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Austen Chat: Episode 39

September 10, 2026

Rereading Jane Austen: A Visit with Elaine Bander

Painting of Regency-era woman reading a book.

Rereading Jane Austen’s novels with an understanding of the literary conventions of her time can reveal new layers of meaning that modern audiences may miss. In this episode, we sit down with Austen scholar Elaine Bander, author of Reading with Jane Austen, to explore how Austen used and deliberately played against the conventions of the romance fiction of her day, as well as forms such as the “two-heroine” novel and the “female Quixote.” Along the way, we’ll gain fresh perspectives on Fanny Price, Marianne Dashwood, and Elizabeth Bennet, and discover how Austen took familiar literary traditions and turned them in unexpected directions.

Dr. Elaine Bander is retired from Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, where she taught English for three decades. She has published numerous essays and book chapters on Jane Austen and other Georgian writers, including contributions to JASNA’s journals Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line. A frequent speaker on Austen, Elaine has also served as president of JASNA Canada and of the Burney Society (North America).

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Elaine for joining us on Austen Chat!

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to "Austen Chat", a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I am, after a nice summer break, once again your host, Breckyn Wood, from the Georgia Region of JASNA. If you were to search my guest's name on JASNA's website, you would get pages and pages of results. This amazing woman has done it all. She has served as president of JASNA Canada, regional coordinator for the Montreal Region, and coordinator for the 2014 AGM in Montreal, and she is a popular AGM speaker, having presented at many. Needless to say, she knows a lot about our beloved Jane. Now retired from teaching English at Dawson College, Elaine Bander is here to talk with us about her recently published book, "Reading with Jane Austen." Welcome to the show, Elaine.

Elaine: Thank you, Breckyn.

Breckyn: I'm so delighted to have you. Okay, so we've been starting interviews lately with your Austen origin story. Can you tell us when you—when you first met her? When did you first encounter her works?

Elaine: Well, I was about 12 years old, and I'm always astonished when people tell me, "Oh, I read "Pride and Prejudice" at 12 and I love Jane Austen," because a friend handed me the book—She knew I liked to read 19th -century novels, which I did. I don't know that I understood them, but I liked to read them.—And she handed me "Pride and Prejudice." And I read the first chapter, and I thought, "I don't care if Mr. Bennet goes to visit at Netherfield or not,"—and just this strange kind of choppy conversation.

Anyway, I put it aside; you know, it wasn't "Wuthering Heights," so I wasn't ready for it. And then in my third year at university at McGill, where I was doing an English major because I had been—I'd flunked out of the honors program; that's another story—one of the set novels on a 19th -century novel course was "Emma." Well, that did it. I read "Emma," and I said, "Wow," and then proceeded to read everything. And a couple of years later, when I was doing a postgraduate year at McGill with an eye to maybe applying to a master's program somewhere else, well, McGill ended up offering me a place in a PhD program, and I thought, "Good, because it would take me 20 years to do a master's thesis, so I might as well go straight to the PhD." And in the end, I wanted to work on Jane Austen, and by then I had read pretty well everything in print, but that was just about when the new books were coming out—'75, '76—and so the whole world was opening up. Anyway, that was how I came to Jane Austen.

Breckyn: 1975 was her bicentenary—

Elaine: Her bicentenary, right.

Breckyn: And now we just did the 250th, which is crazy.

Elaine: Yes, yes.

Breckyn: Okay, so after so many years of reading and teaching Austen, what inspired you to finally write this book?

Elaine: Oh, that's a good question too, because I used to think the world doesn't need another book about Jane Austen. Then I thought, "Well, maybe it needs my book," because decades of speaking about Jane Austen and finding that people were still persisting in what I thought were terrible errors—so clearly the message hadn't gotten across—and maybe it has to be, you know, between covers rather than in journals that not that many people are going to read, or at conferences where not that many people are attending. And so, at some point I'd sat down to see if things I had already written might coalesce into a book, and they sort of did and sort of didn't.

And then about four years ago, I was on hand to help my daughter with a newborn baby. And as you know, or maybe don't know, with newborn babies your sleep is a little disrupted, and you're up all hours, and then there are long hours when the baby's sleeping and you're not sleeping. So I sat down to see if I could, in fact, make a book. And I ended up putting together what I thought was a reasonable argument, but it involved rethinking and rewriting things that I had done in the past, and then writing new chapters as well. With a great deal of help from the wonderful people at Bucknell Press and the readers of the manuscript who prodded me to rethink my through line, I did produce what I thought was a book that was saying something that had to be said.

Breckyn: So, what are some of those errors that the readers keep persisting in? What are some of your personal pet peeves? I would love to hear them.

Elaine: Oh, all right. I'll take a step back from that because I think circumstances are very different now from what they were when I started writing about Jane Austen. That is, people came to Jane Austen then from a literary perspective. They were readers. And now, people are much more likely to come to Jane Austen because as children they fell in love with some of the film adaptations.

Breckyn: Me, that's me.

Elaine: Yeah, that's fine. That was my entry into a lot of literature too, but it means you come with a set of expectations that may not map well onto what Jane Austen actually wrote. Because if you come looking for a meet cute love story, a romance, that's not—I don't think that's what she was writing. I think she was quite deliberately, consciously, writing anti-romances. And it seems to me she makes that explicit towards the end of "Pride and Prejudice," where she accounts for Elizabeth's change of heart towards Darcy. And nobody seems to pay much attention to that. They say, "Oh, no, Elizabeth's been in love with him all along. That's so obvious." Well, no, no, no. It was Wickham whom in a ballroom she would look for, and if Darcy was standing in the way, she just wanted him to get gone.

I do think that Jane Austen is one of those writers for whom it's important to know her literary environment—the culture, the things that she was reading and that she knew all her readers were reading—because, even though there were hundreds of novels coming out all the time, they had a much smaller pile of books to share. And so most people, if they didn't read the books, they read the reviews. So everyone knew what was coming out. Readers really were a more coherent group—kind of like old-fashioned television, when everyone would come in in the morning to work having seen the same program the night before, and that's never happening again.

Breckyn: Yeah, same three channels.

Elaine: Yeah. So, we lose that if we don't have a little bit of knowledge about where she's coming from and what she's doing.

Breckyn: Well, that's a perfect transition to my next question, which is that I watched a recording of a presentation you gave where you described Austen's upbringing as "growing up in an unusually clever book club where everyone actually read the book." And I love that. So, what were some of those Austen family favorites that they're all passing around and discussing?

Elaine: I'm not sure that there were favorites. They just read communally because books were expensive. Jane's father had built a fine library worthy of clergymen with literary tastes, but, for popular novels, they tended to get them on loan from friends, or from lending libraries or book societies where neighbors would club together to buy the books. They read what they had available. You might remember in "Northanger Abbey," when Catherine tells her new best friend, Isabella, "We didn't get a lot of books, she said."—I'm not quoting exactly.—"New books didn't come our way," but she really liked "Sir Charles Grandison," which was two generations old by the time Catherine was reading it—which was presumably owned in the household and could be reread and reread and reread because there was always something new to discover or old delights to find. And I think it's a fine tribute to Catherine that she can love "Sir Charles Grandison" as well as the new Gothic novels that she's so excited about.

But for the Austens it would be the evening's entertainment. Austen calls it that in a letter, "For our evening's entertainment we have—," and it's whatever novels they can get their hands on. And often it's the second or third reading, which is interesting because, as the ladies are doing their needlework and someone is reading aloud so that it is a shared experience like watching the three channels together, they're thinking critically, and then they can discuss the novel throughout the day before the next reading. And sometimes she has interesting things to say. I think it was "Clarentine," a novel by Frances Burney's younger half-sister Harriet, Sarah Harriet Burney. She said, "It doesn't stand up as well as the second reading, and it doesn't really bear a third reading." She didn't like it. Actually, it's not a bad novel. She didn't like it. And she would read it, or they would read it, three times just to exercise their critical faculties. She says the same thing about "The Female Quixote", which was also two generations old, but it stood up well. They still liked it.

Breckyn: Well, and that's particularly wonderful because Jane Austen rewards rereading so much. I mean, as the existence of JASNA proves, you can read Jane Austen for literally decades and still learn something new on the dozenth time through.

Elaine: Yes, well, yes. Here I am.

Breckyn: Well, and that also makes me think—you know that—the famous Mark Twain quote about "every time I read "Pride and Prejudice," I want to dig up Jane Austen and beat her over the head with her own shin bone." I've always thought that that was a really funny quote. And then I saw somebody else comment on that quote and say, "He's saying every time he reads. Why are you still reading it if you don't like it, Mark Twain? Like, something keeps pulling you back." Like, maybe he really did hate it, or maybe it's hyperbole, or maybe it's irony. I don't—sometimes it's really hard to know what Mark Twain really thinks, but that quote indicates that something keeps bringing him back to "Pride and Prejudice," even if it drives him crazy. So, I love that. So, Robert Burns is not an author that I've often heard associated with Austen, like you hear about Charlotte Smith, and Inchbald, and Frances Burney, and you know, you hear those names over and over. I know that Robert Burns was kind of around that time, but I didn't realize that Austen was engaging with him much. So, which of his works do we know that she enjoyed? Where do we see their influence in her work?

Elaine: Okay, well, I have to say my chapter on Burns was sort of a cheat, because I was using him as a way to get at the anti-novel sentiments that he expressed in an unpublished poem that Jane Austen would never have seen. And I can tell you, I looked long and hard. Burns appears nowhere in her letters or any of her novels except "Sanditon." And there he appears in a very particular way, because this silly male Quixote figure, Sir Edward Denham, is raving about Burns as his ideal, and Charlotte Heywood says, "Yes, he wrote some beautiful poems. And yes, he loved, but then he loved and forgot." And she says, "I cannot overlook the"—what does she call them, the "sad irregularities" or something like that—the irregularities of his life." But he died around the time she was drafting "Pride and Prejudice" in the late 90s. Jane Austen probably knew some of his lyrics; they would have been published and republished. By the time she was writing "Sanditon," the first biographies were coming out, and she learned about those sad irregularities of Burns, and that obviously affected her—I think she's sharing Charlotte Heywood's views—affected her admiration of Burns as a lyric poet. But he's not someone she ever quotes in her letters—the ones that are still existing. And even though he wrote so many songs—he actually would find old tunes and put his lyrics to them—she had two of his tunes, the Scottish songs that he had used for his new lyrics, but not with lyrics. They were just in her music manuscript books as music, no lyrics. So I don't think she was a fan of Burns, but she does bring him in for Sir Edward Denham to show what a silly man he is.

Breckyn: Well, that's good. I'm glad that I didn't overlook something. I was pretty sure she never talks about Burns, but again, "Sanditon" is sort of a blind spot for me. I have yet to fully tackle that one.

Elaine: You didn't miss anything, no.

Breckyn: Oh, about saying that Robert Burns—that he loved, but then he forgot. That has echoes of "Persuasion" for me, right? Like, what would Anne Elliot say about that? Or Captain Benwick? So, to go back to that presentation of yours that I watched, you also mentioned that Austen's first readers would have all been carrying around, you know, the same literary models and expressions in their heads because a lot of them, you know—they had a smaller—compared to today—smaller pile to be choosing from. But we modern readers have to work a little harder to understand some of her allusions and irony. So, what are some things in Austen's novels that you think modern readers are most likely to miss the first—?

Elaine: "Emma," for example, is a kind of variation on the female Quixote figure— the young woman who reads too many romances and then is bored with everyday life and sees the world as though it were a chivalric romance.

Breckyn: I'm surprised to hear you say that because I always thought that the female Quixote character was Catherine Morland, and that "Northanger Abbey" was a representation of that. And I've never really thought about it applying to "Emma," but it fits really well.

Elaine: Yeah, well, I don't think Catherine is really a Quixote either, because she keeps saying, "Oh, that can't possibly happen. That only happens in books." And it's only a very brief little moment when it's like she's got the temporary infection that she picked up in Bath, but then the fever passes. But "Emma" is a different kind of quixotic figure because she is very content with the boring, every day, trivial, humdrum life, pretty well. I mean, she grumbles a little bit, but pretty well. She's content with the life that she lives, but she wants to make romances out of other people's lives. So, I think she's more like a frustrated romance author than a woman who wants to be the heroine of her own novel.

Breckyn: But the characters won't do what she wants them to do. She's trying to move them around on her little board.

Elaine: It's such an obvious plot. Why won't you say the right line?

Breckyn: I love that.

Elaine: Yeah, I think it's a bit more subtle in something like "Pride and Prejudice," where Austen has, I think, brilliantly delineated the very slow transition of Elizabeth's feelings for Darcy. And she reaches a point—first, she comes to respect him: "He's not a bad man, he's a good man." Then she comes to esteem him: "He's a good man who deserves more than respect." And finally, she feels gratitude.

And those were—you see those over and over and over again in novels—respect, esteem, and gratitude. And especially in Maria Edgeworth's first real novel, 1801, "Belinda," in which the heroine has a first love who looks kind of morally suspicious, so she backs off. And then she's courted by another man who seems to have—he seems like a Mr. Darcy. And she finally agrees to love him because he gets her to respect and esteem. Maria Edgeworth says, "He had gotten his lady as far as respect and esteem." And then she feels, of course, gratitude, and finally she says, "Yes, I am fond of you too. Okay, I will marry you." Then she finds out he has a gambling problem. She says, "Nope, deal's off," and then finds out that really the first man she loved was okay. He only seemed to be a little dodgy there. So, someone reading that Elizabeth has gotten as far as respect, esteem, and gratitude for Darcy might think, "Well, this isn't a done deal yet."

And then in " Persuasion," when in Book Two, when Anne is visiting her poor, sick friend, Mrs. Smith, and her father rails for about three pages against Mrs. Smith, and all Smiths, and the triviality of the name—t hat's so interesting. And Janine Barchas has identified one Mrs. Smith, who was in fact the heiress of the original builder of Bath and a very wealthy, powerful woman. And I'm not the first to suggest that there are allusions here to Charlotte Smith as well. But I also thought that we were perhaps allowed to think about Adam Smith, who was one of the most distinguished public intellectuals of his day and who would have had quite a lot to say—because he was a polymath; he was a moralist as well as literary critic, and rhetorician, and economist, and so on.—He would have had quite a lot to say about Sir Walter Elliot.

Breckyn: That is really interesting, and the economics of what's going on at Kellynch. That's fascinating. An interview that I did a really long time [ago] with the wonderful Inger Brodey—she also highlighted one of these "what Austen's contemporary readers would have thought versus what we miss." And I think about it all the time now, so I love that you scholars are uncovering this for us, so that we don't have to read "Sir Richard Grandison."

Elaine: "Sir Charles Grandison"

Breckyn: "Sir Charles Grandison." And so, what she told me was that Austen's contemporary readers would have been expecting Marianne to die at the end of "Sense and Sensibility."

Elaine: Yeah. Absolutely.

Breckyn: And I was so surprised by that.

Elaine: Yeah, I have a chapter on "Sense and Sensibility"—reading it in the context of those hugely popular and highly formulaic novels in the 1990s [1790s] that some people call, and that I've called, the two- heroine novels. And they were always the same formula: one good girl, one bad girl—and sometimes the bad girl's only a little misguided, but they have different sets of principles, or morals, or philosophies. And there are very clear indications—words—in "Sense and Sensibility" to show that Austen was deliberately writing against that model. And in that, it's zero sum. The good girl wins it all, and the bad girl suffers, or dies, or lives in lonely isolation for the rest of her life. And Austen actually says anyone would have expected Marianne to be that kind of heroine, but no—she found a useful life and a happy life instead. So she's really deliberately writing against the grain, against the expectation that this is a two-heroine novel and that's how it's going to end. And "Pride and Prejudice" is a kind of two-heroine novel, too, and both sisters wind up happy.

Breckyn: Yeah, and I think it makes Marianne's ending and "Sense and Sensibility" seem a lot happier than—I think modern readers are, like, "Oh, but Willoughby, he was so dashing, and they really were better matched, and she gets this old man who has arthritis, and like, is that really a happy ending for Marianne?" It's like, well, the alternative was death. So, yeah, actually, she ends up pretty good.

Elaine: Not only that, but Willoughby, like Wickham, seems beautiful and dashing and romantic, but he's none of—I mean he—yes, he's obviously a very handsome man, but he's none of those things. He's a man who married for money and comfort, and who was only—what's the term?—mirroring Marianne.

Breckyn: Yeah, her behavior. That's interesting. You know what? I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that before, but that is a really interesting analysis of what Willoughby is doing—is that he is sort of mirroring her behaviors, and Marianne is seeing what she wants to see instead of what's really there.

Elaine: The classic sociopath.

Breckyn: Yes, that's really interesting, Elaine. Awesome.

Elaine: But I also think he really did love Marianne, but he was too weak a man to follow through. So, there you go.

Breckyn: Yeah. Well, and he only—that—he reminds me in the beginning of Henry Crawford: that line where he says he just wants to make a small hole in Fanny's [heart], which is, like, that sounds like a sociopath. Like that's just terrifying. I've heard some scholars compare that to vampirism—like he's a vampire. Isn't that interesting? And like, oh, it's so chilling when—that line is chilling. And I think that that's—even though Willoughby doesn't say it in as terrifying of terms, that's what he's doing. He's like, "You know what? It would be so easy to make this girl just fall in love with me, and destroy her." And he just sort of—for his own amusement. Okay, well, speaking of Fanny, who I love and I know you love as well, Elaine. Fanny. We're turning this into the pro-Fanny podcast. You made a comment that I would love to know more about: that Fanny Price is Austen's regendering of Horatio Nelson. What does that mean? What did you mean by that?

Elaine: Well, Nelson was the national hero, and of course, Jane Austen had a personal connection because her brother Frank had served with him. And what I have to say about it—John Wiltshire had covered some of it in a chapter in one of his books beautifully. I look at other aspects as well. Around the time that Jane Austen was starting to write ""Mansfield Park," she alluded to a new biography of Nelson and said, "No, too many biographies of Nelson. I'm not going to read any of them unless they mention Frank." But, in fact, this particular biography—the narrative story about Nelson is so—to John Wiltshire and to me, and I think to others—so parallels Fanny's trajectory.

He was a young lad, great ardor but physically weak. But he wanted to go to sea because his father was a widower with a large family and a small income. And so, the description of his arriving alone, and cold, and tired, and hungry to join his uncle's ship, and nobody pays any attention to him whatsoever, is so much like Fanny's arrival at "Mansfield Park." And his commitment to an ideal, his own ideal—it was sort of like a spiritual awakening in him of duty and honor. He wasn't in the Navy to win prizes and make money—although, you know, nobody minds the money. He was in the Navy to serve the King and to serve with honor. And he preferred being on a station where he could do honorable things, rather than on a station like the West Indies where he could capture ships with great prizes, carrying gold and such.

So, in many ways, their stories are parallel. It's not just that their life stories are— allowing for differences in temperament and gender—similar, but that certain scenes that are created, that are described—and I did look at three different biographies, not just the one that Jane Austen cited—it's quite striking, the parallels. John Wiltshire had thought them striking, and I thought them striking, and maybe I carried them a little further, but I think that's Fanny holding up for honor and duty because those were the values that Nelson embodied.

Breckyn: Wow. I need to read more about that. It's so funny how you can just come across—like you could just stumble upon a whole area of Austen research you've never heard of. I've never heard that parallel before, and I now—I want to read more about it because that would definitely be a tally mark in the Fanny column. Like, "Oh, she's the greatest hero in British naval history."

Elaine: Everybody at Mansfield succumbs to the dangerous charm of the Crawfords, but Fanny holds out against it all, even though she has to pay a great price for it. She's a heroine. And Austen says she had all the heroinism. Austen's laughing at her a bit when she resolves to accept what seems to be the marriage between Henry and Maria. She has all the heroinism of principle. There we go. Yay, Fanny.

Breckyn: Yes, I love her. I'm gonna do something I have never done before on the podcast, and maybe it'll get edited out, but I'm gonna quote Harry Potter because I'm a—

Elaine: Well, sure.

Breckyn: I'm a 90s child and, therefore, a big Harry Potter fan. And there is a scene in the first book where a very Fanny Price-like character, Neville Longbottom—he's kind of—he's nerdy, he's not athletic, he's not very smart, he's weak—he stands up to his friends, and he tries to get them to—he tries to stop them and tries to get them to do the right thing. And at the very end, Dumbledore rewards him in front of the whole school and says—and I'm paraphrasing here—and he says, "It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to an enemy. It takes a great deal more to stand up to your friends."

Elaine: Brilliant, yes.

Breckyn: And that almost makes me cry every time, because it's so true. Like Fanny having to stand up to her own family and to her own friends who—it takes so much more courage than it does taking down an enemy. Anyway, so that's how I feel about Fanny Price. Okay, so one more chapter from your book that I would like for you to tell us a little more about is "Reading Mr. Darcy."

Elaine: Oh, yes.

Breckyn: Can you tell us more about that?

Elaine: Right. Well, I think it was at the Philadelphia AGM on Brothers and Sisters when I was listening to the wonderful Susan Allen Ford talk about Darcy as a brother, and at the very end during the questioning, I put my hand up, and I started to say, "I don't believe in Darcy." And there was a small riot, but at that point the session was over and everyone had to leave. And I went on to think, "Now why did I say that?" Because he's not entirely convincing to me as a hero. But I started to think about Darcy and went back and reread, and I saw that Elizabeth spends most of the novel literally rereading Darcy, or reading his character, revising— just as the Austens would reread books a second and third time in order to refine their judgment. She keeps studying his character. She rereads his letter with us looking over her shoulder. Takes an entire chapter for her to read that letter, and then another chapter to think about it, and slowly, slowly, slowly revises her view of him.

That's what I said about the respect, the esteem, the gratitude. And people still— drives me crazy— persist in calling it a love story and insist that really Elizabeth was sweet on him all along. No, no, no, no. The one who got her blood going was Wickham. And then, the man she really liked to spend time with was Darcy's cousin, because he was such an interesting, charming man, even though he said, "Sorry, I can't afford to marry you." So that slow coming to respect Darcy as a human being, to admire him as a human being, and then in the last chapters, when they finally meet again, you can feel that she's very physically responsive to him. He walks into the room and she flushes, and everything gets very confused. She's absolutely then, yes, in love with him. But boy, did it take time, and that was not a romantic love story. And Austen even says again— nobody pays attention— very explicitly, "This may not convince you because, you know, you like romantic stories, but this isn't a romantic story. And Elizabeth has gone through a very slow and rational process of coming to love this man." Yes.

Breckyn: And everyone's like, "Oh, Jane, silly Jane." No, I love that you're a hardcore textualist, Elaine. I am the same way. I'm like, "That is not what it says on the page."

Elaine: Despite what you saw on screen.

Breckyn: You can love both, too, though. You can love the screen but you just have to realize that they're not exactly the same thing. That is such a great analytical parallel. I've never really thought about all the reading of his letters and reading character. I really like that. I'm gonna have to think more about that. So now I just want to learn from some of your decades of JASNA wisdom. You've attended and presented at so many AGMs. What are some of your memories from those experiences? Do you have any favorites?

Elaine: Well, I think my favorite will always be my first. It was 1993. I had resisted JASNA, but then I realized, "No, this is where I really belong." I was a new PhD and I went to Lake Louise. Juliet McMaster was the—

Breckyn: I've heard that was a beautiful one.

Elaine: It was. It was amazing. It was a beautiful setting and a wonderful conference. And I gave my first breakout on "Mansfield Park," of course. I think it was "Mansfield Park," might have been "Persuasion," I think—I forget now. But it was astonishing to meet all these wonderful people who all knew Jane Austen, and wanted to talk about it, to hear fantastic talks everywhere, not just the plenaries. For me, I've always judged an AGM by the quality of the breakouts because the plenaries—some are great, some fun, or whatever—but it's in the breakouts that I've really educated myself. I've opened my mind; I've learned new things to read, new ways to think about it.

Breckyn: It's the nitty-gritty. That's where you get into the—

Elaine: Yeah. It was the morning that the conference opened—because we had arrived the night before—there was snow on the ground because Canadian Rockies and everything was fogged in. And then, like a photograph developing in a hypo bath, you saw the fog dispel, and there was the famous Lake Louise view. And I ran up to my room, put on my hiking boots, and started up the mountain. On the way up, I met two people who were also there for the conference and who've become JASNA friends over the years: Jerry Vetowich and Nili Olay from the New York Region, who have also organized one or two AGMs in their time. And the three of us started up the mountain together. And Jerry was lovely; every time there was a bench, he'd sweep the snow off it so it would dry in the sunshine. And on the edgy bits Nili and I went on our hands and knees, and Jerry encouraging. Anyway, we got up to the top and then came down. And I remember as I came down there was a group going up. It was an official walk up, and I handed off my woolly hat and gloves to a total stranger who was part of JASNA. I knew she'd get them back to me. It already felt like a family, and it was just a wonderful experience. So that hooked me. No, after that I had to go to AGMs. And, of course, I loved the one I organized, but I didn't have a whole lot of time to enjoy it. I hadn't slept for about six months before, worrying about it. Yeah, and it all came off, and I thought, "Oh, thank God." Yeah.

Breckyn: I'm sure it was wonderful. Well, okay, so what do you hope readers will take away from your book? Just to wrap up.

Elaine: Okay. I hope they will go back and reread Jane Austen's words. And I hope they will reread the words that she read that formed her literary environment, and that she was writing— that they were the context within which she was writing. But, most of all, that we go back and reread Jane Austen again because she always bears rereading.

Breckyn: Definitely. Well, you have given me several things to read, and to reread, and to look in deeper. So thank you so much, Elaine. This has been such a lovely conversation. Where can listeners go to find out more about you and your work?

Elaine: Oh gosh, I don't have a website or anything, but there's some pieces up—there's some interviews and things up on YouTube. So, I guess they can google me. There are a lot of essays that I've written over the years.

Breckyn: JASNA website, honestly, is where they should go. JASNA.org.

Elaine: JASNA, yeah. If they just go googling in the "Persuasions" archive, they'll find a lot of things I've written. But some of that is rethought, and rewritten, and in the book.

Breckyn: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Elaine.

Elaine: Thank you. Thank you, Breckyn.

Breckyn: Dearest listeners, I am pleased to announce that "Austen Chat" now has over 200 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for your support. If you haven't yet given us a rating, please consider leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Janeites can find us and join our Austen- loving community. Again, thank you. I remain yours respectfully, Breckyn Wood.

[Theme music]

Austen Chat: Episode 39

September 10, 2026

Rereading Jane Austen: A Visit with Elaine Bander

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Transcript

Austen Chat Podcast

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

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