Persuasion: Episode 7, Chapters 16-18

In this episode, we talk about the upward and downward social interactions taking place, what the implications are behind the Dalrymples being Irish aristocracy, the introductions of Mrs Smith and Nurse Rooke, the comedy of Mary’s letter and Admiral Croft’s meeting with Anne, and the fact that in the book’s timeline it is only a month before Napoleon Bonaparte will escape from Elba.

The characters we discuss are Admiral and Mrs Croft. In the historical section, Ellen talks about nurses, and for popular culture Harriet discusses the 2020 television movie Modern Persuasion.

See the full transcript below.

Things we mention:

General discussion:

• Janet Todd and Antje Blank [Editors], The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Persuasion (2006)
• Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800)

Character discussion:

• Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)
• Patrick O’Brien, Master and Commander (1969) and sequels in the Aubrey and Maturin series

Historical discussion:

• Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
• Elizabeth Fry (19th century English prison reformer, social reformer, philanthropist and Quaker)
• Wellcome Collection in London

Popular culture discussion:

• Modern Persuasion (2020, Tangerine Entertainment) – starring Alicia Witt and Shane McRae

Creative commons music used:

• Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 12 in F Major, ii. Adagio.
• Extract from Joseph Haydn, Piano Sonata No. 38. Performance by Ivan Ilić, recorded in Manchester in December, 2006. File originally from IMSLP.
• Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 13 in B-Flat Major, iii. Allegretto Grazioso. File originally from Musopen.
• Extract from George Frideric Handel, Suite I, No. 2 in F Major, ii. Allegro. File originally from Musopen.
• Extract from Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major. File originally from Musopen.

Full transcript:

00:00:03 Harriet

There was one point which Anne, on returning to her family, would have been more thankful to ascertain even the Mr Elliot’s being in love with Elizabeth, which was her father’s…

00:00:14 Harriet

I’m Harriet.

00:00:15 Ellen

And I’m Ellen.

00:00:16 Ellen

And this is Reading Jane Austen.

00:00:19 Harriet

This week we’re reading chapters 16 to 18 of Persuasion.

00:00:23 Harriet

So your 100 word summary.

00:00:26 Ellen

Anne is perturbed to discover that Mrs Clay is to remain with the Elliots in Bath. She enjoys with reservations the company of Mr Elliot, but refuses to regard him as a possible husband and is ashamed of her family’s obsequious pursuit of their noble relations, which is contrasted with Sir Walter’s disapproval over visits to her girlhood friend, Mrs Smith, now an impoverished widow. The Crofts arrive in Bath, bringing the surprising news that Louisa is engaged to Captain Benwick and is amused by Admiral Croft’s naivete during a walk around Bath.

As with the last episode, I found this very easy to do. I didn’t have to go through dragging stuff out and condensing it. And I’m just wondering, does this mean that Persuasion has fewer incidents and more comedy of character than the earlier books?

00:01:33 Harriet

Well, I think it’s also, it’s a shorter book, but we’re still doing the same number of episodes, so we’re doing less each time.

00:01:40 Ellen

But the richness of the comic characterisation in this book is something that struck me.

00:01:46 Harriet

Yeah.

00:01:47 Ellen

Right, go on.

00:01:48 Harriet

Well, here’s my summary.

Anne is still concerned that her father is attracted to Mrs Clay, while Lady Russell sees a match between Anne and Mr Elliot. Anne likes him, but she doesn’t entirely trust him. The Dalrymples arrive in Bath, and the Elliots suck up to them. Meanwhile, Anne reconnects with an old school friend who is poor and sick. So, Walter is scornful about this. The Crofts deliver a letter from Mary to Anne, which reveals Louisa is engaged to Captain Benwick. Anne later encounters Admiral Croft in the street. He says Wentworth isn’t bitter and should come to Bath to find someone new.

00:02:22 Ellen

Again, this is right, probably about the smaller book, but usually one of us has some incidents that the other one leaves out and vice versa. But this time we had almost identical information.

00:02:36 Harriet

Though the Anne, Mr Elliot, Lady Russell stuff is kind of spread throughout the three chapters and we both condensed it into a single sentence.

00:02:45 Ellen

Yes, yes.

00:02:46 Harriet

At the end of the last chapter was Anne’s arrival in Bath and her first evening at Camden Place. These 3 chapters are the beginnings of her time in Bath and what she’s doing there.

Did you have anything general to say about this?

00:03:00 Ellen

Yes, these three chapters are absolutely full of Jane Austen’s wrestling with her moral views of what you should do about people you regard as above you and people you regard as below you on the social scale. And I don’t think she really gets herself sorted out, but I think it’s definitely the problem she’s talking about in these three chapters, right through. Really, I feel, with Mr Elliott making contact with his relations, well, she seems to approve of how he did it. But one would like to know what level of crawling he had to go through to persuade Sir Walter that he was an appropriate person to be recognised again. And I have a feeling it may have had to be nearly as bad as his crawling to Lady Dalrymple.

00:03:57 Harriet

True, I hadn’t thought of that because yes, he must have written a letter to Sir Walter.

00:04:01 Ellen

Yes.

00:04:02 Harriet

In the same way Sir Walter wrote a letter to Lady Dalrymple because in both cases…

00:04:07 Ellen

The connection had been broken off for reasons, and one can definitely place them on three fairly separate steps.

One of the things that I started thinking about is, in a sense, it’s seen as morally wrong that Mrs Clay, who is a poor widow, why is it so wicked that she should want to marry Sir Walter? It would have been nice for Sir Walter. There he’s been living in, well, presumably in a fairly sexless world. It would be nice to be able to have this flirtatious youngish bride. I mean, it would have been nice for him. Obviously, you know, Jane Austen disapproves of her because of her motives. But I can’t help feeling, you know, it’s a bit hard on Sir Walter that he’s got to have some appropriate person.

00:04:57 Harriet

Yes, when the people he approached after his wife’s death rebuffed him.

00:05:01 Ellen

Because he was trying to go too high. That’s all these three chapters do seem to me to be dealing with this problem of who is it right to crawl to? Who is it right not to crawl to? When should you make a distinction? You know, when you’ve got these prestigious relations, what should you do when you make contact? Do you then stand back and make these other judgements about the sort of people they are?

00:05:31 Harriet

Well, that’s where you have that conversation with Anne and Mr Elliott about good company and the best company.

00:05:37 Ellen

Yes.

00:05:37 Harriet

And I think Anne’s position is the letter was awful and they shouldn’t have gone crawling to them anyway.

00:05:44 Ellen

In that way, yes.

00:05:45 Harriet

But having done that, it’s immeasurably worse that these people aren’t, in Anne’s view, aren’t even really worth knowing.

00:05:52 Ellen

Yes, well, if they had been worth knowing, would it have made a difference?And anyway, would Sir Walter and Elizabeth have recognised that they were worth knowing? No. Well, at least you can say Sir Walter and Elizabeth take their place in this hierarchy quite comfortably.

00:06:11 Harriet

Yes.

00:06:11 Ellen

But Jane Austen puts people in this double bind of, well, these are relations, of course you know relations. But should you crawl to be friendly with these relations? And should you make a judgment once you’ve encountered them on what they’re like and pull out if you don’t think they’re worthy of you intellectually?

00:06:35 Harriet

Well, I think Lady Russell and Mr Elliot both absolutely, like Anne, absolutely make a judgment about the Dalrymples, but Lady Russell and Mr Elliot both place a higher value on the social cachet of being part of their circle. Anne basically thinks we should only mix with people we like being with regardless, whereas Lady Russell and Mr. Elliot think you have to make some sacrifices of your time to be part of the first circle because that’s important.

But equally, on the other side of things, when it comes to Anne visiting Mrs. Smith, Lady Russell and Mr Elliot are both very much in favour of that.

00:07:19 Ellen

Well, one wonders is actually no. Lady Russell is very much in favour of that And Mr Elliot says he’s very much in favour of it.

00:07:28 Harriet

Yes. Yeah, that is true. Mr Elliot could well be lying through his teeth.

00:07:33 Ellen

Well, at that particular point, he’s trying to sell himself to Anne. And he’s putting on a good act, isn’t he?

00:07:41 Harriet

Well, actually, throughout most of chapter 16, it is actually quite Mr Elliot. You do get that difference of opinion he has with Anne. But I do love the way he expresses it that Anne says they’re not good company and he says that good company requires only birth, education and manners and with regard to education it is not very nice.

Which I think is fun and funny but also it does position him as what you’re seeing here is he’s aware of the value of rank like Lady Russell is and like Anne is deliberately shutting her own eyes to, but he’s also aware of actual real value, and that puts him in concert with Anne.

00:08:22 Ellen

Well, I’m just sort of slightly interested in what Jane Austen expects her readers to make of the fact that Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret are Irish cousins. Does Jane Austen think we ought to sort of semi-despise the cousins for being Irish. What did she think of the Irish nobility at this time? My feeling is that the fact that they’re Irish puts them down a step or two.

The point is the Irish nobility at this time is in 1700, you had the parliaments of Ireland and England being amalgamated. They became the same kingdom. They’d always had the same king. But in 1700, there was a lot of carry on about which of the old Irish House of Lords should come across to the English House of Lords and who should just maintain Irish peerages.

And then the second thing was their estates were not in very good repair. And this is something that was made quite a lot of by Mariah Edgeworth. You know, she wrote this book called Castle Rack Rent, and they were sort of seen as being rack rent, partly as a result of the Union, more and more of the Irish nobility were spending their time in England. And they had agents running their estates, but they kept saying to them, we want more money, we want more money.

And the estates were then going in for this business of cutting up the farms they let, so they get more money if they divide it into three small plots and put a high rent on each of those small plots. And since they’ve got potatoes, it’s possible for a family to now live on a small plot of ground. And this was, of course, to have terrible consequences 40 years later with the potato famine. That is a fairly standard view. The rack renting for most of these agents was not to hire somebody to do a good job with farming, but was to simply cut up the property.

00:10:36 Harriet

So what that would mean, the subtext or the implication of her being Irish is that a viscount is sort of towards the lower end of the nobility anyway, but as an Irish viscount, that puts it even still above the gentry a little bit less.

00:10:55 Ellen

People were a bit sniffy about the Irish nobility.

00:10:59 Harriet

Yeah, because of course, Jane Austen would have deliberately chosen to make her Irish.

00:11:05 Ellen

Oh, yes.

00:11:05 Harriet

Well, that must have been a reason, but there could well have been a reason for that.

00:11:08 Ellen

Well, Irish must have meant something.

00:11:12 Harriet

So that was chapter 16, which is predominantly about both the downward relationship between Sir Walter and Mrs Clay, but more importantly, the upward relationship between Sir Walter and Lady Dalrymple and what the more right-thinking people, i.e. Anne, Mr Elliot, and Lady Russell, think about it.

00:11:30 Ellen

Yes.

00:11:31 Harriet

Then chapter 17 is about Anne reconnecting with her old school friend, Mrs Smith.

00:11:37 Ellen

And what she’s doing is showing the right way of choosing your friends.

00:11:42 Harriet

Yeah.

00:11:43 Ellen

With your friends, you choose someone with whom you have some sort of connection when you were on an equality and you continue to regard them as on a social equality with you.

00:11:55 Harriet

And we know that Lady Russell approves of this friendship. And it also says Lady Russell was happy to take Anne in the carriage anytime she wanted. I looked it up on the map of Bath. Ask Google Maps. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from Camden Place to Westgate Buildings anyway, and all downhill, so she probably would have appreciated a lift back home rather than to it, but anyhow.

So you have this stuff about how in spite of everything that’s gone wrong for Mrs Smith, she’s still cheerful. And Anne is struggling to understand how that can possibly be.

00:12:30 Ellen

Yes, because she tosses up the reason you could have all this suffering and be cheerful. And she sort of thinks, you know, you could be doing it in the way that Fordyce and Dr Johnson and so on would be suggesting by accepting that this is the will of God.

00:12:47 Harriet

Yeah, and it actually says that she finally determined that this was not a case of fortitude or of resignation only. So fortitude and resignation are what?

00:12:57 Ellen

Are what Dr Johnson and Fordyce would have been saying, if you have troubles, you must have fortitude and resignation. But she looks at Mrs Smith and she thinks, no, this isn’t it. She just has a constitution, yes.

00:13:15 Harriet

This elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from nature alone. It was the choicest gift of heaven.

00:13:28 Ellen

Yes.

00:13:29 Harriet

And the bit about her having been taught to knit and she says she’s making little thread cases and pin cushions and card racks. Well the thing I found fascinating about that is she’s so poor, she’s so desperate, but no way will she earn money for herself. She has all this occupational therapy in making all these little cases. But no way is she going to say “Sell them. All right, go out and buy me a new jacket with the money”.  No, she says, “There’s a poor family down the road. Give the money to them”. This sense that there would be something wrong with earning money for herself.

00:14:11 Harriet

Which is why I do think it’s kind of a little bit like Captain Harville and all his handiwork. He’s got that same elasticity of mind. He can’t do the stuff he was doing because of his injury, so he’s, I guess, he’s also doing occupational therapy.

00:14:27 Ellen

Yes.

00:14:27 Harriet

So, we see these two people in two different circumstances, and hers are much worse than his, but they’re both doing handiwork to help keep themselves occupied.

00:14:37 Ellen

But most of his is sort of little gadgets for the kitchen and toys for the children.

00:14:44 Harriet

Yes, he’s not doing it for charity, but I suppose that’s because he can make things that can be used around the house, whereas how many thread cases and pin cushions does one person really need?

But then after that we get this introduction of Nurse Rook, and I think this is probably one of these bits that we find a little bit uncomfortable, at least in Anne’s perception, and maybe by extension Jane Austen’s where

00:15:09 Ellen

She how sensible nurse Rook is as though she wouldn’t be.

00:15:12 Harriet

And Anne says women of that class have great opportunities and if they are intelligent may well be worth listening to it’s such a classist approach…

00:15:22 Ellen

and condescending

00:15:22 Harriet

…the kind of thing that,  yeah, if Sir Walter was to say it Sir Walter is so dismissive of Mrs Smith and yet Anne is being equally almost as dismissive as Nurse Rookes. Well, no, she’s not, but she’s saying, well, most people in that situation aren’t really worth paying attention to, but if you’re intelligent, then you are. It’s very, very classist.

00:15:44 Ellen

Well, I don’t know. Perhaps she’s using the criteria for this good company.

00:15:50 Harriet

I suppose she is. It’s just that she is… using the terminology ‘women of that class’, which is quite distasteful.

00:15:57 Ellen

Well, she’s so surprised that you would find women of that class.

00:16:01 Harriet

Yes, she’s disappointed that Lady Dalrymple is boring, whereas she wouldn’t be surprised if they were engaging, intelligent, entertaining people, whereas she is a bit surprised that Nurse Rook is.

00:16:12 Ellen

Yes.

00:16:13 Harriet

But we also have this bit where, again, I think we have Jane Austen kind of laughing at Anne’s idealism, where Anne says:

“What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation of all the conflicts and all the sacrifices that ennoble us most? A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes.”

And then you have Mrs Smith being more doubting about it. And at the end of the chapter, Anne thinks, well, Mrs Smith is just cynical because everything bad has happened to her. But I think we’re kind of meant to laugh at Anne for being so idealistic about the virtues of the sick room.

00:16:53 Ellen

I mean, what she wants to do is give the sick room plenty of people who are following the Dr Johnson/Fordyce way of behaving.

00:17:05 Harriet

In chapter 16, everything seems very pro-Mr Elliot. Yeah, Anne likes him. He has similar views to hers, if not quite exactly the same, but he admires her views. He seems really nice. In a sense, we’re given a picture of his character that he has presented to them.

00:17:22 Ellen

Yes.

00:17:23 Harriet

In this chapter, we learn that Lady Russell is 100% for Mr Elliot.

00:17:28 Ellen

Yes.

00:17:29 Harriet

Whereas we also learn that Anne actually isn’t that convinced?

00:17:34 Ellen

I mean, this is this picture we have that Anne is very good at understanding people. You know what it says right at the end about how her understanding of character was better than Lady Russell’s?

00:17:50 Harriet

We do get the bit where for a moment Anne is tempted by the idea of becoming Lady Elliot. But then it goes on and she seriously reflects on it and it says she never could accept him, and it was not only that her feelings were still adverse to any man save one her judgment on a serious consideration of the possibilities of such a case was against Mister Elliot.

And it’s after that we have this thing that she can’t actually pick one specific thing that’s wrong with him, but she just, she distrusts the past, if not the present. He’s occasionally talked to former associates that she thinks are a bit dodgy.

00:18:28 Ellen

He does the Sunday travelling, which is fascinating because in one of the earlier books, and I can’t remember who it is now, do you?

00:18:37 Harriet

I believe if you work it out, somewhere in Pride and Prejudice they travel on Sunday.

00:18:41 Ellen

Yes.

00:18:42 Harriet

Because of course Pride and Prejudice/First Impressions was written much earlier.

00:18:46 Ellen

After all, you can see a lot of difference in manners as you go through the books and what’s acceptable and what isn’t changes.

00:18:55 Harriet

But what it comes down to with Mr Elliot, it says that though he might now think very differently, who could answer for the true sentiments of a clever, cautious man grown old enough to appreciate a fair character? And then she goes on to say, Mr Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, but he was not open.

And that, I think, harks back to Mr Knightley in Emma criticizing Jane Fairfax for not being open. So Mr Knightley celebrates the openness of Emma just as Anne Elliot is attracted to the openness of Wentworth and she just doesn’t trust these people that you feel that what you’re seeing is what they want you to see.

00:19:32 Ellen

Who are presenting a persona and bits that are in shadow and bits that are made prominent.

00:19:38 Harriet

There are so many, I think, good sentences describing why she doesn’t like him. Why she’s just not convinced by him. There’s a bit about her not being open:

“She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing than of those whose presence of mind never varied. Mr Elliot was too generally agreeable. Various as were the tempers in her father’s house, he pleased them all.”

So I think from that, in chapter 16, we might have been starting to think that maybe Anne’s future is with Mr Elliot. But then I think that passage at the end of chapter 17 really solidifies, at least to me, that no, her future is not with Mr Elliot.

00:20:23 Ellen

Well, there’s something that Jane Austen doesn’t do. She doesn’t have Anne saying, and I’m still secretly in love with Captain Wentworth. Which actually, you know, I’ve been thinking back, you were starting to say, Anne is over Captain Wentworth. Anne isn’t. Anne is yearning for Captain Wentworth. And so we come in in the next chapter to something that lets this happen.

00:20:48 Harriet

So chapter 18, which of course is the big, big revelation scene. But one thing I wanted to comment on, Mary’s letter is dated February 1st, which means by the time she did the extra bit and then the crops brought it, we’re probably February 4th, February 5th, something like that. And we know from earlier in the book this means it is February 1815, because the book started in 1814.

Now, for many years and re-readings of this book, I never made a connection that I think contemporary readers would absolutely have made, which is that Napoleon escaped from Elba and landed in France on the 1st of March. So, it’s now less than four weeks until Napoleon escapes. And then in the middle of March, European powers declared him an outlaw and prepared to mobilise.

Now, I didn’t even get that historical context, but every contemporary reader would have, in the same way that when I first watched Casablanca and Rick says it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, I didn’t get that, of course, it must be a day or two before the attack on Pearl Harbor. And I think it would be the same nowadays if you had someone, like Michael actually was, in 2019, talking about going to a conference in Wuhan in 2020.

00:22:03 Ellen

It’s sort of a bit more like saying, I mean, after all, Sally and I were planning to go to a conference in New York.

00:22:12 Harriet

On September 13th, 2001, yeah. When I first realised this, I was thinking it would be like setting something in August 2001 in New York. It’s something that would be so present to a contemporary reader that we just completely miss. This, unlike any other Jane Austen novel, it is set in a very, very specific time. And the reader knowing this would think “Okay, it’s the 1st of February, there’s how many pages left of this book? Is this going to be relevant?”

And it isn’t. As it happens, it isn’t particularly because the Navy weren’t particularly involved. But the point is, it’s a nuance that we just totally miss when we read it today.

00:22:53 Ellen

Yes.

00:22:54 Harriet

But anyhow, from that we have Mary’s letter, which is just so funny. It is just Mary through and through. I think my favourite is “Mrs Harvill must be an odd mother to part with them so long. I do not understand it.”

But then later on, and not very much later on even, she says, I do not expect my children to be asked, you know, I can leave them at the great house very well for a month or six weeks. Classic Mary! She doesn’t even see the contradiction of what she’s saying.

Of course, the big thing in that letter is the revelation that Louisa is engaged to Captain Benwick. And then Anne’s reflection on it as she tries to think what could have attracted Louisa to Captain Benwick.

00:23:36 Ellen

Well, I think even before that, what she thinks is Captain Wentworth is not going to marry Louisa. So that hope is springing up.

Then it says:

“The conclusion of the whole was that if the woman who had been sensible of Captain Wentworth’s merits could be allowed to prefer another man, there was nothing in the engagement to excite lasting wonder”.

Which is kind of like all the way through we’ve had people like Lady Russell thinking Anne is superior to Louisa Musgrove. Now we have Anne thinking, well of course Wentworth is superior to Captain Benwick.

00:24:07 Ellen

Yes.

00:24:09 Harriet

I love this chapter because after this funny, perfect Mary letter, then we have the lovely, lovely conversation with Admiral Croft where he’s been so gorgeous.

00:24:18 Ellen

It’s beautiful. I mean, that is part of that feeling that I said right at the beginning of our discussion, that it was easy to summarise because there were fewer incidents and you pointed out it’s also shorter.

But I still get this sense of it is a book where she gives herself plenty of space to read, really build on her comic characters, particularly on Admiral Croft, up to a point on Sir Walter. He’s starting to pop up again as a really comic character. And then, of course, there’s the Mary comic character. It’s a book of considerable richness of characterisation compared with incident.

00:25:01 Harriet

What happens is she bumps into Admiral Croft in Milsom Street and he’s looking at this painting and laughing at it.

00:25:08 Ellen

Yes.

00:25:08 Harriet

Which I think is so funny.

00:25:10 Ellen

But that’s part of the amount of time that’s being given. I mean, he’s really a minor character. He doesn’t matter at all, Admiral Croft. And yet we get this lovely, lovely relationship and the picture of the way he thinks and so on. The richness of her creation of these people, she doesn’t mind putting in extra stuff.

00:25:34 Harriet

One thing I did notice, they walk up Belmont. Now if you look on the map of Bath, Belmont is actually not on Admiral Croft’s way home. Milsom Street is right next to Gay Street, which is where the Crofts are, and Belmont is just heading up north towards Camden Place. So he’s obviously very deliberately wanting to walk with her and talk with her and wants to wait until they’re in Belmont, not just talking about it when they’re bumping into other people.

00:25:59 Ellen

Yes.

00:26:00 Harriet

And the way he tells the story of Louisa Benwick first of all start saying he can’t remember her name it would be so much easier if everyone was called Sophie and then saying well you know not a word to say against James Benwick but he’s a little bit too piano I prefer Wentworth. And Anne has to sort of jump in and say “No,no, no, I wasn’t doing a comparison between them”.

And then Anne saying I hope Captain Wentworth doesn’t feel badly about this and he says oh no not at all not at all there is not an or a murmur from beginning to end.

00:26:33 Ellen

Yes.

00:26:34 Harriet

No, you would not guess from his way of writing that he had ever thought of this Miss What’s Her Name for himself?

00:26:39 Ellen

Yes.

00:26:41 Harriet

There’s probably not much to say exactly about that.

Mary’s wonderful letter and Admiral Croft’s wonderful conversation ultimately is to reveal one sentence of information. Louisa Musgrave and Captain Benwick are engaged. That’s the whole point of this chapter, but we get given it in two such moment-by-moment delightful ways of reading about it.

00:27:02 Harriet

So that was those three chapters. What was your favourite sentence?

00:27:06 Ellen

Well, I’ve got the bit about the painting.

“And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it, that’s the boat, mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be.”

00:27:25 Harriet

Well, I actually had quite a few possibilities, almost all of which come from that final chapter because it’s just so funny.

00:27:34 Ellen

Yes.

00:27:34 Harriet

And I think the one I’m going to go for is from Mary’s letter where she says

“The butcher says there is a bad sore throat around. I dare say I shall catch it and my sore throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s.”

00:27:47 Ellen

Yes.

00:27:55 Harriet

The characters we’re talking about today are Admiral and Mrs Croft, who I think are one of the nicest married couples in all of Jane Austen. And even before they’ve appeared on the stage, we get such a clear picture just from what Mr Shepherd says of what they’re like, partly in his initial description of them, but the one I particularly like is:

“and a very well-spoken, genteel, shrewd lady she seemed to be, continued he, asked more questions about the house and terms and taxes than the admiral himself and seemed more conversant with business.”

And I think that really sums up their relationship.

00:28:34 Harriet

I know from what Michael has said that once you’re made captain, then you just progress up through the ranks for as long as you live.

00:28:40 Ellen

Yes, the fact that he is an admiral doesn’t mean that he’s better than a whole lot of captains. But be that as it may, while we assume he’s quite successful in his career and extremely competent as an admiral, it’s Mrs Croft in their day-to-day at-home relationship. She’s the one who organises everything. She’s the business manager.

00:29:03 Ellen

Yes, actually, for me, in a sense, the thing that epitomises the Crofts is that remark by Louisa where she says that if she loved a man the way Mrs Croft loves the Admiral, she’d rather be overturned by him than driven safely by anyone else.

Yes.

00:29:24 Harriet

Yeah.

And it is a case of they’ve got this wonderfully accommodating relationship where he knows that she will look after all the day-to-day stuff. They both know that.

And in the gig, when Anne is going with them in the gig and the Admiral is about to run into something and she puts her hands on the reins and Anne thinks it’s a good picture of their married life in general, but at the same time she has had to accommodate herself to the needs of his profession, so she’s travelled on ship with him and She also spent that winter at Deal that she wasn’t very happy because he was away in the North Sea. And they’ve lived in small lodgings that weren’t all that comfortable, but because they were together, they were happy all the time.

And it also talks about how when they’re in the country, they do everything together. And then when they’re in Bath, it says they’ve maintained their country habit of doing everything together.

00:30:19 Ellen

Yes, well, we’ve got the Admiral during that walk with Anne saying, oh, look, there’s… somebody. He’s amazed to see me without my wife.

00:30:29 Harriet

Oh, and another thing I like in that particular conversation is he says, oh, and there’s so-and-so, Sophie can’t bear him. He played me a bad trick once. And it’s like Sophie is so angry on his behalf that this person did the wrong thing by him that she hasn’t forgiven him, even though the admiral seems to have moved on.

I mean, presumably he is very, very competent when it comes to managing his ship. But on land, he does come across as a bit naive, a bit not all that bright necessarily, but he accepts that about himself and he knows that Sophie will look after all that stuff and he doesn’t need to. And he values her for it.

00:31:11 Ellen

Yes, and he’s so nice to the little boys.

00:31:14 Harriet

Yes, that lovely, lovely scene.

00:31:16 Ellen

Where he’s going to take them away in his pockets. Yes.

00:31:20 Harriet

And Lady Russell likes.

00:31:22 Ellen

She’s a bit snotty about them.

00:31:23 Harriet

Yes.

00:31:24 Ellen

She’s sort of not quite manners as she thinks manners should be.

00:31:28 Harriet

No, she likes Mrs Croft. No, but she just thinks the Admiral Croft is a bit not quite. Yeah, it says Admiral Croft’s manners were not quite of the tone to suit Lady Russell, but they delighted Anne. His goodness of heart and simplicity of character were irresistible.

And I think that’s what Jane Austen feels as well.

00:31:48 Ellen

Oh, yes. Did we discuss his little account of where they put the umbrellas? You get the impression that’s their different ways of handling the majesty of the place. That the Crofts hang their umbrellas just outside the garden door.

00:32:07 Harriet

Yeah.

00:32:08 Ellen

Whereas the Elliots hang theirs in the butler’s pantry. And can we work out from that, in fact, the Crofts take themselves out into the garden.

00:32:20 Harriet

Yes, I think we can.

00:32:22 Ellen

Whereas the Elliots have to be ushered out by the butler and handed their umbrellas.

00:32:28 Harriet

Yeah, and you also have the bit about the scullery door and how anyone could bear it closing the way it did. Well, that’s obviously because the Elliots never actually went anywhere near the scullery, or at least Anne might have done, but Sir Walter and Miss obviously didn’t.

00:32:43 Ellen

Yes, it’s interesting though that the amount of humour she gets out of them, almost all the humour comes from the Admiral. Whereas there’s just the one little joke concerning Mrs Croft, which is not so much her joke as when she’s explaining where they’ve been And Mrs Musgrove has never talked about the Bermuda and the Bahamas.

00:33:09 Harriet

Yes. The, of course, the other thing we get, practically the first thing we get about the Admiral, is where Mr Shepherd talks about him:

He had inquired about the manor, would be glad of the deputation certainly, but made no great point of it. Said he sometimes took out a gun but never killed.

Quite the gentleman, is what Mr Shepherd says.

00:33:30 Ellen

Yes, well, you know, we simply can be a bit thrown by that passage because we don’t understand the etiquette of shooting. Are we being told that he goes out with a gun and points it up at the sky at intervals? But never actually shoots anything?

And perhaps is that even an advantage that he’s not going to even be bringing down too much of the game that is there? It’ll still be there for Sir Walter when he goes back.

00:34:01 Harriet

Well, presumably, since Mr Shepherd puts it as a positive, the notes in my Cambridge edition say about that passage that the manor included the domain which brought with it duties and rights to exact fees and fines. By law, only the lord of the manor and those appointed by him could kill game.

For Admiral Croft, shooting seems to serve as an excuse to be outdoors rather than as a recreational activity. It did much the same for Walter Scott’s hero in Waverley, who, whenever he wanted to indulge in solitary daydreaming, took on his walks, his gun and his spaniel, which served as an apology to others. What we get from Admiral Croft is presumably he likes being out of doors and he takes a gun because that’s what you do if you’re walking out of doors. But actually what he really wants to do is walk. And from what we learn later in the book, he’s probably walking with Mrs Croft anyway.

00:34:56 Ellen

Well, I don’t know if he would have taken a gun when he went out with Mrs Croft though.

00:35:01 Harriet

Yeah, true.

I was thinking about what other really, really nice older married couples are there, and the ones I thought of with the Gardiners. What I particularly thought was Mrs Croft and Mrs Gardiner are very, very similar. But the extra dimension you’ve got with the Crofts is Admiral Croft because Mr Gardiner really has very little presence in the book, except insofar as he’s really annoyed that Darcy won’t let him say that Darcy was the one who paid off Wickham but he doesn’t really come alive much, whereas Admiral Croft is just, he’s a delight.

00:35:36 Ellen

Well, he’s a fully rounded character. And Mrs Croft is a lot more rounded than Mrs Gardiner anyway.

00:35:44 Harriet

Yeah, she is a bit, because you get that dimension of her talking about her travels and being on board ship. And I suppose because the Admiral is more developed, their relationship is developed in a way the Gardiners’ relationship isn’t.

00:35:57 Ellen

Yes.

00:35:57 Harriet

So I think the Gardiners are the only other really comparable couple to them.

00:36:02 Ellen

Oh look, the Musgraves are pretty compatible.

00:36:05 Harriet

I suppose though the difference is Mrs Croft and Mrs Gardiner are also both intelligent women.

00:36:12 Ellen

Yes.

00:36:12 Harriet

And Mrs Musgrove, she’s kind of ordinary.

00:36:15 Ellen

Yes.

00:36:16 Harriet

There was one other thing I wanted to say, which is Michael’s a big fan of the Patrick O’Brien books, the Aubrey-Maturin series. I never really got into them. I only read the first couple of them and I didn’t particularly engage with either of the characters. In particular, I didn’t like Aubrey all that much. But sometime later, it suddenly occurred to me that Aubrey is actually in many ways the young Admiral Croft, in that he’s presented as very competent at sea but useless – yeah, maybe useless isn’t fair, but very naive on land. But he’s not presented in the same loving way and with the same kind of gentle humor, I don’t think, that Jane Austen presents Admiral Croft.

00:36:59 Ellen

Yes.

00:37:00 Harriet

But as I said, once I realised that, I thought, well, maybe I should reread them and see Aubrey in that light.

00:37:05 Ellen

Yes.

00:37:06 Harriet

So yeah, that’s Admiral and Mrs Croft. I think the most delightful married couple in Jane Austen, even above the Gardiners.

00:37:14 Ellen

I suppose I tend not to think of them in those terms. I tend to think of them in terms of her using Persuasion to tell you how absolutely fantastic the Navy is.

00:37:33 Ellen

For this episode, I thought I’d talk about nurses, since we’ve started to hear quite a bit about Nurse Rook. Nurse Rooke produces a rather different version of the nurse compared with the most famous one in fiction, Sarah Gamp, in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, because Sarah Gamp is drawn as somebody who drinks rather too much and who is very keen on the money. And this is also a picture that other fiction from the middle Victorian suggests a bit, whereas what we got with Nurse Rook, is this very nice, chatty woman, full of gossip, but totally responsible and reliable.

00:38:23 Harriet

Well, we assume she’s totally responsible and reliable.

00:38:27 Ellen

But we know that she was very good to Mrs Smith.

00:38:30 Harriet

Yes, true. Even when she wasn’t being paid for it, she was just living there and being good to Mrs Smith.

00:38:35 Ellen

Yes, so the picture we have is of somebody who moves into the patient’s household and is cared for and fed by the patient’s servants while she offers her services.

00:38:49 Harriet

And then when she’s between jobs, she just comes and lives at her sister’s house.

00:38:53 Ellen

But we don’t have any real picture of what the background would be like. And so, not that I was looking for the background for Nurse Rook, but at one stage I was doing quite a lot of research on the background to nursing. And I found it was very difficult to find out anything about these private nurses, who were, of course, the best paid ones and the ones with the nicest conditions, and tended to be quite separate from the nurses who worked in, you know, what could be called the hospitals, because at that stage, almost all hospitals took in poverty-stricken patients.

00:39:36 Harriet

Yeah.

00:39:36 Ellen

And partly they were supported by charities and partly they were founded by doctors with a particular interest. So if someone was interested in rheumatism or something like that, they would set up a special hospital for that and so they could study it there. And they always tended to have resident nurses who did the kind of looking after the patients in terms of cooking their food and feeding them and washing them and sometimes, but not always, looking after dressings and things.

And now what one isn’t at all sure about is what was the relationship between these two sorts of nurses. Were there nurses who trained in hospitals and then became the well-paid servants, like Nurse Rook, who moved from place to place? And I wasn’t able to find anything much from Jane Austen’s period about these nurses but I did come across in the Wellcome Institute they have the archive of a group that was established in June 1840 and it was called to begin with the Protestant Sisters of Charity but the name changed within a year to the Institution of Nursing Sisters and I felt this gave a sort of a picture.

Mention of this organisation turns up in most standard histories of nursing as an organisation founded by Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker prison reformer, but these are very brief narratives and we don’t hear much about them. Substantial records of this organisation did, however, survive and they are held by the Wellcome Institute in London.  And these make it clear that this institute was an agency for providing women whose characters could be vouched for to nurse in the homes of those who could afford to pay 10 pounds a quarter to the institution for their services. And I think the main reason for mentioning them is to say, this tells you something about the kind of women that went into this work. So, the kind of background we’d get for someone like Nurse Rook.

The sisters were employed by the institution. They were interviewed by a committee member and sent to one of the London hospitals to gain a couple of months’ experience of a range of cases, and then they were employed at a salary beginning at 20 pounds a year and rising to 23 pounds. When they were not out on a case where they were expected to live in the house of the patient at the patient’s experience. They could stay at the nurses’ home.

This institute was run by a committee of well-to-do upper middle class women who were prepared to give up an afternoon a fortnight to the work with further service in interviewing prospective employees, chasing up their references and dealing with the superintendent of the home and with the hospitals who volunteered them and with their dress. None of these women that ran the committee had any intention of nursing the sick themselves, nor do they seem to have regarded themselves as training the nurses. The expertise they offered was that of estimating character, a skill that no doubt they had honed through years of appointing and managing domestic servants and of running large charitable organisations efficiently.

While they seem to have had some failures in the first, appointing nurses who wore crinolines or drank in public houses or were rude to the relatives of their patients. In the second they were eminently successful, since the institution continued to operate without any hint of mismanagement or scandal until 1921. The big advantage of looking at this institution, which is a long, long time after Jane Austen created Nurse Rook, is that it does, every now and then, give you some information about the age and the background of the sort of women who went into this nursing.

In the year 1848, when the current Secretary recorded details of applicants in the minutes. The ages of the 20 women interviewed ranged from 30 to 48, and 48 was considered almost too old. So they were not really elderly women like Sarah Gabb. But women, as Nurse Rook seems to have been, at the height of their powers in a sense. Six had already been working as nurses in London hospitals, so some had picked up some training. and of those whose marital status were recorded, eight were single, six were widows, and one was a married woman with an estranged husband and no children.

The information on social background is also very scarce. The fathers of three of the single women were recorded as a Baptist minister, a tailor and a draper, while another sister, aged 41, was described as the widow of a tradesman, which suggests that they were getting mature women of lower middle class background who were pretty respectable, pretty refined. All of which, of course, is exactly what we would guess about Nurse Rook.

00:45:31 Harriet

So if Nurse Rook had been born 20 years later, she might have done this rather than working in the area.

00:45:37 Ellen

Well, she would have probably been the sort of person that they were employing. I mean, it’s not necessarily she was like that. This is the only information I found anywhere about these home nurses.

00:45:50 Harriet

Yeah.

00:45:51 Ellen

Now, one interesting thing I discovered though, when I was reading those, I started to come across some familiar Jane Austenish names. A little account in the lady superintendent’s records of the home, where the nurses went between jobs, that in January 1853, somebody called Sir Norton Knatchbull turned up and wanted to complain about a lady called Mrs Tapner. And he said that Mrs Tapner had been staying in his house, attending a patient who was living there, and his housekeeper and his maids complained about her.

Well, if you read through all the details, do you know that Jane Austen’s niece, Fanny that she was so fond of, she married, I think, Sir Edward Knatchbull. Well, I think Sir Norton could well have been her stepson, the eldest son of the first wife.

Yes, so Sir Norton Knatchbull is complaining about Mrs Tapner, and this sort of a big flurry starts, and the committee is interviewing the housekeeper and the housemaid and Mrs Tapner’s defending herself by saying she wasn’t happy there and I think in the end Sir Norton Natchbull gets Mrs Tapner fired and then right at the end the lady superintendent said that Mrs Charrington called and paid 11 guineas for Mrs Tapner’s attendance on Miss Austen.

00:47:30 Harriet

So what generation of Miss Austen’s would that be?

00:47:35 Ellen

So she’s probably a daughter of one of the Sailor brothers.

00:47:39 Harriet

Yeah.

00:47:40 Ellen

So I’m the only person, I think, who’s ever encountered this. I don’t know if we have any listeners who can get access to the Wellcome Institute and look this up. If they would like it, I can give the archival reference.

00:47:57 Harriet

Okay.

00:47:58 Ellen

But I saw this, what, 30 years ago I read this.

00:48:09 Harriet

For pop culture this time, I’m talking about a film called Modern Persuasion that was released in 2020. It stars Alicia Witt and Shane McRae. It hits many of the standard romantic comedy tropes and it’s relatively low budget. And honestly, I was expecting it to be absolutely terrible. And in fact, it wasn’t. It was quite pleasant.

It runs for one hour and 27 minutes, so it’s shorter than all the adaptations I’ve looked at so far. It follows the plot of Persuasion pretty closely. There are cuts, but not that many more cuts than an actual adaptation.

An interesting aspect of it is, because it’s got quite a limited cast, most of the people are present at many of the scenes, so you don’t have the Sir Walter Elliot equivalent being just gone for the book. He’s there all the way through. So he and Mrs Clay and people like that, they’re present at times when in the book they’re not. But it generally works pretty well and it does hit a lot of the marks.

Now all of the characters in it map to characters in the book, but they all have different names. So for a start, Anne is Ren Cosgrove, who works for a PR company, and that company is downsizing and it’s just moved from premises in Manhattan to smaller premises somewhere else. I think it’s Brooklyn. She fits in with the standard rom-com heroine in that she’s a workaholic, overachiever, and she has a cat, and in the first time she meets up with the hero, it’s an embarrassingly klutzy moment that I won’t really talk about.

There is absolutely no sense of her losing her bloom in this. Even right at the start, it says she’s really pretty. She’s only downtrodden insofar as she’s doing all of the major work for this company, but she’s not a partner.

00:50:00 Ellen

Yes.

00:50:01 Harriet

Wentworth is Owen Jasper. He dated Wren when they were both in college but then he moved to San Francisco and he wanted her to come and she was persuaded to put her career ahead of his so they broke up and since then he’s made a fortune inventing a social media app called Blippa that is basically Twitter and now he’s developed a charity giving app and he approaches their PR firm for the launch of this app and he was actually I think one of the most disappointing parts of this because he didn’t really have a great deal of charisma and there was no real chemistry between him and Ren. They’re older than the characters in Persuasion. I think it actually says in there somewhere that it was 15 years ago they were at college. So that puts them in their mid-30s.

Sir Walter Elliott is Grayson Keller, who is one of the two partners of the PR company that Wren works for. In spite of the fact that the company’s downsized, he arrives at work in a limo. He is also conceited, but unlike Sir Walter Elliott, he’s actually kind of likable. You just have to accept that he is what he is, but he’s kind of nice with it.

Now, the other partner in this PR firm is Grayson Keller’s sister, Maxine Keller-Lynch. She is the equivalent of Charles Musgrove, and her wife is Lizzie Lynch, who is, of course, the equivalent of Mary Musgrove. Now, Lizzie is pregnant in, honestly, the most fake-looking pregnancy I’ve ever seen on screen. But at one point she admits to Wren that actually she kind of likes being pregnant because she can complain about anything as much as she wants.

00:51:44 Ellen

I doubt if the Mary in the book would ever have had the self-knowledge to say that.

00:51:51 Harriet

That’s actually one thing I should have said earlier. It doesn’t have the level of biting commentary the book does on some of these characters. If they were unpleasant in the book, they’ve mostly been made a little bit nicer. They’ve been smoothed out.

00:52:03 Ellen

Yes.

00:52:04 Harriet

The Elizabeth Elliot equivalent is Rebecca Duvalier. She’s another employee of the PR firm, but she’s not related to anyone. The PR firm also has two younger employees who are obviously Louisa and Henrietta. The Mrs Clay equivalent is Denise Jones, who’s the new receptionist at the PR firm.

00:52:23 Ellen

All the way through watching these sort of films, you are being expected to have read Persuasion or not?

00:52:31 Harriet

No, you are not expected to have read it. In some ways, if you have read it, you spend the whole first part of it, because all the names are changed, except maybe a little bit that Sam Benson is like Benwick, trying to work out this is this person, this is this person, this is this person. And maybe they don’t want you to do that, because it is a bit of a distraction at the start.

But she has a cat called Wentworth. And the company that Owen has set up is called Laconia. So you just think, oh, those are call outs to the book, put in there for people who know the book.

00:53:03 Ellen

Yes.

00:53:04 Harriet

But then much later on in the film, Owen learns that the cat is called Wentworth and realises that she chose that name for the same reason he chose Laconia as the name for his company, because it’s from the book they read in college. And so this film is actually set in a world where the Book of Persuasion exists, which I thought was a little bit different from most modernisations. I kind of liked it. I’m not sure how popular a move it was with everyone, but I thought it was kind of cute.

The opening credits are animation, though to be honest, very, very cheap low-end animation that tell the backstory of Ren and Owen. But because you don’t know that, it actually took me half of it before I realized that’s what it was doing. If you haven’t read the book, you almost certainly won’t pick it.

But it shows in this opening animation that they’ve got together at college and then someone tells her she’s got a great future and then they break up and then it sort of fades from the last cartoon picture into her jogging.

He’s come to their PR firm because he’s doing this charity giving app and he wants them to do the PR for it. In that first meeting, we very quickly get to the parallel to little Charles having his fall because Lizzie, the pregnant wife, is in the background eating and she chokes. And so Wren is the one who goes and gives her the Heimlich maneuver. So, we see Wren taking control of a medical emergency.

The next big thing is an event they all go to, including Grayson. So as I said, all of the characters are here all the time through, and this is the equivalent to the dinner at the Musgroves.

The next scene that happens is they’re checking out a gallery space that they’re going to use for an event that they will be holding for Owen to meet people. This doesn’t have a specific equivalent in the book, I don’t think, other than maybe you could say it’s the Walk to Winthrop, because this gallery is owned by Crystal’s boyfriend. Crystal is the Henrietta equivalent. But also, again, in the interest of bringing characters in earlier so they’re there for more of the film, this is where the character of Sam or Benwick is introduced. But this was not Lyme, because Lyme happens next.

Rebecca, who’s the Elizabeth equivalent, has an event she’s organised that’s happening at the Hamptons. So going to the Hamptons is the equivalent of going to Lyme. Wren gets there and she’s left her suitcase on the bus. So Kate lends her her clothes, and this is the equivalent of Wren getting her bloom back. She hadn’t lost her bloom, but Kate, she lends Wren young and sexy clothes, so Wren obviously just looks much hotter than she did earlier.

00:55:39 Ellen

Yes.

00:55:40 Harriet

And during this party, Kate, who’s moderately drunk, and Owen go out to the beach, and then Kate slips on the rocks, and that’s the equivalent to falling down the stairs.

00:55:52 Ellen

Yes.

00:55:53 Harriet

Then there’s just a bit of a work montage. And on this social media app, Wren and Crystal see something that says Kate has a new boyfriend. It’s a photo and it has Kate and it has Owen and it has Sam in it. And she just says new boyfriend. And obviously they think it’s Owen. So that’s the equivalent of being certain that following the accident, Wentworth and Louisa are going to get engaged. And the equivalent of what some of the other adaptations put in where the news gets to Anne incorrectly and she thinks that they are engaged when in fact she just hasn’t been properly informed, which doesn’t happen in the book because she knows from the start who it is.

The next thing is an event at the gallery. That is the equivalent of the concert in Bath and that is where Wren learns that in fact Kate and Sam have got together, not Kate and Owen. A photo was taken, which was sort of a bit staged, of Tyler kissing Wren. Tyler is Mr Elliot and Owen sees that photo and he leaves and Wren asks him why he’s leaving and he says, I’ve met everyone I need to, there’s nothing left for me here. Again, direct call back to the book.

00:56:58 Ellen

Yes.

00:56:59 Harriet

After that, Lizzie, the Mary equivalent, she tells Ren that clearly Owen still has feelings for her. She shouldn’t be moping. She should be deciding whether or not he’s good enough. You’re a rock star and he would be lucky to have you. It’s kind of cute to have Mary giving this big empowering speech to Ren.

00:57:16 Ellen

Yes.

00:57:18 Harriet

Then it’s the official launch of this charity giving app and just before it, because there’s no Captain Harville, Ren is having a conversation with Sam about moving on and women not forgetting men and that sort of thing. And Owen overhears that, so he types a message in his phone and as he’s giving his speech at the launch, he presses send and Wren gets the message. He talks about Persuasion and how she said it had the most romantic letter ever in it. And he has some quotes from the letter in his message to her.

They don’t immediately get back together. The next morning is her dressed to go jogging. And she goes to his place and basically says, what did you mean by that? And he says, you’re what’s best for me. And then he actually starts reciting verbatim the letter from the book, which would have been absolutely beautiful, except that he recites it in in such a dead sort of way that it’s not really all that moving.

And that’s where it finishes. And then the end credits, like the opening credits, are sort of cartoon style, but rather cutely, well, I thought it was cute, these are photos from Wentworth the Cat’s social media account.

So look, as I said, I had very, very low expectations going into this. I thought it was going to be terrible. And it wasn’t. It was low budget. The script could have been better. The production values could have been better. But it was pleasant and enjoyable to watch. I’m not sure I would particularly say I really want to watch this again someday, but if someone else said I’d like to watch it, will you watch it with me? I would be quite happy to watch it a second time. It was not great, but it wasn’t terrible.

You’ve been listening to the Reading Jane Austen podcast with me, Harriet.

00:59:05 Ellen

And me, Ellen.

00:59:06 Ellen

In our next episode, we’re going to be reading chapters 19 and 20 of Persuasion.

00:59:14 Harriet

The structure of this podcast was inspired by Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.

00:59:18 Harriet

Our music is Creative Commons performances of pieces Jane Austen might have listened to.

00:59:23 Ellen

You can find us on our website, ReadingJaneAusten.com.

00:59:28 Ellen

We’re also on Facebook at Reading Jane Austen and Instagram at Reading_Jane_Austen.

00:59:39 Harriet

You can e-mail us at ReadingJaneAusten.com or rate and review us in your podcast app.

00:59:45 Harriet

We hope you’ll join us next time.