The Penguin Podcast: Episode 3 – The Classics

What makes a book a classic? Who decided which books make it into the canon? And how long would it take to read the entire list? Join our exploration through our Classic bookshelves with author Henry Eliot who answers listener questions with reading recommendations from all eras. Plus, we delve into the world of Jane Austen with Gill Hornby, whose novel Miss Austen is being adapted into a four-part drama by the BBC.

Click the button below to listen or continue scrolling to explore all the books mentioned in this episode.

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Episode 3: Transcript

Rihanna Dhillon

Hello and welcome back to The Penguin Podcast and another episode of Ask Penguin. I'm your host. Rihanna Dhillon, today I'm back here at Penguin Books tucked away in our evermore book filled studio, where, as usual, I'm going to try and answer some of our listeners questions. Well, actually, I'm going to find some experts to answer them for you, because as The Penguin Podcast, we're lucky enough to be able to speak with loads of the incredible authors whose work is published right here at Penguin as well as the people who work in all sorts of other parts of the business.

 So if you have a question that you'd like to Ask Penguin, this is the place to send it. Go on. We'd be so pleased to hear from you. You can get in touch by emailing penguinpodcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk and you can find that address in the show notes.

Or if you don't have a question, perhaps there's just a general topic that you'd like us to cover, or an author that you'd love to hear as a guest. Do let us know. We cover all sorts of themes and genres on the show, but today, we're talking about a very specific kind of fiction. Our episode this week is all about classics and modern classics. But what does that word classics actually mean?

I mean, what makes a book a classic is that quite an intimidating label. Are there some stories that everyone should really read? What is a modern classic? Later, we'll be chatting with author Gill Hornby about her detailed research into the Austen family that led her to write her best-selling novel, Miss Austen.

But first, when it comes to the classics, there's one person that literally everyone in penguin said we should talk to here with me today is author, editor and fellow podcaster Henry Elliott. Henry is the author of The Penguin Classics Book and The Penguin Modern Classics Book. You can see why you've asked him here. He's also a QI elf and hosts the podcast on the road with Penguin Classics. So I think if anyone can help unpick this, it's Henry Elliot. Hello, Henry.

Rihanna Dhillon

Thank you so much for joining us.

Henry Eliott

Well, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Rihanna Dhillon

So before we get into any more details or recommendations, which I know you're going to help us with, I think let's try and understand, what does it mean when a book is described as a classic or a modern classic?

Henry Eliott

Yeah, this is the big question, isn't it, and it's surprisingly tricky to pin it down. And lots of people have come up with definitions for what a classic means. My favorite definition is one that Ezra Pound, the poet, came up with and he publishes book called The ABC of Reading which sounds better than it is actually. It's a kind of it's a kind of book for critiquing poetry. But he at the beginning, he includes a series of warnings, and one of the warnings that he puts in is this definition of a Classic, where he describes it as something that isn't bound by any kind of rules that you can come up with. It's something that has a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness. And that's what I really like, that irrepressible freshness idea, because for me, what differentiates a Classic from something that's just a, I don't know, a historical artifact, is that it still feels alive in some way. It still speaks to us across time and across place.

Rihanna Dhillon

I am so impressed by the books that we have. I have next to me here. They are enormous. I don't want to hold one up, because I drop it, but somewhere in there, there must be a book that sparked your love of Classics.

Henry Eliott

Oh, that's a good question. I think I've always, like so many people always loved reading. It was such a escape and comfort when I was small. In terms of Classics, I suppose probably the book that's been with me the longest. I feel like all of us, we collect those kind of talismanic books, don't we like four or five books, which you have to have with you where you go. And so I think the one that's been with me longest is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I'm sure is the same for many people. I just love it, and I find maybe it's because that book is almost a metaphor for falling into a book and losing yourself and exploring these strange other worlds. And you know, I've collected illustrated editions of it. I love that book. I've read it many times over the years

Rihanna Dhillon

Where was your favorite place to read it?

Henry Eliott

Well, I have taken it with the illustrator, Chris Riddell, to the banks of Port Meadow where the story was originally told, and that was pretty special, and especially there with Chris, who's such an amazing illustrator, and he had recently done some anniversary editions of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And I remember as we sat there by the river, imagining Dodgson and little Alice Liddell coming up the river and telling the story, he said that he imagined himself joining this long table of illustrators, with John Tenniel at one end and Arthur Rackham and all the other illustrators down at the end, and he was joining the tea table at the very end. It was like, kind of Mad Tea Party. Yeah, that was very special. Yeah, I've read that book in lots of different places.

Rihanna Dhillon

So how do you think the idea of the classic has changed over time? Because, as we say, there's a classic and then there's the modern classics.

Henry Eliott

Yeah, sure, it's definitely changed. And you know, in the 18th century, when people talked about the classics, they specifically meant ancient Greek and ancient Roman classics. And for some people, that is still the definition of classics when you use that word, but gradually it's kind of cut off has crept more recent. So in the 19th century, some slightly more modern authors, like Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, they were kind of allowed into this group of classics. And then in the 20th century, it suddenly accelerated, because in the 20th century, the word started being used by publishers to market their lists of books. And so in the interest of selling books, more and more recent books got labeled classics. And then we invented terms like modern classics, and even a term I don't believe in, which is the instant classic. And so suddenly it's come much more recent.

So yes, it has changed. It goes right back, actually, to a Roman writer, but I think the second or third century AD called Aulus Gellius, who loved reading and spent lots of time in Greece, where he read lots of Greek literature, and when he was staying in Attica, he wrote this compilation, which he called attic nights, where he'd spent his nights reading and copping down his favorite bits of literature. And he came up with this term for the best writers that he could think of. And he used the term. He took it from the highest tax band in ancient Rome. There were, kind of, I think there were six different tax bands, and the aristocrats, the wealthiest people who paid the most tax, were known as the classici. That was just the tax name for them. And so he described his favorite poets and authors as the classici , the Scriptures, classici . And that's why we call them classics today. That's

Rihanna Dhillon

That's  so interesting. So because obviously that would have been describing, as you say, a really specific set of people, the aristocrats. And even now, if we think about those early classics, they are also going to be describing a really like a particular set of people, ie men, predominantly white men, I'm assuming. So when did that definition start to change and start to include people who weren't white men.

Henry Eliott

For sure, this, I feel, is a really positive side to how we talk about classics today. And yeah, if you think about that, you know where that different definition came from. It was a single man in his study deciding who was best. And that kind of idea of classics has persisted for a long time. And I think there was this alongside the idea of classics was the idea of a canon, which was a similar idea this kind of quite exclusive list, but was delivered from on high by usually white men who decided what were the great books that we all ought to read. I feel like this really came to a kind of climax in the early years of the 20th century, when a chap called Charles W Eliot. Share his surname, was retiring as president of Harvard University, and as his kind of retirement fling, he published this series of the Harvard classics, and it was marketed as Dr Eliot's five foot shelf of books.

And it was 50 volumes. It took up five feet on a bookshelf. And it was 23,000 pages, and it was his personal view of what. He had a particular phrase for it, he said. He said, these are the books which are essential to the 20th century idea of a cultivated man. And if you look at what that list is today, it is entirely white, almost entirely male, and he does slip in about five women, but they're mostly single poems in one.

Rihanna Dhillon

How magnanimous of him.

Henry Eliott

Exactly. It's completely sort of biased and one sided. And to be honest, I think this idea of a canon is just completely outdated now. You know, I think we've gone beyond that. I think we moved beyond that as soon as it was impossible for a single person to read every book there is in the world.

Rihanna Dhillon

When was that point?

Henry Eliott

Well, I mean, the last person who claimed he'd read everything was Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the beginning of the 19th century, which might just be true, because, you know, the factorization of publishing hadn't really come in. You know, there were fewer books around. I still think, even then, it would have been impossible to read them all. But some, you know, I just think it's impossible now. And Italo Calvino, the great Italian writer, in his 1981 essay, why read the classics? He has a great line where he says, There's no way we can all read everything. All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of classics. And that, for me, feels like a much healthier way of thinking about classics. We each compile our own personal library.

The Argentinian writer Borges had a similar idea. He had a personal library of favorite books. And as by it, the writer A S Byatt, she's she's kind of moved beyond the idea of a single canon. She says that a culture's canon is an evolving consensus of individual canons.

So we, we kind of all have our personal library and where those crossover that could be seen as a as a group or a community's canon, but no longer does it get delivered down from someone like Harold Bloom, who says this is the Western canon? Yeah, you know, I think that's just we've moved beyond that.

Rihanna Dhillon

I actually haven't really, I mean, I've talked about how impressive these books are. Haven't really asked you, how on earth you approached writing them or making them? I mean, they are. They're so gorgeous, and they take you on such a journey, and kind of offer up these terms that I hadn't even thought about literature before. So how did you even begin to start compiling these lists?

Henry Eliott

Thanks. Yeah. Well, it's I had. I had an unusual remit when I was working at Penguin Classics, so half of it was a regular editor's role commissioning new titles into the list, which, to be honest, struck me as so such an odd idea commissioning new titles into the classics list, we can talk about that, but, but the other half of my role was to think about new ways to present the list and and share it with people. And it struck me that the list had grown so huge that it was actually quite difficult for people to navigate it and to know what was there if they hadn't been directed to. And actually, the idea for these books started not as a book idea at all but started thinking about museums and museum collections.

And I was thinking about, I started thinking about the list as a as a kind of physical space where you could walk into the 18th century French room and and through that door would be the 19th century French room, but through that door is the 18th century German room, and you could see what was on the walls there. And maybe if you went up the stairs, you get to the 19th century and so on. And, and I actually felt, as far as sketching out, you know, the architectural plans of this museum and dreams one day of sort of taking over a warehouse and kind of building it, which sadly never happened, but it kind of these ideas as we discussed, some became more and more book shaped.

Rihanna Dhillon

So because we couldn't pass up the opportunity to get you to answer some listener questions,if that's all right, I've got some for you right here. So our listeners have been thinking about classics related problems, and I think this one is so perfect for this time of year. Our first listener asks, Can you recommend a modern classic set in New York with autumn vibes,  if possible, yeah, with plenty of jazz and romance?

Henry Eliott

Oh, right, yeah, I can. I think I can. Yeah, I've got two books in mind. The first is, you know, it's a long established classic. Which is the book that really made F Scott Fitzgerald's reputation, and that's the Beautiful and the Damned, which is the book he wrote just before Great Gatsby. He came out in 1922 he was his second novel, and it's very autobiographical. It's a story of him and Zelda careering around New York, drinking too many mint juleps and driving fast cars, and it's, I mean, he fictionalizes it, but it's very thinly fictionalized. So that's a great jazz age novel.

The one I've read recently, which was completely blew me away. So I work, I work at Faber, and Faber now on their Classic list, they've just brought out this incredible forgotten classic from the 1920s called The Ex-wife by Ursula Parrott, which, at the time was it was published anonymously. It was this sensation and absolute bestseller, and it's just been kind of forgotten, really, but it's, it is brilliant, and I can't believe it's 100 years old because it reads so freshly. It's basically, it's a story of a divorce. It's about a young couple who decide to get divorced at the beginning. And the course of a novel is this very messy negotiation which culminates with, well, this is not quite the ending, but they do decide to get divorced in the end. And then, I won't spoil the end, but it's the voice is just brilliant. It's full of wisecracks. Is kind of deadpan. Women lost in New York, looking for love, newly single, and she she the best bit is that she moves in with a friend who's also an ex-wife, and their conversations are just priceless. It's brilliant. So I'd highly recommend that too.

Rihanna Dhillon

That's both of those sound excellent, especially that second one. So this is another interesting one. Can you recommend any nonfiction classics, because we have talked predominantly about novels.

Henry Eliott

Yeah. I mean, gosh, there are so many. I mean, you know, I You can't go wrong with reading Virginia Woolf sets as A Room of One's Own. But really, if you, if you're into reading, I think you have to read those. One of my favorites is a very strange, extended essay from the 19th century called the confessions of English opium eater by Thomas de Quincey, the romantic friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge and so on. And he, like many of them were at the time, was addicted to laudanum, which was just freely available from chemists with cozy sounding names like Mrs. Holcomb’s family cure or whatever, and it was just pure open world and alcohol.

He was completely addicted, and he wrote this account of his addiction. So it's, it's really the very first of what has become a kind of micro-genre of addiction memoirs. And what is interesting is he splits it in into the pleasures and the pains of opium. And he at the beginning, he says, you know, I'm going to tell you how bad this is, and none of you take this stuff and he describes the pains briefly, but the pleasures, he completely goes to town and describes his crazy hallucinations and how he kind of would take opium and then walk the streets of London, and imagine he was kind of searching for the northwest passage through these labyrinthine streets which seemed to multiply in front of him. It's an amazing experience reading it and I recommend that.

I suppose my two top tips for non-fiction are one well-known and brilliant. One less well known. The well-known one is from the early 17th century, its huge book called The Anatomy of melancholy by Robert Burton. Which of Robert Burton was this kind of reclusive Oxford academic. He wrote this study of melancholy, or depression, as a means of warding off his own depression, he found that kind of writing about it and and the activity of writing staved off his own melancholy. But it's just extraordinary. He packs in references to devils, to classical literature, to sort of folklore, to his own personal anecdotes. It's a wonderful sort of rag bag of his very witty, academic, affable company and Penguin have actually just published a new edition a couple of years ago, which is which is brilliant, beautifully typeset, great annotations. So I can highly recommend that.

The other one is less well known, very strange book. It's got a kind of cult following. I love the strangers coming up so well, you can tell the kind of things they like. It's a book called The Quest for Corvo. A J A Simmons. It's a biography, but it's a biography of a very strange man called, well, he had lots of different names, but in this he tends to be called Father Rolf. Freyr Rolf, okay. Rolf was a writer. He wrote an odd novel called Hadrian the seventh, about a about an Englishman who sort of accidentally becomes Pope, and Simmons goes on this quest to try and work out who this Rolf is. So he goes on a quest for who was this. And he keeps getting to places just sort of just as the archive has been demolished, or just as the sort of record has gone and he's going to visit someone just as they've died. It's sort of, it's this kind of brilliant story of not really being able to find this person at all. And it's, it's funny and gripping and very slim as well.

Rihanna Dhillon

Amazing. I knew uou'd be good at this. Okay, we have another question, which is kind of going a bit further afield. So this person has read their way through most of the British Classics canon, and is looking kind of, I guess, abroad for books that have been translated. Where should I start? So I know we've sort of said War and Peace.

Henry Eliott

Well if you fancy another big one, another complete romp, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas, which is a tale of revenge a person wrongfully imprisoned in this island prison off Marseille called the Chateau d’lf and his escape from there, and then revenge on the people who put him in prison is just amazing, and it's, I think Count of Monte Cristo is probably where our 20th century obsession with superheroes comes from, because he kind of….

Rihanna Dhillon

so that's what, who's to blame?

Henry Eliott

I guess, because this guy, he's like, you know, it's a classic sort of superhero joke. He gets broken down for nothing in this prison, and then he kind of escapes and disappears and then comes back as this, like, super rich, super skilled, super, sort of confident hero, basically, who's just knows how to do everything, slightly vampire like as well. It's some, there's definite sort of vampire vibes coming from him. But it's a page turner. I mean, you will love it. And it's long.

Just thinking of Germany it'd be. It's interesting, because, I think just traditionally for whatever, I don't know quite what reason, but in England, we've read a lot of French literature and translation and Russian literature translation, less German and Spanish. And so just to throw out a couple of recommendations from there, a German language novel which I've been reading and talking about recently on the sub stack I run called read the classics, is a novel by the greatest German language writer, Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was his first novel. He wrote it when he was 24 in just six weeks, and it's based on an actual unrequited love of her that he had. But it was such an important book because it absolutely it was so popular across Europe as the first international bestseller, and it kickstarted the Romantic movement across Europe. So Wordsworth and courage wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for this novel being such a success, and it's great. It still reads really freshly. It's a tragic story, and it's only 100 pages.

So that's great. The greatest Spanish novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, which I love. You know, I think it's probably in my top five novels, but it's big, and not everybody loves it. So a slimmer, more recent novel I'd recommend, not very well known, is one that penguin Modern Classics have published as the island by Anna Maria Matute, who won lots of she won the Cervantes prize, actually, I think, for this novel. And it's a coming of age novel of a young teenage girl who's been sent to Majorca during the Spanish Civil War, and she's there with her aunt and her cousin, and as news of the war comes from the distance this island gets hotter and hotter, and these kind of tensions start to come through. It's very it's kind of a broiling, simmering teenage angst novel. It's very good,

Rihanna Dhillon

Henry, that has been amazing. Honestly, I've learned so much, and I now just have to remember all of your brilliant tips and recommendations. Where can our listeners find you well?

Henry Eliott

So I have a sub stack called Reaper classics. That's probably the quickest way. I also run a monthly classics book club at Hatchards bookshop in London, the oldest bookshop in the UK. So if you look on their events page, you'll find that, yeah, we discuss a different classic each month. So either of those places fantastic.

Rihanna Dhillon

Henry Elliott, thank you so much for joining us.

Henry Eliott

It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rihanna Dhillon

Joining me today is best-selling author Gill Hornby, whose novel Miss Austen is based on a littering mystery that's puzzled biographers and Austen academics for years. Gill, thank you so much for coming on the penguin podcast.

Gill Hornby

Thank you for having me.

Rihanna Dhillon

It's such an interesting premise for a novel, and for those who are yet to read it, can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Gill Hornby

Yes, well, the Miss Austen of the title is not Jane Austen. It's her sister, Cassandra, who was the Miss Austen of the time, because she was the older sister. And so Jane was Miss Jane Austen, and it begins a long time after Jane's death, or sort of nearly 40 years after her death, when Cassandra's coming to the end of her life and beginning to think about the legacy of Jane Austen. Jane went through an incredible dip in her fortunes before she died. I mean, when she died, she thought she was pretty much done as an author. It was all she'd have this flurry with pride and prejudice in 1813 the summer of 1813 It was the kind of Bridget Jones of the bestseller list, and then it sort of dwindled and dwindled, and then she had this horrible sickness and early death at the age of 41 and Cassandra, who was her best beloved and most devoted sister all of her life, they were so close, they shared a room all their lives. Jane died in her arms.

So Cassandra was became the keeper of the flame. There wasn't much of a flame to keep, to be honest, because she was promptly forgotten about but, she was very conscious of the fact that she may become famous again, and that she alone was in control of what we would end up knowing about Jane. The thing about women in history is that there's it's very hard to find out things out about them, because they don't leave records. You know, even from bank records and things like that, you can learn a lot, but there aren't any from women at that time. So really, the big source of our information are the many, many hundreds of letters that Cassandra and Jane wrote to one another over the years.

They were forced apart, very often by various family circumstances and economic circumstances, and in that time, they wrote often. So towards the end of her life, Cassandra sat down with her pile of we have no idea how many letters she would have sat down with and went through them all and burnt all except 161. So of the 161 we do have. What we know about them is there's nothing in there that Cassandra didn't want us tonight, and in the ones that went we can have no real way of knowing what it was she was cleaning up.

Legacy management was a big thing in those days. You can't do it now, because we drip ourselves all over the place and all over the internet, and we'll have no control whatsoever about how people look at us. But in those days, it was quite straightforward. You found a bit of paper and you either set fire to it or you framed it behind glass.

You know, I think it was Fanny Bernie's niece. I might be wrong. Some of the people correct me, who went through all of her letters, which were pretty racy and crossed out everything. But of course, now they can just be x-rayed and read all of it, because Cassandra Austen was a very thorough woman. Everything she did, she did very properly, and she burnt them. And that's that. So it's that, that stage of her life that we come into the novel.

Rihanna Dhillon

And there are letters from Jane printed in your book are those letters that did exist, or ones that you…

Gill Hornby

I’m afraid, imagine that's a posh word. Yes, I made them all up. Yeah, that was a bit daunting. But then again, yeah, it must have been, well, in the end, I could was turned into, like, one of those forges, like the Hitler diaries. I could knock one up in five minutes. She had a kind of very distinctive letter writing style, and I just sort of, I hope I got the hang of it. Anyway, nobody's ever picked me up on it.

Rihanna Dhillon

I mean, they are brilliant and so witty you could the voice does really come through. So you've written a biography as well of Jane Austen, the girl with the golden pen.

Gill Hornby

Yearh, so I wrote that. I mean, I was just approached write that by short books to do a little biography of Jane for young leaders, eight to 12 year olds. So it's only a short book, obviously. But the thing about writing short books is you have to know as much as you need to know to write a long book. Yeah, so I'd always been absolutely buried in the novels, but it wasn't until then that I became engaged in the story.

And at the same time, something else had come into my life, which we had moved into a house, old vicarage in Berkshire, and we were told by the village that there was a Jane Austen connection, and I didn't think much of it at the time, because I thought she probably had connection with most vicariously, yeah, but in fact, the connection was with Cassandra, who's who had been engaged to the son of the Vicar, and they were all set to marry, And it was a perfect match. Their fathers were best friends. All the brothers knew one another, and then tragedy and tragedy intervened and and so she never did get married.

Which was crucial to Jane, because if Cassandra had married, then Jane would somehow have had to marry the first ghastly curate that came along, and she never did attract men particularly, but there was safety in numbers two spinster daughters, and when they finally, finally got a cottage of their own, not until for the last eight years of Jane's life, then Cassandra said, right, you sit down and write and I'll run this place. So she was basically her wife, yeah. So they were, were a perfect partnership, which would never have happened if Cassandra had married. Then I did all this research for the for the biography, and read all the letters, and I was very struck by two things, one, that all biographers hate Cassandra Austen, because she burnt everything and that got on their nerves, and two, Jane worshiped her.

She never made a decision without her, she knows she wouldn't even trimming upon it. She would write to Cassandra to ask her what it was. She says at one point, ‘I loved your account of last night's ball. You truly are the finest comic writer of your generation’, which was quite something coming from Jane Austen, and then went towards the end, when she gets very ill, and Cassandra's looking after she becomes very, very dependent, and Cassandra's dragged off by another hypochondriac relative who doesn't need her as much, and it's very painful for them. And Jane writes to her, ‘Don't worry about me. I was ill at the time of your going, purely from the fact of your going’. And it wasn't much longer after that, she died in Cassandra's arms. So I wanted to make the case for Cassandra, yeah, built on that, because as she she was getting a really rough ride from from everybody else.

Rihanna Dhillon

It's interesting you say that she, Jane described her as being, you know, such a comic, because in your book, you sort of allude to the fact that Cassandra herself doesn't think herself funny. She's happy to laugh at everybody else, and is very good natured, but she doesn't think herself funny.

Gill Hornby

I know, I had to, sort of, I had, I had to balance that, because another thing that struck me when I was doing my research is various nephews wrote memoirs, because her fame was by then, towards the end of the nephew's life starting to build, and they thought, might as well cash in on that, and they create out of Jane, a character who never worried about anything, who only cared for the family, who never wrote for fame or for money, which is rubbish, but no upset ever disturbed the flowing of her life.

Well, that just is simply untrue. And of Cassandra, they write that she's a really crusty old stick and really horrid things, you know, because Cassandra stayed on living in the cottage in Chawton for 40 years after Jane's death. And they said, Oh, it was never the same. When we visited after Jane was gone, the light and joy had gone out of it.

You know, it was just Aunt Cassandra dressed in black. And I see, I feel with that there was a certain injustice, because Jane had died when she was young and in her prime, and Cassandra, you know, did the indecent thing of becoming an old woman. Yeah, yeah, so, but she was much more she was more sensible, she was more practical. She she had her own. I mean, her mother thought she was a marvel and thought Jane was a disaster area, but because, you know, her stitch was perfection and her handwriting perfection and stuff like that, but she loved Jane's jokes.

Rihanna Dhillon

Do you have a theory as to why Cassandra burnt so many of Jane's letters. Or is that…

Gill Hornby

I do, and it’s in a very good book called Miss Austen by Gill Hornby, available from Penguin,

31:09

Rihanna Dhillon

You'll have to read it to find out. And I mean, Jane obviously died before, like you say, she was really recognized by her contemporaries, or had really found her audience, of course. Now her audience is absolutely enormous. What do you think that she would have made of all of the kind of the attention around her books? All of the adaptations?

Gill Hornby

Well, I think, I think there's a conflict here. I mean, she did enjoy fame and celebrity around Pride and Prejudice and so on, and Walter Scott reviewed her brilliantly, and the Prince Regent was a great fan. Yeah, she loved all that. She loved every little bit of accolade and stuff. But she had published anonymously. They were published by a lady, so actually, nobody knew who she was. She knew that they loved the books, and she loved hearing about that, but she didn't want any body to know to the extent that her nieces and nephews didn't know. Really, no, I mean, they would be reading Pride and Prejudice in the library not knowing that that their aunt had written it.

And then there's a very sweet story of there was a woman in the village because they were good rectory girls, Jane and Cassandra said they would go and look after the poor in their village. And there was a blind lady called Miss Ben. Poor. Miss Ben, she's constantly called, and they used to go and read to her. And one and summer of 1813, she wanted Pride and Prejudice, and Jane and her mother went and Miss Ben was very outspoken about what she's thought about various bits of it, and she had to absolutely clench her teeth and sort of stick her fingernails in her palms to keep quiet, because the woman had no idea. Yeah, it was the author reading.

But then, as her sales declined before her death, like Mansfield Park, didn't do very well, she it…it hurt her. She was hurt. She had to pay herself for the second edition, and lost money on it. And then she was working on Persuasion as she was dying, and that was published after her death.

So yeah, but the anonymity part of it was crucial to Jane. I mean, they weren't published under her name until after her death. And I think that's the argument for Cassandra's cleansing of her personal history, that they were very prim Georgian girls, you know, they didn't want people ferreting around in their knicker draw the way happens to celebrities these days. You know, absolute, frightful idea. So she was stopping all of that happening. So that would have been completely in accordance with Jane's wishes.

Rihanna Dhillon

Cassandra suggests to Isabella in the book, in your book, that is where starts with Persuasion. Is that her favorite? Or is that your favorite? Or,

Gill Hornby

Which is Cassandra’s favorite? It's my favorite. It depends how old I am. it's your favorite. I mean, I loved Pride and Prejudice when I was younger and didn't get persuasion,

Rihanna Dhillon

But what I loved about that beginning when you say that, Oh, you had to get through all like the baronet and everything, because that is my mum was like, you just have to get through these first few pages where they're telling you all about Sir Walter Elliot and then it is the most incredible novel. And actually, she was absolutely right,

Gill Hornby

And actually, was absolutely right, it is. But I've tried to use, actually, in all of my books, one of the novels as a sort of mirror or theme throughout the novel I'm writing about Jane and Persuasion was that one, because there is in Miss Austen, there is a story of of love coming back, yeah, and being rekindled and re-found, which is the great, the great beauty of Persuasion. Cassandra's favorite, I think, was possibly Pride and Prejudice. She had an argument with Mansfield Park, which is that she thought Fanny and Edmund shouldn't have got married, that Fanny actually should have married Henry Crawford, because she had this idea that marriage was a moral act, and that if Fanny and Edmund had married each difficult Crawford, then each Crawford would have been redeemed by being married to a good person, which is a very interesting idea, very magnanimous way, not, not the way we look at it. Everything was a moral and Christian and, you know, for self-improvement and and so on, and so, yeah, that is very rather mind blowing.

Rihanna Dhillon

Was there anything that you uncovered in your research, having obviously, like you say, been so immersed such a long time in the Austins just because of your interest and everything that kind of surprised you, even still,

Gill Hornby

I think the difficulty of her life and those sort of random things. I mean, I always want to write about families. That's what interests me. The only novels I read are about families. I want to read the dynamic. Yeah. I mean, it's a complete world, isn't it, and you have war and peace and love and tragedy and everything in in one family, and the Austen's are the most brilliant family. They were extraordinary. This little Stephenton rectory and these eight kids, and they all had amazing stories. They were, I mean, Jane was a genius, but she wasn't known to be the genius. The brother Henry was the genius. The elder brother James thought he was literally top dog and wrote very learned essays.

Rihanna Dhillon

Is he the one that writes a poem?

Gill Hornby

Yes and patronize Jane, because the novel was a really fly by night nonsense thing that wasn't going to come to anything. So there were lots of them crammed in there. And then there was one Edward, who was very handsome and charming and pretty dim. And astonishingly, when he was 14, some relatives turned up and on their honeymoon to come to stay in the village. And they said, Oh, we do like your Edward, can we take him off on the rest of our honeymoon? Such a weird thing. And Austen said, Yes, which I'm thinking I'll ever quite get over. And so off they went with this 14 year old boy on their honeymoon - the month. And then they dropped him back, and then they came back a few years later and said, so we have not been blessed with our own children. We'd like him. And Mr. Austen said, rather liked his children. Said, absolutely not. You know, what about his Latin? What about is this? And the mother who was slightly more venal, said, I think we should let him go, because by being picked up by these people, he became heir to an enormous estate, Godmersham Park, which is the subject of my next Austen novel that came out two years ago, and then Chawton great house, where the cottage is, which he eventually once it worked out how dirt poor they were. He finally bestowed on his poor, widowed mother and two single sisters. So, I mean, that's like what my children would call random, yeah, he suddenly became immensely rich, thus benefiting the whole family, because they had the new social capital of having this swanky estate. And so the nieces and nephews, all 11 of them from that family, came from a completely different social class, from the Austens.

Rihanna Dhillon

How does it feel now, knowing that Miss Austen is going out into the world in another form that you are yourself being adapted, this is very exciting. Tell us how that came to happen.

Gill Hornby

Well, a producer bought it while it was still in manuscript, actually, but that was a long time ago, and anyway, lots of things get get bought, and nothing happens, except, astonishingly, this happened because Christine the producer is a very determined person with a brilliant track record and Masterpiece Theater in the states who did Sanditon were looking for another Austen project, so they put dosh in, and the BBC matched it. And Keeley Hawes came on board to play Cassandra. And once she was on board, I think it was plain sailing away. Christine Langham probably wouldn't say that. And I tagged along to the filming, which was very exciting. And the current scheduling is but it'll be Sunday nights in February for one hours. I know I'm so lucky.

Rihanna Dhillon

I mean, it is fabulous, of course it is. But as an author, what are some of the biggest sort of worries that you have about your work being adapted?

Gill Hornby

I mean there are no worries, people might end up hearing of me, you know read the book by accident, there are no worries. I am unbelievably grateful. The scripts went were put in front of me and went off. There are a couple of lines I should have picked up on it and didn't and then. But there were other things, like I did catch it's a great script. The performances are unbelievable. The directors amazing. The locations of everything that you'd want, you know, it's, it's looks to me like the real deal.

Rihanna Dhillon

You must have had, like a sort of, you know, playing almost in your head when you were writing. You must have an image of how everything looked. How similar is the sort of finished project to what you have in your head.

Gill Hornby

It was slightly weird writing that one, because most of it is set in my own back garden, so,

Rihanna Dhillon

And they couldn't come and film there.

Gill Hornby

No, they couldn't, well, they couldn't come and film that, because now a train goes through it, so that would have rather ruined everything. But so as the point of picturing it, I didn't have to go very far, because all the locations were real to me, because it's Chawton cottage and it's Godmersham Park and it's and it's Kimberly village. They look different the sales that they've chosen. It's a different they didn't take on a village. They they filmed in an estate which had cottages and a house and a river and a church and and all of that. So they made it look like, like the thing. I mean, so none of it's sort of the same, architecturally, everything's as it always is in costume drama, slightly grander than the reality was, you know, Pride and Prejudice, they only actually do live in a kind of Georgian house, but it's always stately home in the TV adaptation.

Rihanna Dhillon

I mean, Longbourn is, yeah, yeah, beautiful place.

Gill Hornby

I did, like the Jo Wright vegetative because they will have, they were covered in my papers coming in and out. And that is actually what it's like. You know, chickens, chickens, pigs.

Rihanna Dhillon

If you could leave your readers with one thing after reading Miss Austen, what would it be?

Gill Hornby

I think that there are many types of love, and all of them are valuable. People, everybody wants to feel sorry for Jane Austen because she wrote these great love stories, but didn't have one of her own. But she did. She had Cassandra, and she had the best life with her sister that she could possibly have had. Because if she had got married, she wouldn't have written any books, and if she hadn't written any books, she would have never known happiness. So really, it's that that. There are lots of different happy ever afters.

Rihanna Dhillon

She might never have known happiness, and neither would we never read a Jane Austen. And finally, what is coming up next for you? Gill,

Gill Hornby

Well, my third novel about the Austen family is coming up next June. It's called the elopement, and it's about a romance and a scandal of Jane's nieces and nephews from her rich brother, Edward, the Godmensham Park family.

Rihanna Dhillon

Is this based in reality?

Gill Hornby

Totally, yes. Yes, it is. It's all taken from the journals of her niece, Fanny Knight.

Rihanna Dhillon

Gill, thank you so much for joining us.

Gill Hornby

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Rihanna Dhillon

Thank you. Gill's novel, Miss Austin will be reissued in January and is available to order right now. You'll find a link in the show notes to those details, as well as info on all of the other books that we've talked about in this episode.

Thanks again to Gill Hornby and Henry Elliott for sitting down with us and thank you as well to everybody who submitted a question.

They're brilliant and take us to some really interesting, sometimes weird places, which I love. If you've got a question or a message, then email us penguinpodcast@penguinbrandamhouse.co.uk we're going to try and answer as many as we possibly can. That's everything for this episode, but you can find other episodes and loads more information on all of the books that we've talked about across the series@penguin.co.uk forward slash podcast or follow the show. Wherever you get your podcasts, to find all of our episodes.

We'll see you next time, and in the meantime, Happy reading.