Introducing our new podcast

In this introduction, we explain what our podcast is going to be about, and how it will be structured.

Episode transcript

Harriet

Hi, I’m Harriet

Ellen

and I’m Ellen

Harriet

and we want to tell you about our new mother and daughter podcast, Reading Jane Austen. We’ve been talking about Jane Austen together for years, since I was first old enough to read her books.

Ellen

But we’ve never done a close reading and discussion together.

Harriet

Last year the idea occurred to me to do this as a podcast. I’ve been really liking the close reading of the Harry Potter books in the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast and I’d also been enjoying the Jane Austen podcast, First Impressions. But I couldn’t seem to find anyone doing a Jane Austen chapter by chapter reading.

Ellen

So it seemed as if we should just do our own.

Harriet

Then of course, while I was planning it, a new podcast called The Daily Knightley started. But even though they are also doing a reading of the novels, our approaches are quite different.

Ellen

And I think there’s a space in the world for several Jane Austen podcasts.

Harriet

So we’re going to go through the novels, a few chapters at a time, and take a structured approach to our discussion.

Ellen

We’re going to talk generally about the chapters and then pick one character to examine closely.

Harriet

Then Ellen’s going to share her social historian’s expertise and talk about the historical period, and I’m going to draw on my pop culture appreciation by talking about the adaptations.

Ellen

We’ve decided to start with Pride and Prejudice.

Harriet

I thought about doing them in publication order, and following her growth as an author, but that doesn’t really work unless we start with the juvenilia. And even if we stuck with full length novels, while I love Sense and Sensibility, it has some issues that I think we can explore more fruitfully after we’ve gone through Pride and Prejudice in detail. We’ve divided the book up into 10 paths, and we’re hoping to put an episode out every couple of weeks.

Ellen

So with our first proper episode, we’ll be looking at chapters one to six of Pride and Prejudice.

Harriet

I’m looking forward to it. We hope you’ll join us.