and have since watched it on television and people who are employed by universities. Members of the Jane Austen Society may well seem a little proprietorial about Jane Austen. But having come to know them over the last ten years, I have found that they are a great mixture of expertise and openness. They make for a great test of more academic explainers, because they like hearing from academic critics, but you can’t bamboozle them with theoretical ingenuity.

Second, Austen is a writer who peculiarly inspires readers with the sense that they are really getting it. That is a great thing about her. But it inevitably means that readers of Austen—whether they are literary critics or not—are often amazed to hear somebody else come up with something different, because of that sense of a peculiar sort of intimacy. This might have something to do with the fact—and this is singular, isn’t it?—that an intelligent, rather bookish 13-year-old girl can read Pride and Prejudice and enjoy it, and totally get it. And then, someone can reread it for the tenth time in their fifties, and feel that they are getting it in a completely new way and seeing completely new things.

DK: Do you have this sense of intimacy with Austen?

JM: Yes, I suppose I do. But I think that with real Austen fans, and I am one, it is not about thinking that you know best. It is about realizing that, as I try to explain in my book, her novels are incredibly precisely machined. So you can get things wrong. The pain and pleasure for the Austen expert is reading an analysis of a particular bit of Austen—whether in an academic book, a student essay, or a newspaper article—and thinking “No, that is not quite right, because in the chapter before, that character has said something different, so you are supposed to notice the contradiction between what he is saying now and what he was saying”. That is a matter of getting it right, of doing justice to Austen’s ingenuity. You can completely trust her: she knows what she is doing. There is nothing vague or merely suggestive in the way that she writes.

For example, it is remarkably common for quotations from her novels to be used as if they are authorial statements, when in context, they are in fact percolated through the minds, the thoughts, the prejudices of one of the characters. One of the things that I talk about in my book, particularly in the last chapter, is her revolutionary use of—I would say almost invention of—free indirect style. Very rarely does something proceed directly from her. Some of the most innocent-sounding statements in the narrative are reflections of the predispositions and prejudices of a character. I used to come across this particularly often with discussions of Emma—DH Lawrence was guilty of it—where the inveterate snobbishness of the protagonist is confused with the outlook of the author. You have to go very carefully when you take a small part of one of Austen’s novels and look at it, because often what you are being told is not fact or observation, but prejudice or delusion. Jane Austen delights in this. What did she say? “I write not for such dull elves as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.” It is a test.

DK: Even the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the best-known line in Austen, is like this, because if you read through to the second line, you get, “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be,” and suddenly it is revealed that the narration is from the perspective of the village.

JM: Yes, absolutely. That is an interesting example, because it turns out that the need for caution applies even when a statement can’t be located in the mind of a specific character. ”It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”—that’s the first sentence, we haven’t met anybody yet. But of course, it is in the minds of the women of Meryton. You can, as it were, hear the author’s voice. “Of course, it’s absolutely true, who can doubt…” That is irony, but it is still the case that the substance of the irony is the commonly held view.

In all Jane Austen’s novels, that sense of what people are thinking, what people in a small community are saying, bubbles through. It bubbles through I think most of all, again, in Emma, where the opinion and voice of the town or village—it is halfway between the two—pushes its way into the narrative. In Emma, you are given this wonderful impression of a narrative which is absolutely fixed in the mind of its protagonist. But as it were, just out of hearing—certainly out of Emma’s hearing, but maybe not quite out of yours—is a world of gossip and chat and rumor and report, which swirls around. “Tiresome gossips,” Emma says, at one point, about some of the people who have been gossiping to Harriet. Emma purports to reject all that, but there is still the sense that some third-person statements are voicings of commonly held beliefs in a particular place.

DK: Is there more of that in Emma than in, for instance, Pride and Prejudice? After all, Pride and Prejudice has the gossip par excellence in Mrs. Bennett.

JM: Pride and Prejudice is less focused on the mind of its protagonist than Emma is. Of course, Elizabeth Bennett is the center of our consciousness. But the narrative is more able to move off and see things from another person’s point of view than it is in Emma: the magnetic field of the protagonist isn’t as overwhelming. As part of that, Elizabeth is herself conscious—sometimes painfully conscious, as at the Netherfield Ball—of the world of gossip. She is constantly mortified by her family, because she is aware of everybody else around them listening and talking. For instance, much later, when Lydia has apparently eloped, Elizabeth tries to persuade her mother that she should shut up, because there are servants around. The servants will hear; they will talk to other people in the village; everybody will know.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is quite sensitive to the social world around her. As a result, because Jane Austen is the genius she is, the nature of the narrative is shaped by that sensitivity. By contrast, in Emma, Emma is so sufficient unto herself (or so she thinks) that the narrative follows that self-sufficiency, so the sense of what is being said out there is dialed down.

DK: How about, then, in Northanger Abbey, another novel where the plot is shaped by reports? For instance, you can detect that General Tilney has been told something about Catherine, but Catherine herself is completely oblivious.

JM: Northanger Abbey is a much simpler and earlier book. It is important in Northanger Abbey that we know more than Catherine, because Catherine is by far the most naïve of Jane Austen’s heroines. The way in which Austen does that is very witty, but also much simpler than in the other novels. For instance, when Catherine turns up to visit Henry and Eleanor in Bath, after they think that she snubbed them by going off on a trip with the gruesome Thorpes instead of them, the servant comes to the door and says they are out. The narrative then says “the servant returned, and with a look which did not quite confirm his words, said he had been mistaken,”. It is very amusing, but perhaps technically, it is not the kind of thing that would happen in one of the later novels. For it raises the question: Is that in Catherine’s mind? Is she shrewd enough to see that? Maybe she is, but it feels more like Austen is having to steer us. Similarly, when Catherine is talking about how she is sure that General Tilney does not care at all about money, there are obviously looks passing between Henry and Eleanor, because they know that he cares about that more than anything. You are allowed to see those looks. Yet, you wonder, can Catherine pick up on them? Because if she was picking up on them, would she be saying such incautious things? So it feels to me as though it is much less developed.

DK: You write about this as well with Sense and Sensibility, where you suggest that there is some difficulty in disentangling exactly what is Elinor and exactly what is Austen.

JM: Yes, Sense and Sensibility is her first published novel, and I feel undecided about this: sometimes I come down one way, sometimes the other. I try to give one or two examples in my book. But I have also done an edition of Sense and Sensibility, and I talk about it in the introduction to that. There are some strange passages which read as if they are authorial analyses of the behavior of one of the characters, of Willoughby, say. But then, towards the end of a passage of Johnsonian prose, long periodic sentences, balanced abstract nouns, plenty of polysyllabic adjectives, you suddenly get a cue which tells you that this is what has been going through Elinor’s head, and you think, “Oh no, that wasn’t a little Johnsonian essay by the author, that’s what Elinor is thinking”. However, Elinor seems to think in quite 18th century prose. I think that Austen does that deliberately—“she would make a virtue of the necessity”. This is her early prose style, which she soon changes.

DK: It’s also the clearest expression of some more philosophical themes. For instance, the inversion, “not merely giving way to as relief, but feeding and encouraging as a duty”.

JM: She merges the sententious ironical prose of the 18th century moralist with the remarkably judicious self-controlled reflections of this very mature 19-year-old, and the two become one. I think that it is brilliantly done. If she died after Sense and Sensibility, we would still say, “This is the best novel of that whole period”. But after what she went on to do, it seems perhaps a bit stilted. I think that some of the antagonism that readers sometimes feel towards Sense and Sensibility is a consequence of the uses of that what I would call “18th century prose style”. It is very marked, for instance, after Marianne’s illness. She has discovered what a rotter Willoughby is. She has almost died. The illness itself feels a bit, to people, like a punishment for her ill-considered romantic impulses and for trusting so much in somebody who is obviously untrustworthy. In any case, she recovers, but she is a wan and reduced figure. There is then an extraordinary scene in which she goes out for her first walk at home with Elinor. She reflects on what has happened to her and speaks in this Johnsonian prose. It is so different from the way she spoke before; she used always to be gushing and crying and exclaiming. Now she sounds like an essay from The Rambler. That measured periodic prose riles some readers.

DK: But isn’t that a joke about how Marianne’s gone to the other extreme?

JM: She goes to the other extreme. Yes, I mean, that is a clever way of making sense of it. She feels she has to reform, so she reforms her language.

DK: Consider towards the end of the novel, when Austen writes “Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. Instead of falling a sacrifice to an irresistible passion, as once she had fondly flattered herself with expecting,—instead of remaining even for ever with her mother, and finding her only pleasures in retirement and study, as afterwards in her more calm and sober judgment she had determined on…” The picture seems to be of how Marianne bounced between extremes.

JM: Austen, I think, because she contrived it so carefully, wants readers to feel some unease or regret about Marianne’s fate. She uses the word “fate”. She makes Marianne say ill-considered and cruel things about Colonel Brandon in the first part of the novel, because eventually she is going to marry him. And as readers notice, but sometimes only half-consciously notice, Austen does extraordinary things. For instance, Marianne and Colonel Brandon almost never speak to each other. Even after she has changed her mind about him and about Willoughby, the man she thought loved her, and even after Colonel Brandon has become a welcome visitor, Austen doesn’t give us any dialogue between them. Colonel Brandon only ever speaks with Elinor. It is a continuation of the pattern in the early parts of the novel, where “he came to look at Marianne and talk to Elinor”.

Austen didn’t have to do that. She carefully gives you the sense that Colonel Brandon is smitten but that there is no communication between the two. So when Marianne eventually becomes his prize or reward, as it were, a sense of regret or dissatisfaction is a natural consequence. People talk a lot, rightly, about how brilliant Austen is at dialogue, but she is very good at absences of dialogue as well. Consider how important it is that in Pride and Prejudice we never get anything that Mr. Bingley and Jane say to each other: an absence of dialogue with a very different point. They are in fact constantly going off and talking to each other—in a ball, in the corner of a room, going ahead of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy on a walk—but we never hear a word of it. Because it would just be too boring, wouldn’t it?

DK: Austen’s use of “fate” is presumably ironic, as well.

JM: Yes, Marianne’s fate is a version of what other heroines in Austen also have to experience, which is to taste the contradiction between what they profess and what they practice. Marianne has this absurd credo that “first love is the only love”. Her mother points out that if that were true, then Marianne and Elinor would not exist, because they are the products of a second marriage. But that sentence makes it feel to some like the author is exacting punishment.

DK: That’s interesting. Marianne seems to me such a wonderful comic character, especially in her melodrama. One of my favourite bits of dialogue in Sense and Sensibility is between her and Elinor: “I am afraid,” replied Elinor, “that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.” “On the contrary, nothing can be a stronger proof of it, Elinor; for if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.”

JM: “I took pleasure in this and I wouldn’t take pleasure in it if it was wrong, so it can’t be wrong”, I know. It is fascinating because Marianne is a humorless, earnest, sincere character—I almost said “person,” because it feels like she is, like somebody one might meet. She is also a morally serious person, to the point that she cannot imagine doing something that is wrong without knowing that it’s wrong. I am sure that there are philosophy classes around Britain where students debate a proposition like “It is impossible to be wrong by mistake”. Elinor thinks it is possible. For instance, you can do things on the gust of a wish, which you justify to yourself. There is a sentence in Chapter II of Persuasion which is unusual in that it does sound authorial. Sir Walter Elliott is being persuaded by Mr. Shepherd to rent out his house and move to Bath. We then move to Lady Russell, who thinks this is a good idea—and the paragraph is introduced with this exclamation: “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”.

Still, Sense and Sensibility is the most sententious of the novels. Not only is it the novel where sententiousness most inhabits the mind of its protagonist, but it is also more often possible in it than in almost all of the rest of her work combined to identify authorial exclamations. You must remember the one when Marianne has her first illness after Willoughby inexplicably leaves for London. The first paragraph of the chapter begins: “Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby.” That is already Austen—she is tilting the table, isn’t she? The paragraph ends: “She got up with a headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment, giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough!”

DK: On the issue of Austen’s use of the absence of dialogue, do you remember, in Virginia Woolf’s fantastical description of what Austen would have been like if she had lived longer, Woolf’s writing that Austen “would have devised a method for conveying what people leave unsaid, not just for what they said”? It seems incredible for Woolf to think that Austen did not already have such a method.

JM: I agree, that puzzles me. Woolf means it as a deep compliment. She means to say almost that if Austen had lived long enough, she would have discovered stream-of-consciousness narration before Joyce and Woolf ever did. But of course, Austen has found ways of not just allowing narrative to follow the logic of thought, but to convey what characters don’t allow themselves to think. I give the example in my book of the moment when Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, dances with Mr. Darcy for the first time. Most, even first-time, readers will have noticed that she does not dislike him as much as she professes. At the end of an earlier chapter, when Charlotte Lucas’ mother says to Elizabeth “I would not dance with him, if I were you”, she replies “I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.” Well, there is hubris for you.

Austen works an extraordinary choreography in the first volume of Pride and Prejudice. At the Meryton Assembly Ball, Mr. Darcy snubs Elizabeth. He is very rude. He allows her to overhear him saying “not handsome enough for me”. Elizabeth just laughs at this folly. Then there is an informal dance at the Lucases’, where Elizabeth exacts her revenge much more gracefully. Sir William Lucas gets Mr. Darcy to ask her to dance, and says, you know, that Mr Darcy is not completely averse to it. Elizabeth delivers that brilliant killer line: “Mr. Darcy is all politeness.” Then finally, at the Netherfield Ball, they do dance together. Elizabeth has danced with the awful Mr. Collins, and then, much better, with somebody from the militia. She talked about Wickham, and while she is chatting with Charlotte Lucas, Mr. Darcy, I think the only word to use is, “pounces”, although not in the predatory way we use the word now. He doesn’t talk to her. He just asks her, and the narrative says “without knowing what she did, she accepted him”. Elizabeth curses her lack of self-possession afterwards. “Oh, what have I done?”

That is so simple, “without knowing what she did”. This is the most knowing-what-she-did person we have ever met in a novel. Elizabeth Bennet is the acme of self-consciousness, self-awareness. And yet, “Oh, what have I done?”. It epitomises what gets everybody, including many filmmakers, about the relationship between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. It is not symmetrical, but from Elizabeth’s point of view, a crude analysis would be: She fancies him, but she won’t admit it. Now, any author could say, “She fancied him, but she wouldn’t admit it”. But Austen allows us to experience a character not allowing herself to think what is in her head. That is a difficult trick to bring off; nobody else had done it before her in fiction, I don’t think, and very few people since. So that is a counterexample to what Woolf says. But again, I think she was trying to say that if Austen had gone on, she would have found even more radical ways of conveying the interior life. I don’t know if that is true or not.

DK: I suppose that to me, Woolf’s essay seems like a sustained exercise in imagining away Austen and replacing Austen with herself. For instance, Woolf says that Austen would have stopped having these little bits of dialogue that fully revealed the character, that she would have become less funny, that she would have become less confident. But in any case, to go back to earlier, Austen can feel hard to pin down, even outside her novels. For instance, some other famous quotes from her are ones like “my little bit of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour” and “I must go on in my own way; I would fail in any other”. Such comments about herself seem to be completely laced with irony.

JM: You mean the comments—the very few comments actually—that she makes in her letters about her own fictional practice. Yes, they are. They are mostly self-deprecating, and occasionally self-vaunting, but those are equally ironical. However, I don’t detect there myself, having read all her surviving letters—of course, only a tiny fraction of those she would have actually written—any real self-doubt in the irony. The letters and journals of Fanny Burney—a leading female novelist of the previous generation—contain, at least at first, real anxiety, self-doubt, self-criticism, reticence, pained modesty. Burney was younger than Austen was when she first published, but I don’t detect any of that in Austen.

DK: The point was just that well-known quotes from Austen almost always seem to signify the opposite of their literal content. For instance, the “little bit of Ivory” quote comes from a letter to her niece: “how could I append your sketches onto my…” And the other comes from this letter where she has to say “I don’t want to write your romance novel” to Mr. Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian.

JM: Yes, and the most famous one of all, which is more subtly modest, but also therefore more subtly ironical, is her remark that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”. It seems so brilliantly to foresee the complaints of generations of those who have failed to see the significance of what she wrote about. “Oh, gosh. It’s just some genteel people in an English village. Give us a break. Where are the servants? Where’s the poverty? Where’s the rick-burning? Where are the Napoleonic Wars? Where are the debates about slavery? Where’s the contest for the franchise? Where’s the formation of trade unions? Where’s women’s emancipation? Where is it all? Just two or three genteel families in a village?”

DK: Where’s the guilt and misery?

JM: To me, it is like saying about a Samuel Beckett play, “oh, it’s just two people on the stage, sitting in flower pots”. That much more extreme delimitation of space and number of characters is absolutely acceptable in absurdist, modernist fiction or drama. Why not apply the same standard to Austen? Because, of course, we know that the point is not the conventions and the social world in itself. That is just the material. Jane Austen is interested in human beings and knows that they always exist in some kind of social context, but I don’t think she is particularly interested in the social context itself. She didn’t write these novels to tell us what life was like for the midland sort in the home counties in the early 19th century. They are the structure, the data.

DK: Even critics can seem to find this puzzling about Austen. “She’s so well-regarded, but she just wrote…”. Their puzzlement seems to me naïve. But, to anticipate a different question, many satires can be hampered by the context in which they are set. For instance, Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh are extremely funny, but their books are constrained by chauvinism. The result is a form of parochialism. Austen seems to have completely generalised away from the specific social context in which she set her novels.

JM: We talked a bit about the fact that in her very fictional method, she removes herself from her novels. Virginia Woolf was good on that. “She is not there,” Woolf said. In contrast, George Eliot is totally there. It is like being in a room with the most intelligent person you have ever met: it is great, but it is the opposite of Austen.

You talk about generalizing. It is as if Jane Austen wrote with an eye on posterity. People often say that Austen is all about the conventions of this very hampered social world. But the situation is in fact exactly the opposite: you don’t need to know anything going in. The important conventions are made completely intelligible in the novels themselves, as if she knew that people would have to read these books in one or two hundred years time and still understand them. For instance, you don’t have to read a book about Regency England to get the convention—which is so important in Sense and Sensibility, and perhaps in Persuasion too—that once you have proposed to a woman, if she has accepted you, you can’t just change your mind, though she can change her mind. It is clear in the novel. Likewise with the conventions about dancing or meal times or whatever. It is as if she was calculating on being able to outlast her times.

DK: She also has remarkably little sensory imagery. For instance, does she ever tell you what colour something is? So there is something very abstract about her novels.

JM: Nothing about clothes except in the mouths of one or two very foolish people like Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbeyor Mrs. Elton in Emma. Ironic, isn’t it, that the film and TV versions are so visual?—so clothes obsessed, so building obsessed, so house and grounds obsessed. Because, for the most part, Austen doesn’t give you any of that. There are one or two exceptions with the house and grounds: obviously, in Mansfield Park, the layout of the gardens is important, just as the descriptions of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice and Donwell Abbey in Emma are quite important. But when it comes to the people, no, we don’t get shown what they look like or what they’re wearing at all, do we?

DK: The are brief moments where she’ll reveal her technique. For instance, towards the end of Northanger Abbey, she writes “the hero is before each of your eyes” about Henry Tilney’s sister’s fiancé. In effect, she deliberately allows you discretion over how to imagine many characters’ appearance. Or, again, in Sense and Sensibility, there is an extremely funny scene in which Elinor watches Robert Ferrars buy a toothpick case, and the narrative goes “Elinor turned to Marianne, but Marianne hadn’t seen a thing, because she was just as able to be alone in her own thoughts in the store as at home”. Part of the point is that there would not have been this extremely funny scene if the novel had been filtered through the perspective of a consciousness of a more inwardly-directed character. So you can figure out what she’s doing because she occasionally shows you. But anyway, to return to the issue of the absence of sensory imagery in Austen, playscripts are similar: because they are to be performed, they typically do not specify perceptual details. But Austen doesn’t seem to adapt well to the screen (or stage).

JM: I think the jury is out on whether Austen adapts to the stage. But I think that most people would say she adapts well to the screen. Whatever diehard Austen readers like myself might think, there is no doubt that she is endlessly alluring to directors, screenwriters and audiences. That may be because of some things that are not in her novels—the dresses, the clothes—and maybe we have some odd addiction to the manners and mores of Regency England (I am not sure that is the case, but people say that it is). But it is also surely because she writes great dialogue, so bang. I remember talking to Fay Weldon once about her BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. She said that she figured out, with help from the other people working on the adaptation, how much of the dialogue in the novel could be used in the five hours of screentime she had. It worked out as fifteen percent, so she went through with a pen crossing out bits of dialogue until she got it down to fifteen percent, and there you go. That’s what she claimed anyway.

DK: But as a diehard Austen reader, how do you feel about the films?

JM: Well, perhaps I should first say, I don’t often get very exercised about even the most foolish bits of adaptations. I think Jane Austen can easily survive it all. I also do think that sometimes, adaptations remind you of something that you have forgotten about or not properly noticed in the book, so that however selective it has been, you think, “Yes, there is something there”. For instance, I thought one of the best adaptations of an Austen novel was the 1995 film of Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, directed by Roger Michell. It is only two hours long, but Persuasion is, after Northanger Abbey, the shortest novel, so it leaves less out than such a film of Emma would. And it does seem to have something about it: the melancholy, the washed-outness, as reflected by both the acting and the cinematography. In particular, it conveys what in the novel it is quite hard for Austen to make you believe in: that Anne Elliot has lost her bloom. Although the film has some silly bits, like them kissing in the street—Amanda Root once said to me that they were told they had to have that for the American audience—it feels as if the people who made and acted in the film have actually read the novel. It sends you back to the book, so that if you have read the book and feel you know it well, it rings true to it, even if it is not an enactment of everything in it.

Of course, there are other films where that is not the case. There is a notorious adaptation of Mansfield Park by Patricia Rozema. Now, obviously, she is a talented director. But she was faced with the puzzle of Mansfield Park. What do you do with a novel where the heroine is often absent from key scenes, ignored by other characters; often silent, with the main drama going on unspoken in her head? Indeed, the drama is centred on precisely something that she cannot talk about, the fact that she loves Edmund. Fanny is also an apparently frail, anxious, put-upon character, but not like Jane Eyre; she is not going to answer back or furiously burn with self-assurance. So Patricia Rozema rewrites it. She gives Fanny lines from Austen’s other novels, makes her ride through a thunderstorm on a white horse, makes her a feminist heroine, I suppose. She also deals with the novel’s—for the modern reader, slightly baffling—exchange about slavery by giving to Thomas Bertram a vividly depicted history of abuse, including sexual abuse, of slaves. All that is to do with the present-day director and screenwriter; it is nothing to do with the novel. It is the opposite in some respects of what the novel is about. So I did dislike that adaptation, however well-acted it was, however beautifully filmed it was. I really disliked it.

DK: To backtrack again, can you think of novels, not by Austen, that are comparable with, particularly, Pride and Prejudice, just in respect of general quality combined with sheer funniness? I find it really hard to think of novels that are that good, that are…

JM: … that are also that funny. There are some examples. Great Expectations is an absolutely first-rate novel, and, in its comic phases, terribly funny. It is a different kind of funny. There are some bits of Great Expectations which are weep-makingly funny, but what is dark and what is funny are commingled in very unexpected ways. So you will laugh at things—and this is Dickensian, not Austenian—which you shouldn’t laugh at. You will laugh at a funeral a lot in Great Expectations, yet the funeral remains poignant, at least for the man whose wife has died, Joe Gargery, for all the comedy about it. So there is an example, really different, but, I would say, of a great and deep novel that is also very funny.

DK: Are there other examples that come to mind?

JM: Well, they are not as good as Jane Austen, but there are some 20th and 21st century authors who combine razor sharp stylistic elegance—and some bad stuff happening—with being very funny. I think the best Evelyn Waugh is very, very funny and also non-trivial about what people are really like in their bad moments, for instance in A Handful of Dust. More recently, a novelist I very much like, at least in his autobiographical magnum opus, is Edward St. Aubyn. His Patrick Melrose novels are pretty nasty and pretty funny, and non-trivially funny. They don’t score cheap points, but they are very amusing and wisely hilarious.

DK: It is interesting to me that you like Austen so much, as well as Dickens—you have written books on both of them—given that Dickens is so much more melodramatic.

JM: Yes, in many ways, they are opposites. Jane Austen, not a sentence wasted. Dickens, copious. Bountiful, some would say. Baggy, Henry James would have said. Have it whichever way you like.

DK: Is there anything that unifies them for you, besides the fact that they’re excellent?

JM: I think there is something that unifies them. It is rooted in their biographies, curiously enough. They are two of the most uneducated writers in the history of English literature, in terms of formal education. They did get plenty of informal education: Austen more than Dickens, though even Dickens got his dad doing Shakespeare’s speeches over a frugal dinner. But they had three or four years of school education between them, and probably that school education was itself absolutely inadequate. Dickens said that William Jones, the headmaster of the Wellington House Classical and Commercial Academy, the school where Dickens went for just two years, “was quite the most ignorant man that it has ever been my pleasure to meet”. So they were both in a sense self-made. Dickens was more radically self-made: economically self-made, socially self-made, everything. But they were both self-made writers. Dickens, no education, no social privilege, no schooling in how you are supposed to write. Austen, socially less of an outsider, and her father and her brothers were educated and intellectually generous people. I think Jane Austen’s family is great, actually; they were admirable people, by and large. But she is a woman, and it is not just that she was a woman; she was also out in the sticks most of the time, apart from a period in Bath. She learnt what she could from her dad and her dad’s bookshelves. So Austen and Dickens were both surprising geniuses, and they both did extraordinary and revolutionary things with the novel, which it may be that neither of them could have done had they had a better education.

They shared some God-given self-assurance, which allowed them to invent rather than to follow. I could bang on about what that meant with Dickens, but with Austen, you can see it. We have been in a way going through the novels one after another. I feel strongly that if you group Austen’s novels in the order in which they were written—so if you treat Northanger Abbey as the first of her novels, even though it was published the last—you can see that she starts off bouncing off the genres and fictional conventions at the time, parodying them, mocking them, diverging from them. Northanger Abbey is about the Gothic novel, Sense and Sensibility to some extent about the cult of sentiment and sensibility in fiction of the period. This is even clearer if you know about their genesis, and you know that Sense and Sensibility, when she first wrote it, was written in letters, in explicit imitation of the dominant form of the period. But by the time that Jane Austen gets to Pride and Prejudice, she is not thinking about any other novelist anymore. She is on her own and she is only influenced by herself. In Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, she has left everything else behind her—everything. You may meet characters who read novels, but Jane Austen herself has forgotten about the habits of all those lots and lots of novels that she read (and she certainly read tonnes of them). She has forgotten about them because they don’t help her anymore. They are behind her. She has reached a stage of only influencing herself.

DK: Lady Susan, which is in epistolary form, also fits into this narrative. There is also Sanditon. People, such as Virginia Woolf, sometimes talk about Persuasion as if it was where Austen was evolving to, given that it is in a calmer, more romantic mode. But when she died, she was writing Sanditon, which almost has elements of farce.

JM: It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Sanditon is at once beguiling and frustrating. In terms of subject matter, it looks like there is new stuff there. It has a character of color, Ms. Lambe. And it has lots about hypochondria and seaside resorts, which suggests a sustained satire on early 19th century medical practice. Yet in terms of how it is written—we are back now to where we started, my interest in style, and literary form, her sentences—although there are some nice turns of phrase, Sanditon looks to me like a very early draft. Few of the delights of Austen’s prose, for me, are there. It is suggestive of how much rewriting might have been necessary to get Jane Austen from her first sketch of what something was going to be about to the final manuscript. My PhD supervisor, Tony Tanner said that Sanditon was all the better for being unfinished. For him, it was like a romantic ruin. But I find the prose quite unsatisfying, quite unlike in any of her finished novels, so I think that it was a long way from getting going.

DK: In your book, you say that Austen’s brilliance was in the style, not in the content. I agreed with the two sentences after that, which were about how her distinctive success in depicting character itself depends on her style. But for instance, as a very simple observation, Austen did not seem to be a novelist for whom style was the main concern. The free indirect style is wonderful given the way that it permits you to access the characters’ perspectives, but the dialogue can do that too. For me, then, one aspect of Austen’s brilliance seems to consist in her extraordinary capacity for mind-reading. The free indirect style is one vehicle for her mind-reading, but more generally, she seemed to have an incredible ability for simulating perspectives.

JM: I think that is true. Style may be my preoccupation. We don’t know, because she left so little record of what she thought she was doing, but I am not supposing that style was her preoccupation. There are novelists who are preoccupied with style: there have been quite a few from Henry James onwards. Some of them are great; some of them are not. My sense is that it was a means to an end with Austen. Probably a lot of it was instinct, too. It is often said that Jane Austen hardly ever writes a duff sentence. Her sentences are beautiful, usually. She had an ear. I doubt that she sat down and chiseled away at it too much. She probably wrote many of those sentences just by instinct, but we will never know; we have no really good, helpful manuscript evidence. Still, I am pretty sure it was a means towards an end.

You’re right that psychology was another of her gifts. I think that is what she shares most with Shakespeare, actually: an unerring psychological sense, so that at just the moment when any other writer would be tempted to follow one predictable line in a dialogue, there is a little twist which makes the thing believable. I think it would be possible to write a good book about Jane Austen’s art of psychology, as it were. I don’t know if there is one, although the best critics of Austen are able to illuminate aspects of psychology, especially through the dialogue. Dialogue, and the brilliance of dialogue, is something else I don’t think I found enough room for in my book. I would like to do much more on that, because it is an extraordinary gift. The two gifts of novelists which are least often written about in books of academic criticism are humor and dialogue. They are two of the hardest things to write about, but they are obviously both essential to Austen. In my experience, there is very little good written about the art of dialogue in fiction generally, or in specific novelists.

DK: I don’t mean to suggest anything like an over-focus on style in your book, because I learned a lot from it. And it seems to me that it is not just with Austen that there’s an underemphasis on style in academic literary criticism. What is your impression of how much style tends to be discussed by academics in English literature?

JM: I think things have changed a bit in recent times, for the better, generally speaking. But yes, the first sentence of my book about Dickens is a question. “What is so good about Dickens’ novels?”. Very little that is written about Dickens addresses that; there is much more about what is dark or twisted or weird about Dickens’ novels. I have a pessimistic explanation of this, which I hope is too pessimistic, namely that the trade of academia, especially in North America, requires would-be academic professionals to display their ingenuity, and therefore values the critic’s ingenuity over any capacity to reveal the author’s ingenuity. This is a deeply pernicious habit, inasmuch as it is established. It is one of the reasons why style, but also any sense of the skills, the achievements of a writer, are not credited, let alone analyzed in books of academic criticism. Luckily, books of academic criticism aren’t the only thing. As I said, writers as good as Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare survive the critical fashions of the day. But I believe that the prioritisation of interpretive ingenuity on the part of the critic has been a debilitating tendency in universities. I can’t speak so much to Europe, but I think it has happened there in France, as well as in Britain and quite extensively in America.

DK: The first sentence of your book on Austen is also a question: “Did she know how good she was?”. Well, what do you think?

JM: Those, as I have described them, expert amateurs have often asked me that question, because they have fondly imagined that is what an academic can bring to the table; I found myself asking it because it was asked of me. It is unanswerable. But it is a poignant question, isn’t it? There are clearly many writers—including the two others that we’ve mentioned most often in this discussion, Shakespeare and Dickens—who knew exactly how good they were, because they were given tonnes of evidence for it. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t have chips on their shoulder. It doesn’t mean that Shakespeare didn’t want to have his work turned into books, so that it wasn’t just shoddy commercial drama, or that Dickens didn’t want to leave behind his manuscripts and notes, so that critics of the future could see how carefully he had planned it all. But they did have plentiful evidence, as did many other great writers.

Where they didn’t, it is often poignant and interesting. Keats died not knowing whether anybody was ever going to read him, and made a bit of a thing about it. But Austen was a singular case, because not only did she not have time to see how successful her work was going to be, but unlike Keats, she also didn’t know any other writers. There was no Maria Edgeworth saying to her, “God, you’re better than me”. She had that admiring review written by Walter Scott, but we don’t even know if she knew it was by Walter Scott. She never escaped, because she didn’t live long enough, the obscurity of her writing life, where the only people who read her work and talked to her about it were friends and family, some of whom were absolute ninnies. I think one index of her self-confidence, actually, is that she recorded some of the most ninny-like things people said. She clearly was quite relaxed about it. She knew that when people said, “Oh, you can’t have clergymen being such fools,” that they were fools.

DK: But despite the lack of testimony from others, doesn’t it seem that she knew?

JM: Yes. I think, first of all, that technically, what she was doing was so unusual, so ahead of the game—and indeed, it was going to be ahead of the game for almost a century—that she must have known that nobody else amongst her contemporaries was doing anything similar. Emma, a novel of such formal sophistication—you can’t do that by accident, whatever Henry James says. Consider the moment in Volume III where Austen suddenly drops in a chapter from Mr. Knightley’s point of view, the only one, and Emma walks almost out of sight. At that moment, you know this is a writer who knows what she is doing, because suddenly she has done something different, and she is daring you to notice. So, it seems to me, it is inconceivable that Austen wasn’t conscious of the sophistication of a novel like Emma, which means that she knew she was doing something that had no parallel anywhere else in the fiction of her day or earlier. You can’t do that without having some considerable self-confidence.

But I think that is as far as we can go. I think that no writer knows. I have known many living novelists, as well as some who are now dead, and none of them knows if they will be read in 50 years time. Still, I think what can be said is that Austen knew that what she was doing was completely unlike what any of her contemporaries or predecessors had done. In that sense, she did know how good she was. A good friend of mine and I were once having a conversation about Mrs. Elton in Emma. Many of the characters in Jane Austen give you so much pleasure because they are so ridiculous, but so believably ridiculous. We were talking about what a fantastic invention Mrs. Elton was, and my friend said to me, “Don’t you think that sometimes after a day’s writing, Jane Austen must have gone to bed and just hugged herself?” I do. I think that is a good way of putting it; she must sometimes have just hugged herself.

DK: As you said before, with Austen, one sees new things every time one rereads her. What are the latest discoveries about her that you feel that you’ve made?

JM: Oh my goodness. Well, I haven’t read an Austen novel in its entirety for almost two years. [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted in 2022.] Usually I read them all every two years when I teach them, but I have been on leave this year when I would normally be teaching the Austen course, so the last novel that I read in its entirety was Emma, because I prepared a new edition of it, which was published in March. I do remember noticing something that I hadn’t noticed before, or rather, that I had only half-noticed. I think that is often what it is with Austen: it is something that you have half-noticed, or noticed subconsciously. With Emma, the thing that I noticed, which more astute readers might have noticed the first time round, was that, although Emma has arguments with Mr. Knightley, which are almost always at least slightly playful but do sometimes involve real disagreements, she’s never wrong about him.

It is clever because people sometimes say, I think wrongly, “Oh, Mr. Knightley tells her what’s right”. That is not so. Mr. Knightley himself misunderstands things sometimes, because he is jealous and grumpy. He is not the moral monitor that people sometimes accuse him of being. But he does have a power over Emma, because she loves him. He has the power to make her right. I became aware of this for the first time halfway through the novel. Everything that Emma says about Mr. Knightley is true, whereas everything she says about other people is untrue. For example, in Chapter VIII of Volume II, at the Coles’ dinner party, there is a conversation between Mrs. Weston and Emma, in which Mrs. Weston wonders if there might not be a tendresse between Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax. She raises the possibility that Mr. Knightley sent Jane the piano. Emma responds, “I do not think it is at all a likely thing for him to do. Mr. Knightley does nothing mysteriously.” It is true. Emma is taken aback at the thought—she is speaking instinctively—but she is honing in on something.

The pinnacle of this occurs when Harriet Smith presents Emma with what seems to be the evidence that he is in love with Harriet. Again, Emma is taken aback. She is appalled—in shock, you might say. Harriet waits for her to say something. Emma knows that she could say anything to her and Harriet will believe it. But what she says is “Harriet, I will only venture to declare, that Mr. Knightley is the last man in the world, who would intentionally give any woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really does”. It is incredibly generous. You realize that is a good moment for Emma. But also, she can’t say something untrue about him—incredible when she is so good at saying and thinking untrue things about everybody else.

DK: Although she does think that he might love Harriet, and that’s wrong.

JM: Yes, she does think it is possible. That is her one, in a way, misconception about him, isn’t it? Anyway, Mr. Knightley has a magnetic influence upon her. And she upon him; that is another story. But I hadn’t really seen that until my most recent reading, because I, of course, saw all the disagreements they have. The novel begins with one crucial disagreement between them. But you believe that she really loves him because, before she ever realizes it herself, the novel enacts his good influence on her.

DK: That’s such a classic Austen theme. She seemed to love how in marriages, each partner would bring out the good or the bad. One of my favorite images in Persuasion is of Admiral Croft driving the carriage, but with his wife in effect keeping them from being overturned: “But by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand they neither fell into a rut, nor ran foul of a dung-cart; and Anne, with some amusement at their style of driving, which she imagined no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs, found herself safely deposited by them at the Cottage.”

JM: Yes. Anne has a similar thought about Charles Musgrove, doesn’t she? “Anne could believe, with Lady Russell, that a more equal match might have greatly improved him; and that a woman of real understanding might have given more consequence to his character, and more usefulness, rationality, and elegance to his habits and pursuits.” In some ways, this is an immodest reflection on Anne’s part, because Charles proposed to Anne and she turned him down. She does not wish that she had married him, but she knows that if she had married him, he wouldn’t have been as much of a grumpy, know-nothing as he is. That is quite a crucial thing, isn’t it, in Austen—and one tends to think that some of these things are simply true of life, since Austen was no fool—that husbands and wives can make each other better or worse. They can pull each other up, or pull each other down. Yeah, absolutely. That Mr. Bennett is as he is because of his wife. He would have been a better person with a better wife.

John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at University College London and author of How Novels Work (2007), Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (2007), What Matters in Jane Austen? (2012), and most recently The Artful Dickens (2020). Daniel Kodsi is a lecturer in philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.