Dear Bitches, Smart Author Podcast, October 23, 2015

 

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 164 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Juliette Wells.  She’s the Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Goucher College in Maryland, and she edited and did the annotations for the 200th anniversary edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, which was published earlier in September.  In this interview, we talk about the coded language of Austen, the annotations that Wells developed for the anniversary edition, and the adaptations of Austen’s work that Wells has studied.  We also talk about common questions that she frequently receives and about Austen’s life as a writer who took her work very seriously.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Break Me Down by New York Times bestselling author Roni Loren, where one couple wrestles for power in and out of the bedroom.  On sale October 20th.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy it, if you can buy it.  You might not be able to buy this one.  I’ll have to check.

But in the meantime, on with the podcast.

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Sarah:  If you can tell us, just introduce yourself and tell the people who are listening a little bit about what you do, ‘cause you do cool things.

Dr. Juliette Wells:  Oh, that is so nice of you to say.  I think the things I do are cool too.

Sarah:  No, seriously.  We really love Austen and academic studies of Austen and academics’ examination of things that are romance, so yes, you are 100% awesome in our world.

Dr. Wells:  Oh, wow!  Thank you!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  So I’m Juliette Wells, and my day job is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and that involves teaching courses on eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature, specifically on Jane Austen, on the English novel, on women writers, and I also teach in the college’s Book Studies interdisciplinary minor, so that brings together my interest in publication history, book history, and reception studies, which involves what readers have thought of Jane Austen’s works from her own day until ours.

Sarah:  So you study not only the books but how books are made.

Dr. Wells:  Exactly, more and more so, so since coming to Goucher, which has a collection of rare Jane Austen editions –

Sarah:  Oh, that’s just terrible.

Dr. Wells:  I know.  It, it is –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – it is truly a hardship.  [Laughs] Not at all!  One of our alumnae from the 1920s devoted her adult life to collecting material related to Jane Austen, and she was fortunate in the 1930s and 1940s to be able to obtain a lot of first English editions, first illustrated editions, valuable books at relatively low prices.  She also –

Sarah:  Somebody who is listening is drooling, I just want you to know.  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  I know.  I mean, I look back at what she paid, and even if you do the currency conversion then to now, it’s still Wow.  [Laughs] That was a –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Dr. Wells:  – it was a great time to collect.  So this woman’s name was Alberta Hirshheimer Burke, and she was a Janeite.  She called herself a Janeite.

Sarah:  Aw!

Dr. Wells:  Big Jane Austen lover, and she became an expert in her own right in bibliography and book history, and she remained a passionate reader of Jane Austen throughout her life.  When she died in 1975 and gave almost everything that she had collected to Goucher, she decided that Goucher at the time was not equipped to handle the manuscripts that she owned, so she gave those to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New, in New York, which already had the largest collection of Jane Austen’s letters on this side of the Atlantic.

Sarah:  [Exasperated noise, laugh]

Dr. Wells:  Yes, so we regret that decision of hers, but we certainly understand it –

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Wells:  – and we hope someday that Goucher will be equipped to welcome some of those manuscripts back, at least for a visit.  We don’t expect the Pierpont Morgan Library to give them back, but it would be lovely to be able to exhibit them.

Sarah:  I’m sure that those manuscripts want to visit the papers that they used to live with.  I mean, they’re probably all really good friends at this point.

Dr.  Wells:  I think so.  I had a very enjoyable visit to the Morgan Library a couple of years ago in which I requested everything that Alberta had given them, and –

Sarah:  Oh, that must have been a big box!

Dr. Wells:  It, it wasn’t so much.  She had about twelve manuscripts, because that was a, that was a more expensive form of collecting.

Sarah:  Of course.

Dr. Wells:  So she had, she had twelve, and I, I looked at them together and imagined what it must have been like to choose those of the, the many items that came up for auction, and so I thought about them as, as kind of a family, family of objects.

Sarah:  So are the manuscripts handwritten?

Dr. Wells:  They are!

Sarah:  Ohhhhh.

Dr. Wells:  It’s beautiful handwriting, and it’s very legible, and a few years ago in 2009, 2010, the Morgan put on a special exhibit all about Jane Austen that featured many of the letters that they own, together with prints and other visual materials, and what was great about that exhibit was that the, the letters written by Jane Austen were framed on the wall at roughly eye level for an adult, and you could just stand in front of them and read them.  They were perfectly legible.

Sarah:  So, so, so she was really talented and she had good handwriting?

Dr. Wells:  Well, good handwriting was part of your good education.

Sarah:  That’s true.  Good penmanship was very crucial.

Dr. Wells:  Part of your ladylike-ness.

Sarah:  Yeah, I would have failed that class.  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  I know; kids don’t even learn cursive anymore.  But it’s, it’s remarkable, and these letters are in beautiful condition, and I, I took my students at the time.  I wasn’t teaching at Goucher yet.  I was teaching in the New York area, so we could get down there quite easily, and my students stood in front of the letters and read them, and they said, we don’t even write letters anymore; we just text.

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Wells:  And we thought, wow, okay, well, your texts are not going to be hanging on the wall of an archive or a library probably in 200 years.  Hmm.  So I don’t know; maybe they started writing letters as a result of that.

Sarah:  Funny enough, I just did an interview that ran on the podcast that is with a librarian named Caryn Radick who is the archivist at Rutgers –

Dr. Wells:  Oh!

Sarah:  – who is studying how romance authors use archives when they’re doing historical research to lend authenticity and verisimilitude to the historical settings that they’re writing about, especially if they’re outside of London, because, you know, romance readers are very familiar with London during the Regency.  We have a great degree fluency of what that looked like and the, the common words, but once you move out to, you know, country estates, it’s a whole new set of language, and so she’s doing a lot of research about archives and how research and archives are used by authors, and one of the things she talked about was the incredible intimacy of letters and how, you know, you know that these people never expected their intimate letters to be hung on a wall or be, be in a library, and you know, the, the, the journals and letters of a farmer who drew pictures of his cows are now part of the Rutgers State Library collection, and if you went back in time and told that farmer, he’d be like, you’re kidding.  There’s no way.  And I wonder, you know, did Jane Austen herself have any indication that she was going to be so enduring in popularity, or she, was she kind of like, yeah, well, that was a book.  There’s another one, and there’s another one, and okay.

Dr. Wells:  It’s such an interesting question.  She cared so deeply about her novels, and she was such a committed writer from an early age.  This is the part of her story that my creative writing students find very inspiring:  Jane Austen began writing fiction in her early teens.  We know this because she cared about the pieces she wrote as a girl, and she copied them over and kept them, and we have three different handwritten volumes, manuscript volumes of what scholars call her juvenilia, her youthful stories and sketches.  And they’re super funny!  And she was really talented, and she kept writing and wrote full-length novels and revised them all the way through her twenties, into her thirties.  She didn’t see any of her novels in print until 1811.  She was born in 1775, so she was well into her thirties.  So she had a sense of herself from a very young age as an author, and she had a sense, as far as we can tell, from a very young age that she wanted to be a published author.  In the letters that we have that remain, she jokes about caring about how well her novels sell, but as often in her letters, with her jokes there’s also seriousness.  So she writes on one occasion, I wrote, I write only for fame, not for pecuniary emolument.  And she wrote for both.  She, she cared about what people thought about her novels; she cared greatly about that.  And we know that in part because she began writing down the comments on her novels that she heard from her friends and family members.  She has these two great handwritten documents called “Opinions of Mansfield Park” and “Opinions of Emma,” where she wrote down the names of her friends and family members and what they had to say about her novels Mansfield Park and Emma, and those documents are just fantastic at showing us what ordinary readers of the time liked and didn’t like about not just Mansfield Park and Emma, but Pride and Prejudice too, because a lot of the opinions, a lot of the comments run kind of like, well, you know, I like Mansfield Park, but I still like Pride and Prejudice better, that kind of thing.  So we get insight into opinions of all the works that she had published by that time.

Sarah:  Bless her, she collected her reviews.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah, and not just, not just –

Sarah:  [Laughs] That’s amazing!

Dr. Wells:  I mean, not just reviews but, but –

Sarah:  Like, real reviews.  Like, what her mom thought, and what her neighbor thought.  Like, that’s, like, the hard-core review, right there.

Dr. Wells:  – sister, brothers, you know, the friend who lived in the great house.  It’s, it’s amazing.  I’m not aware of any other author of that period –

Sarah:  Okay, that’s truly amazing.

Dr. Wells:  – the trouble to do that.  So she really cared, and one of the lines in her letters to one of her nieces who had gotten married and had a baby, a niece who had been an aspiring novelist herself, shortly after Jane Austen published Emma, she wrote to the niece and said something along the lines of, you know, I’m, I’m pleased to meet your Jemima, your baby, and I want you to meet my Emma.

Sarah:  Aw!

Dr. Wells:  So she often refers to her novels as, as being her children, and that’s kind of a convention of the time, but you get the sense, between the lines of her letters, that, you know, she knew perfectly well she had chosen not to marry.  She didn’t have any, any literal children, and these books were what she, what she was going to leave.  But she had no idea, there’s no way she could have known that she would become as popular internationally as she has.  No indication in her own lifetime at all.

Sarah:  I always wonder what would happen if you went back in time and were like, seriously, you have no idea.  Like, in 2015, there’s going to be a waiting list for any course about you.  Like, any course, there’s going to be a waiting list.  People are going to line up to try to get in, ‘cause it’s so amazing.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.  I have a feeling, I have a feeling about a lot of the women authors in particular, you know, you really wish you could go back and just say, hey, it was all worth it.

Sarah:  Yes.  Like, you’re still in print, and I can buy a copy.

Dr. Wells:  Although, you know, I feel the, I feel the, the need for that more with some of my other favorite authors?  Charlotte Bronte, for example, who, who was so deeply unhappy most of her life.  I feel, I feel that she would have benefited more from knowing that she’d made it into the literary canon.  Jane Austen always seemed so confident, so sure of her own artistry and, and her own authorship, it’s, I’m sure she would have been – well, I don’t know if she would have been pleased.  Who knows if she would have been pleased?  But she didn’t seem to, didn’t seem to need adulation in the way that some other authors have.

Sarah:  ‘Cause she knew that she was talented, and she knew that she was writing stuff that was good, that she was pleased with it.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.  Yeah, absolutely.  She was not – she was self-critical, in the sense that she held herself to high standards and did amazing work, but she wasn’t self-critical in the sense that she put herself down that we know of.

Sarah:  Now, I was connected to you by your publicist because you edited and did the introduction for the twenty-two – ‘scuse me, twentieth, ha-ha-ha! no – 200th anniversary edition of Emma.

Dr. Wells:  That’s right!

Sarah:  Which is technically December of 1815, but it’s also 1816, so I think you said in an interview, we get the whole year.  Let’s just take a whole year for this.

Dr. Wells:  We do get the whole year.

Sarah:  I don’t, yeah, I don’t blame you; let’s take a whole year.  What has been your experience revisiting Emma so intimately to, to, to work on this particular anniversary edition?  And it’s a beautiful edition.  Like, you just want to, like, pet the paper and everything.  It’s gorgeous.

Dr. Wells:  It did come out beautifully; I’m so pleased about that, ‘cause it makes it, makes it inviting to pick up and inviting to read, and that was the whole idea with the contents of what I wrote, too, so it’s a form and function kind of thing to have it be lovely on the outside.  My goal with this edition, from the earliest stages of planning it, was to create something that did not already exist, to add to all of the wonderful editions what I have always felt the need for, which is a very reader-friendly, very accessible edition of Jane Austen for readers who need that friendliness or would benefit from it.  So not the people who have read Jane Austen a million times, not people who have studied her in classrooms.  They have wonderful editions for themselves, but I’m thinking the people I meet in my everyday life who say, oh, you study Jane Austen.  What’s that like?  And then they say to me, well, I’ve never read any Jane Austen.  What do you think I should start with?  And it’s fun to think of which of her novels might suit the people that I’m meeting.  But then I also think, well, you know, great as her novels are, many of them are kind of tough going for the average reader today, and wouldn’t it be nice if there were an edition that told you exactly what you were curious about, that anticipated sources of confusion for you, especially for American readers.  An edition that kind of cheered you on and gave the kind of support and information that I give when I’m teaching.  And I knew that edition didn’t exist, so it would be on me to create it.  That was my goal, and my experience re-reading Emma really slowly and carefully was just pure delight.  This was about a year ago.  While I was teaching other courses, I was just slowly, slowly re-reading Emma with my pencil in my hand and trying to calibrate my brain to that exact point of the uncertain reader, the person who hasn’t read much nineteenth-century fiction, who maybe has seen a movie, maybe not, trying to think of all the sources of confusion that my undergraduate students have brought up over the years and to, so to think, think of myself not as the person I am who is re-reading Emma for the nth time, but a person for whom these words are fresh and new and sometimes really puzzling.

Sarah:  I know one of my reviewers said, told me, Carrie told me that she hated Pride and Prejudice for the longest time until she understood, after trying to re-read it again, that is was written in a kind of a code and that once she understood that it was written in a code and the language was revealing things very subtly and she broke the code, then she loved it.  And a lot, a lot of Austen’s fiction is built like that.  There’s something that’s going on on the surface, and then there’s a lot going on underneath that requires a little extra push to, to access.  So what are some of the annotations that you developed for this edition that you thought are, are going to be most interesting to readers, or that you thought were most surprising?

Dr. Wells:  Well, I completely agree with you about the different levels and the coded language.  I think that’s even more true in Emma than the other Jane Austen novels, and I think that Emma is a tougher sell to many readers than Pride and Prejudice because less happens.  There’s less overt humor, and there aren’t the wonderful archetypal romantic characters Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to be paying attention to.  The first thing I wanted to do was to help twenty-first-century American readers get past points of potential confusion with Austen’s word choices, so I created a glossary of not only words that she used that we don’t use today that you might not be able to figure out from context, but I was particularly interested in glossing words that look familiar to us but mean something completely different.  There are many of them, and I probably missed a few, but an example would be nice.  Nice in Jane Austen’s time can mean nice the way it means nice today, but it can also mean choosy.  It can mean particular, and you wouldn’t know that that word has more potential meanings, so I wanted to help out with, with potential, potentially confusing words like those.  And then the next layer of help and supportive information I wanted to give had to do with social customs and references that Austen’s original readers would have taken in stride because she was describing a realistic version of, of their world too.  And one of the things that I decided as I was re-reading Emma and putting together my notes was, if this edition was going to be really friendly to readers, it was not going to have traditional footnotes or endnotes, because I hear from students and regular readers all the time, and notes are a drag.  You flip all the way back, and then you’re not even sure what you’re going to get.  Maybe the editor has decided to give you a, a literary reference but not even tell you what it is, just tell you go look at Paradise Lost or whatever it is.  And I think the other thing with endnotes and footnotes is that they’re so atomized.  They’re just little bits, so I, I came to the decision that I wanted to write short essays about topics that were especially important to appreciating Emma, and so I developed my list of topics as I was going along, and they include things like food and dancing and family relationships.  So I tried to fit into those, those essays all the little bits of information that in a regular classroom edition would be scattered throughout the endnotes, and I tried hard to write the essays to be lively and entertaining ‘cause I figured if you’re reading Austen, you don’t want to turn to my prose and have it be really boring and dull, so I felt Jane Austen sets a high bar for interesting writing, and I, I would try to meet it.

Sarah:  Yeah, she kind of does.

[Laughter]

Dr. Wells:  She really does.  And then with my introduction, I wanted to steer clear of what I see and what my students tell me are some of the annoying features for them of many typical scholarly introductions.  I wanted to write an introduction that you could read before you read the novel or during you read, during the time that you’re reading the novel, so there are no plot spoilers in the introduction at all, and I didn’t want to make a literary critical argument about Emma there because literary criticism is not the goal of this edition at all.  So I thought, what are the questions that people always ask me about Jane Austen?  They ask me, what was her family like?  They ask me, where was she from?  They ask me, did she make money from her writings?  They ask me, does she think of herself as a professional writer?  Those kinds of questions.  And so I, I started from those, and then I added the aspects of publication history, book history, and reception that I find that ordinary readers are very interested in, even if they don’t know to ask about those questions, so I, I discuss Jane Austen’s involvement in the publication of Emma.  She negotiated her own contract with the publisher, she was intensely involved through the production process, and I briefly touch on the very little known and exciting story of her first publication in America, which was Emma, published in Philadelphia by a prominent publisher of the time, Matthew Carey, in 1816, and there are only six known copies of that first American edition of Emma in libraries.  One of them is at Goucher.  One of them is –

Sarah:  Yay!

Dr. Wells:  – found by our wonderful collector Alberta Burke, and I have been doing research on the publication history of that edition and the stories of readers and collectors that the remaining copies have to tell us.  So the introduction touches just briefly on, on those topics.

Sarah:  And that ties together both your own personal research as a, as a professor and also your involvement with the minor in, is it book history?

Dr. Wells:  It’s called Book Studies.

Sarah:  Book Studies, which is a really nifty title for a minor.

Dr. Wells:  Isn’t it?  It brings together courses in English and history and art history and studio art and courses taught in our library by our librarians.

Sarah:  Okay, that’s seriously cool.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah!  We’re very proud of it.

Sarah:  I, I think you should be; I think that’s amazing.  One, what are some of the questions that you’re most commonly asked when you talk about Jane Austen outside of your university?  Are there common questions that you get a lot?

Dr.  Wells:  Yeah, it depends on the audience.  If there are a lot of creative writers in the audience, then they’re interested in authorship questions.  They’re interested in how much money did she make?  They’re interested in was she a bestseller?  Sadly, no, not during her time period.  Sometimes questions about adaptations come up, because in our lifetimes, television and film adaptations, and now YouTube adaptations of Jane Austen have come to almost everybody’s attention one way or another.  Sometimes people have read one of the books inspired by Jane Austen’s writings.  They’ve read Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James, or they’ve read one of the many, many sequels to Pride and Prejudice or Karen Joy Fowler’s novel The Jane Austen Book Club from 2004.  So sometimes they’re curious about that.  A while ago, everyone had seen the film Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway from 2007.  That, I don’t get as many questions about that anymore, but when that film first came out, then the questions were, did Jane Austen really run off with Tom Lefroy?  And the answer is, no.

[Laughter]

Dr. Wells:  The movie made that one up.  And also, as far as we know, Jane Austen did not look like Anne Hathaway.

Sarah:  So here’s, here’s the most important question:

Dr. Wells:  Okay.

Sarah:  Which Darcy is the best Darcy?

Dr. Wells:  Ah, well –

Sarah:  You, you’ve been asked that before, I presume.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.  This, this, this is an easy one.  I thought you were going to say, which is your favorite novel?  Which is very hard to answer, and I always end up limply saying, whichever one I’ve most recently taught.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  But definitely I am, I am all about Colin Firth when it comes to on-screen Darcys .

Sarah:  So what, what is your, what is your favorite Darcy appeal?  Like, what is it about Firth’s performance that is, is, is appealing to you?

Dr. Wells:  Yeah, good question.  I particularly appreciate the attention in that adaptation to the faces of the characters and the eyes of the characters, and so I, like many other people, am particularly drawn to the scenes where Elizabeth is staring radiantly at Mr. Darcy, and he is staring radiantly back at her.

Sarah:  [Laughs] There’re a number of those.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.  Wet shirts I can take or leave, but –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – smoldering gazes in the drawing room –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Dr.  Wells:  – those I find very compelling.

Sarah:  And that little tiny smile he gives when he helps, when, when she helps Georgiana with her music.

Dr. Wells:  That is the, that’s the big scene.  Yes.

Sarah:  Oh, gosh, that’s like one little twist of the lips, and like, half of the known universe’s hearts just sort of dissolved into a puddle.

Dr. Wells:  Yep!  Very powerful stuff.  I have to say, today’s undergraduates are less sensitive to the glory of that scene.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  Yes.

Sarah:  I have a certain amount of personal fondness for the James McAvoy performance, because he was a Darcy, as one of my reviewers, RedHeadedGirl, puts it, he didn’t know how to person.  He was so uncomfortable being a person, and his awkwardness was really well done, but I always wonder, would Darcy have actually been able to be that awkward in the position that he had in life, or would he have had to get over his inability to person a lot sooner than he did?

Dr. Wells:  I think so.  So we’re, this is the Keira Knightley from 2005 with Matthew Macfayden that you’re thinking of?  Is that the one, ‘cause –

Sarah:  Yes.  Yes.

Dr. Wells:  – James McAvoy is, is the love interest in Becoming Jane.  Be interesting to have him be Darcy, but anyway, yeah –

Sarah:  Did I mix up my names?  It’s very possible.  Yes, the Keira Knightley, Joe Wright version.

Dr. Wells:  Matthew Macfayden.

Sarah:  Matthew – oh, God!  This is embarrassing.

Dr. Wells:  But you’re going to edit it, so –

Sarah:  Yeah, but I’m still going to leave me being an idiot in because it’s more fun that way.  [Laughs]  Yes, Matthew Macfayden.  Dur.

Dr. Wells:  Matt-, Matthew Macfayden, no, my students, my students at the time really liked that portrayal.  They, they really liked the super shy, socially awkward Darcy, but I think you’re totally right.  It’s, he could not have functioned if, if he were truly that uncomfortable, as he seems in that version.

Sarah:  Because he –

Dr. Wells:  I should give a shout-out.  In Baltimore, Center Stage, one of our wonderful regional theater companies, has been presenting, is presenting right now for another week, a brand-new world premiere stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which –

Sarah:  Oh, really!

Dr. Wells:  Yes, which I have had the pleasure of being very slightly and inappropriately involved in –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – and I’m quite transported by the Elizabeth and Darcy of, of this production, and it’s –

Sarah:  How have they interpreted that relationship?

Dr. Wells:  Well, the, the play, which is by a, a theater guy from Massachusetts, Chris Baker, the play is, does what you need to do, I think, in order to get the story across in an evening’s theater, so there are only four sisters, for example, and –

Sarah:  Whoa.

Dr. Wells:  Yes, and there is serious narrative compression –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – in the second act.  And Chris Baker, the, the adopter, does what adopters always have to do, which is weave some of Jane Austen’s best lines, which need no explanation and still get laughs today, together with other lines of dialogue that are more calibrated for today’s theater audiences.  But that said, the Elizabeth and Darcy of this, of this stage version, very, very compelling versions of intelligent, self-aware people surrounded by less intelligent, less self-aware people.  I was about to say, by idiots, but –

Sarah:  I was thinking that, I was thinking that exact thing.  Surrounded by complete idiots.

Dr. Wells:  Well, the, the supporting actors are really having fun with their roles in this production, and Mr. Collins and Charlotte are both fairly broadly drawn by this point.  Very comic.  Even Lady Catherine is, is tending to be a bit comic, and, and Mrs. Bennet is very central to this adaptation, which is interesting to see.  But certainly Elizabeth and Darcy seem like the serious, serious thinkers, serious people of feeling, and certainly in Elizabeth’s case, people of wit.

Sarah:  I do a lot of comparing of the Keira Knightley version and the Jennifer Ehle version, because, well, I watch them both a lot.  They’re my, they’re my comfort viewing when my brain is too tired to even read.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.

Sarah:  The, the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice in particular is just such eye candy.  It’s just dripping with beautiful, like, bucolic gorgeousness.  It’s the best brain candy, but one of the things that I’m always fascinated by is the different portrayals of Charlotte and the different portrayals of Elizabeth’s parents’ relationship.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.

Sarah:  In the, in the BBC mini-series, you can tell that Mr. Bennet has no respect for his wife, but then in the Keira Knightley version, there’re scenes where they’re laughing together, and they’re joking together, and that they, there’s some warmth there.

Dr. Wells:  Much more, yes.  Yes.

Sarah:  And then Charlotte in the mini-series is very sort of buttoned up and repressed and quiet and very severe, whereas in the Keira Knightley version, I loved that actress, because she made a case for herself.  Like, dude, we can’t all just turn down some dude.  I’m a burden, and I’m going to get married, and I’m going to have, like, my own home, and I’ve got to put up with this dude?  That is not a problem, and don’t look down on me for that.  I particularly loved the sort of strength of that character, because that interpretation isn’t always visible in the text.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.  You know, something I always ask students to do is go back and look at the first description that Jane Austen gives of each character, ‘cause you notice it at the time when you’re reading, and then you kind of forget it, and the first thing that Jane Austen says about Charlotte Lucas is that she was a sensible, intelligent young woman of twenty-seven and Elizabeth’s particular friend, and I say, look, Jane Austen’s narrator, whom we trust, says Charlotte is sensible and intelligent, so all of the judgments that follow, all of the decisions that Charlotte makes, we have to understand through that, through that lens.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Wells:  And in some ways, Elizabeth is the irrational one.  Elizabeth is the one who’s so convinced of the necessity of her own happiness that she turns down a perfectly good offer.  Okay, it’s from Mr. Collins, but where does Elizabeth get this confidence from?  Where does she get this certainty that she should hold out?  I think twenty-first-century readers take it for granted that we are all out for our personal happiness, and we’re not going to marry bozos, but –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  You know, and certainly Mr. Bennet backs Elizabeth up, and that’s crucial.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Wells:  If he hadn’t –

Sarah:  She’d be married to him.

Dr. Wells:  She’d be married to him, yes.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Don’t marry a bozo: marital advice from Jane Austen.

Dr. Wells:  Absolutely.  Sum it up.

Sarah:  Also, there, there’s the fact that as romance readers we know to expect a particular kind of ending.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.

Sarah:  Like, when something is called a romance, we know that the structure will inform a happy ending or an optimistic ending, and so we know, as the narrator moves us along, that there is a happy ending in store for her that is not this character, so we kind of already have the ending ahead, but if you put yourself in the location of those characters at that moment, what she does is completely bonkers.

Dr. Wells:  Absolutely.

Sarah:  Like, she could have saved her whole family, and she’s like, nah, no, I don’t like him.

Dr. Wells:  Exactly, he’s not worth it.  Or rather, she says, he’s not worth it, and I’m worth more.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Wells:  So, we can cheer for that too, and romance readers and readers of, of classical comedy, where the books end in marriage, and you kind of know on one level that that’s going to be true, you know when the marriage proposal comes a third of the way through that it is not the proposal that is going to be accepted and end the book, because you still have two-thirds of the book –

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Wells:  – so you know something’s got to happen.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Unless the cover copy specifically explains that the book is about what happens after they get married.

Dr. Wells:  Precisely.

Sarah:  That’s really the only option.  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So one of the things I know that you’ve studied a lot is all of these adaptations, from the films and television mini-series and BBC series and books and spin-offs.  Do you have some favorites that you revisit as often and you, as you revisit the, the Austen novels themselves?

Dr. Wells:  Not as often.  For a while I taught a course called Jane Austen and Popular Culture, and that, in that course I would teach a novel in conjunction with a couple of different film versions and some of the print versions, and I’ve, because I now teach more with rare books, that popular culture aspect has moved a little bit to the periphery of what I teach, although I still have quite a large, somewhat embarrassingly large number of Jane-Austen-related books in my office, which are popular books.  One of the, one of the recent novels that I like very much and that I recommend is Longbourn by Jo Baker, which is from just a couple of years ago, and it’s being made into a film, and it does not do justice to Longbourn to describe it as Pride and Prejudice told from the servants’ point of view, because then you think, oh, okay, we’re going to get every scene from Pride and Prejudice, and it’s going to be told from the point of view of the people who are passing the tea tray and opening the doors.  It, Jo Baker, who is a young British novelist, has completely re-imagined the world of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the kind of person whom Austen only glances at in the novels, a young servant, and so we, we – it’s not an Upstairs, Downstairs story, really.  It’s the story of the kind of character who is so compelling to us now, but for Austen and her readers would have seemed much less interesting to focus a novel on than the privileged, relatively privileged gentlewomen of the Bennet family.  So Longbourn I like a lot.

Sarah:  I read Longbourn, and I, well, the parts that were at Longbourn itself were fascinating to me, just, I remember so clearly the servant, the heroine saying that it was amazing to her that to make soap, a thing that makes you clean, is among the most disgusting, unclean processes, because you have to boil fat and, and all these disgusting things together to make soap –

Dr. Wells:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – was baffling to her, and that it was her job for, like, the whole day.  The thing I struggled with was the pacing.  Like, why are we in Spain for so long?  We’re in Spain for so long in this book.  Why are we in Spain?  So I struggled with that, but the parts that were at Longbourn were really fascinating.

Dr. Wells:  Hmm, okay.  Well, it’s, I think when you move into the realm of fiction and nonfiction inspired by Jane Austen, then, then you get personal tastes playing a –

Sarah:  Yes.  Oh, absolutely, there’s no denying that.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.  But I recently re-read Allegra Goodman’s novel from a couple of years ago titled The Cookbook Collector, which was promoted at the time as Allegra Goodman, today’s Jane Austen, re-writes Sense and Sensibility.  And it’s not that at all, but Allegra Goodman certainly knows her Jane Austen and plays with characters, I think, from quite a number of novels in The Cookbook Collector.

Sarah:  Has it happened to you that you’ve been reading a novel that had no mention of Jane Austen at all, and you catch a sort of a nod to a character or a scene from one of Austen’s novels?

Dr. Wells:  Yes.  This happens to me.  I feel sometimes that I am a giant magnet for the pulses of Jane Austen –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – and whatever I’m reading in any medium, newspaper, fiction, you know, watching a movie, there’s, some Jane Austen thing is going to come up, and then I, it turns out I have to pay attention.

Sarah:  [Laughs] It’s like, aw, you know, I had turned off my work brain, but now I’ve got to boot it back up!

Dr. Wells:  Yes, that, but, but thankfully, thankfully my earlier book is now done.  This is the book titled Everybody’s Jane:  Austen in the Popular Imagination, and when I was researching that, I really felt, I had to try to keep track of every single thing that anyone was saying or publishing or creating related to Jane Austen, and it was kind of exhausting, and no one person could have kept track of all of it.  And now that I’m researching publication history, I have the satisfying feeling that I can let some of the more ephemeral popular things today go, and I don’t have to watch every single episode of every single YouTube series.  I can let others take up that important work.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I am fascinated by the way in which Jane Austen’s particular stories can evolve into so many different formats.

Dr. Wells:  Oh, my goodness, yes.  It’s often said that Jane Austen and, is now second only to Shakespeare and way up there with Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle in terms of the, the range and extent and creativity of the adaptations and their, and their re-workings.

Sarah:  I mean, the core story functions in so many realms.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah, it’s absolutely true.  Central story of Pride and Prejudice, central characters have been successfully updated to our own era and placed in Bollywood and all kinds of different, different realms.

Sarah:  One of my reviewers, Carrie, wrote a book called Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn, which was, which is an extended book, it was an eBook published by Harlequin’s nonfiction division, that examined all of the movie adaptations and how they functioned based on her readings of the core stories, and I’m, I know that it was a lot of fun for her to watch all of these films and then discuss them and look at them critically, but at one point, I think, she said, there are so many hours of Jane Austen, I cannot even tell you how many hours there are.  There are so many!  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  It’s completely true.  I, even when I was working on my book, Everybody’s Jane, I gave up really early on on trying to keep up with sequels to Pride and Prejudice and alternative versions in fiction of Pride and Prejudice, because there were just so, so many.

Sarah:  Well, I mean, it was kind of a blessing that the girl had six sisters, because, you know, each sister gets another story.  I think I’ve read at least two or three versions of Mary Bennet’s happy ending, and in my opinion, there was no character in more desperate need of a happy ending than Mary Bennet.  That poor thing, she needed a big Happy Ever After.

Dr. Wells:  Absolutely.  I, I, I have a little game with myself.  I count the number of minutes in a course where my students are reading Pride and Prejudice, I count the number of minutes until somebody says, but Mr. Collins is her cousin.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  We talk about that, and then you can also count the number of minutes to when somebody brings up Mary Bennet and points out that it seems illogical that Jane Austen would make fun of a character who is trying so hard to become educated.  So, yeah, I see, I certainly understand why so many creators have centered, centered novels on Mary Bennet and given her another try.  ‘Cause she does seem to be really hard-done-by by Jane Austen.

Sarah:  Do you have a theory as to why Austen wrote such an unflattering portrayal of a character who was trying very hard to educate herself?

Dr. Wells:  I do.  I’m necessarily satisfied with my own explanation, but as far as I understand it, Elizabeth gets the concept of audience, and Mary doesn’t.  Elizabeth understands that if you are playing and singing for a group of family and friends in your drawing, that the point is to be entertaining for them and not to show off –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Wells:  – and not to attempt something that you can’t do, and so in that scene early on when Mary and Elizabeth both play, the narrator tells us that, you know, Elizabeth didn’t have the technique that Mary did, but she was much more delightful to listen to because she didn’t try to do something she couldn’t do.  But you know, there’s a, a wonderful, wonderfully interesting book by one of the members of the Jane Austen Society of North America called So Odd a Mixture, which is a quotation from Pride and Prejudice, and in this book, its author, Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer, who is a speech language pathologist who works with people on the autistic spectrum, Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer examines the characters of Pride and Prejudice through the lens of our understanding today of autism and Asperger’s, and she shows us, using the theories of today, how we might understand Mary Bennet in a different way, and even Mr. Darcy, and even Mr. Bennet, and then Phyllis takes us through lots of other characters in the novel, too.  But I, I think my students certainly see Mary as much, much more sympathetic because of her social awkwardness, much, much more sympathetic than, as far as we can tell, Jane Austen intended for her to be.

Sarah:  One of the things I wanted to ask you is slightly outside of your, of your Jane Austen work, is about the, the Jane Austen Society.

Dr. Wells:  Sure!

Sarah:  Because I know that you, are you still the Scholar-in-Residence of the Jane, the Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence, or is that ended?

Dr. Wells:  Well, I’ve done a lot of things that have Jane Austen in the name, so –

Sarah:  Yeah, I was, I was like, wow!  So you’re, so you’re actually Jane Austen is what you’re saying here.

Dr. Wells:  Oh, my goodness.  The other day, this had never happened to me before, but I was doing the Emma edition book release event at Goucher, and it was lovely, and this man I had never seen before came up to me and he said, Jane?

Sarah:  [Gasp!]

Dr. Wells:  And I said, nooo?

Sarah:  [Laughs] Oh, no.

Dr. Wells:  He had bought a book for a friend of his, and, you know, he knew that his friend liked Jane Austen, and I don’t think he had cottoned on to much else about her, and I’ve, I’ve heard stories from my colleagues in the Jane Austen business, you know, they’re in a hotel elevator going up to a talk, and somebody in the elevator says, oh, is Jane Austen going to be there?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  I never quite believed this, but now I’ve had someone come up to me and say, Jane?  So now I –

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Wells:  It can still happen!

Sarah:  So now that you’re Jane Austen –

Dr. Wells:  Okay, yes –

Sarah:  So you’re a part of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.

Sarah:  What do they do?

Dr. Wells:  They have fun.

Sarah:  I like this plan.

Dr. Wells:  They enjoy each other.  So the, and this is, this is actually a part of my research, because my research involves making work out of what everyone else sees as fun.  So in my book Everybody’s Jane I have a, a chapter about the founding of the Jane Austen Society of North America in 1979, which is connected to our Goucher collector Alberta Burke.  She died in ’75, and her husband, who outlived her, was one of the three co-founders of the Jane Austen Society of North America, better known by its acronym JASNA –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Wells:  – and the three co-founders had the idea to come up with a North American Jane Austen society because they were already members of the English Jane Austen society, which was –

Sarah:  So why not?

Dr. Wells:  Yes, and they had two reasons.  They said, (a) we want to get together in North America and not have to cross the Atlantic every year, and (b) they wanted a more democratic and friendly and welcoming society than the English version, because the English society was – [hums] – pretty clubby at that point.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Yeah?

Dr. Wells:  Yeah.  So, both societies still exist, English and North American, and they’ve been joined by other Jane Austen societies in countries around the world from Brazil to Japan and beyond, and the Jane Austen Society of North America now has more than 4,000 members, and there are regional groups throughout the country that meet everywhere from a couple times a year to every month, and they range in size from small and intimate to large and splendid, and every year the members get together, and actually that’s where I’m going at the end of this week.  So it’s the second weekend in October this year.  This year’s location is Louisville, Kentucky.  The location of the annual meeting moves around to different cities.  Every, each meeting is hosted by stalwart volunteers in a region, and the typical attendance at one of these annual meetings now is about 800 or 900 people.

Sarah:  That’s a lot of people.

Dr. Wells:  It’s a lot of people.  So it’s a big hotel.  There are plenary speakers invited, Jane Austen scholars.  There are breakout sessions on all kinds of different topics led by members of the society, some of whom are scholars and academics, some of whom are enthusiasts, some of whom have expertise in other realms.  Every year the annual meeting has a different theme, and there’s, a lot of fun is had.  There’s always a Regency ball on the Saturday night, and people dress up and dance dances from the period and have a lot of fun, and it’s a great opportunity to meet people who love Jane Austen’s writings and who share this interest, and it’s become a real kind of clearing house, in part because people who write books inspired by Jane Austen of course want to sell them to the kinds of people who come to this annual meeting.

Sarah:  Of course.

Dr. Wells:  Yes.  But they also, many of them, you know, love Jane Austen in their own right and want to be a part of the meeting, so it’s, it’s become a place to find out what’s being published, what’s in the works, what’s happening next in, in Jane Austen and popular culture, as well as  a place where you can educate yourself about her life, her times, and topics related to those –

Sarah:  I’m, I’m guessing that you’ve seen the coverage on Jezebel of Kelly Faircloth attending the Jane Austen association meeting in Bath.

Dr. Wells:  Yes!  I had the pleasure of emailing back and forth with her for a while about her impressions while she was there.  Yeah.

Sarah:  I, I’m a big fan of hers because she’s been doing a lot of coverage of romance from a more, not critical but happily curious perspective, which in the romance world, we don’t get a lot of from regular journalists?  Usually regular journalists enter the romance world with a very high nose and a very low opinion, and Kelly’s like, this is cool!  Let’s learn more!  So I really enjoyed all of the pictures and, and how much, just how much stuff is generated around Jane Austen.  Like, you can have tchotchkes for years.

Dr. Wells:  Yes, you will –

Sarah:  You can never run out!

Dr. Wells:  No, and now that there’s Etsy and CafePress and all of the, the clearing houses for, for small artisans to sell their Jane-Austen-related wares and for us all to customize everything we’ve ever owned, that’s, that’s –

Sarah:  [Laughs] So do you have a lot of Jane Austen stuff in your office and in your home?  Is that, is that the default gift now for everyone who knows you?

Dr. Wells:  Sometimes.  Students are very sweet about giving me stuff that they found.  I do own two Jane Austen finger puppets.  They’re horrifying looking, but –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  And I, one of my prized possessions in my office is certainly the Jane Austen action figure that was produced a few years ago.  I had to keep it in its box, because there’s a sticker on the box that says, with writing desk and quill pen!  Because that’s her action.

Sarah:  Of course!

Dr. Wells:  Yes.

Sarah:  She’s going to stab you with that pen.

Dr. Wells:  She might.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Because there might be a zombie.

Dr. Wells:  And I do have a Jane Austen bobblehead, bobblehead doll and assorted tote bags, tote bags with her image on them.  I, I haven’t made an effort to collect the stuff.  When it kind of comes in my purview or certainly if, if a student gives, gives it to me with shining eyes, then I find a, a very special place for it, but I have to say, now that I work with rare books more, that’s what I want.

Sarah:  [Laughs] You want, like, an original edition?

Dr. Wells:  I want special books.

Sarah:  You mean the kind that have to be kept hermetically sealed in a bag, and you’ve got to wear gloves to touch them?

Dr. Wells:  No, I mean the kind where you can, you can read them and say, wow, somebody in 1832 read Sense and Sensibility from this same book!  Same, same, same.  And you could have your mystical experience.

Sarah:  I love things like that.  I mean I, I studied abroad twice, once in high school and once in college, and the, both times I was in very old cities in Spain, but the second time I was in Salamanca where I was going to school in buildings that had existed since before the United States was a country.  Since, like, before anybody had bumped into it.

Dr. Wells:  Yep!

Sarah:  And the idea that I was walking on the same streets and touching the same walls and being in the same rooms as people who had studied in the 1600s was mind-blowing to me, so I know exactly what you mean.

Dr. Wells:  Yes, yes.

Sarah:  Like, I put my fingers here and hold this book, and someone else did, like, 200 years ago!

Dr. Wells:  And they thought about Jane Austen’s words, this shape on this page, and maybe this illustration.  Although I should say, not in the realm of tchotchkes but in the realm of, of things that I treasure is a replica of a coverlet, a quilt made by Jane Austen, her sister, and their mother, and in the Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, England, the house where she lived when she was writing her mature novels, this quilt exists, and quilters from around the world come to see it and to study it, because it’s a very unusual design; they made it up themselves.  It’s patchwork; it has a really interesting varied, varied pattern of different, different materials, and my mom has a friend who is a super-accomplished present-day quilter, and when I was visiting Jane Austen’s House several years ago to be there for a month and do research on literary tourism, my mom friend said, oh, please bring, bring me back the book that shows you how to make the quilt, a version of that quilt today, and so I brought her back the book, and then my mom asked her to make a quilt for me, and I have it.

Sarah:  That’s really beautiful!

Dr. Wells:  And it’s, it’s super gorgeous.  This is the thing.  I mean, you can make replicas of things, and you can say, oh, wow, that’s a replica of something that Jane Austen made, okay, but this is just great-looking –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  – in its own right.  I mean, it is a pleasure to, to use it, and Elinor Adams, the woman who made it for me, you know, told me very solemnly that I had to use it and not just, not just hang it up and display it, and so I do.  It’s my summer bed cover.

Sarah:  That’s lovely.

Dr. Wells:  It is!  I take it and show it to the students, and I say, look, Jane Austen spent time stitching the original version of this quilt by hand with her mother and her sister.  Do we wish that she had spent those minutes on her novels themselves?  You know, who are we to even think about that, and what does it mean to think about what a woman author did with her time when she wasn’t writing, what she left behind?  Jane Austen liked, liked to sew.  She left patterns for collars, she left lacework.  You know, this is, her writing was an, an important part of her life, and her, her authorship was crucially important to her, and clearly she chose to spend time doing other stuff too.  She played the piano every morning before breakfast.

Sarah:  As you do.

Dr. Wells:  As you do!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  Yeah!  She did it because she loved it, not because anybody wanted to hear her.  So she seemed to, she seemed to really enjoy her life, and I, I hope that she did, because she died awfully young.  Forty-one, that’s way too young.

Sarah:  She did.  So my last question of any interview is always book recommendations.

Dr. Wells:  Mmm!

Sarah:  What are you reading?  What do you recommend?  What books have you been telling other people about?  But if there isn’t a book that you want to recommend, I also accept other women writers that you have studied that you would recommend as well as Jane Austen.  So you have, you have your pick here.

Dr. Wells:  Well, the answers are the same, because I – [laughs] – I continue to gravitate, not exclusively to women writers, but, but very strongly to them.  So I had the enormous pleasure and honor this past week of meeting an author whom I have admired for many, many years, Gail Godwin.  She’s an American novelist.  She came to visit Goucher College, where I teach, as a visiting lecturer, and I got to have dinner with her and tell her how much her books have meant to me, and she –

Sarah:  Isn’t that the best?

Dr. Wells:  It truly is.  It truly is.  I, I said to her, like, I, I work mostly on women authors who are long dead, and there isn’t any, there are not any opportunities to thank them, and so it means a great deal to thank a living author for works that have, that have really mattered to me.  So Gail Godwin’s novels, most recently she published Flora.  The book that I have loved for a long, long time is the novel called Father Melancholy’s Daughter and its sequel Evensong.  So it’s a pleasure to re-read those and a pleasure to hear Gail Godwin’s voice in person and now be able to hear that as I’m, as I’m reading her novels.  

And the other, the other group of novels that I recently read and thought were just stunning, the quartet of Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante.

Sarah:  You’re, like, the sixth or seventh person –

Dr. Wells:  Okay.

Sarah:  – who has told me about these.

Dr. Wells:  That’s because they’re great, and the, the final, fourth novel was just released in English translation, and I cannot think of another series of novels that ended with a work that was so magnificent it made the entire group of novels just rise to many higher levels.  The only other one I can think of really is the final Harry Potter novel.

Sarah:  That is some high praise indeed.

Dr. Wells:  Is it not?  Yes.  Yes.  So it’s, the, the tagline, I mean, the, what somebody on NPR said, this is the finest modern set of novels about women’s friendship, and that does not do justice to this, this group of Neapolitan novels.  Friendship, wow.  [Laughs] It’s so complicated, and wonderful.

Sarah:  It’s amazing; so many different people from so many different backgrounds, because, you know, it’s, it’s my podcast, so I interview whomever I’m curious about, and I have talked to editors, and I’ve talked to academics, I’ve talked to readers, I’ve talked to librarians, and I’ve talked to people who are just tangentially interested in books and then people for whom books are their life work, and there’re so many people who are like, no, these books are truly amazing.  Like, there’s this unilateral, no, they’re really great.

Dr. Wells:  Yeah, I’m so glad to hear that.  I mean, I’m also enjoying Jane Smiley’s trilogy, no question, but the Elena Ferrante books really made my year.

Sarah:  I’m also, I also think it’s fascinating that the author herself is very secretive.

Dr. Wells:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  Like, no one knows who it is, she doesn’t do any press, she doesn’t go out and give interviews.  It’s just, yep, here’s your book; leave me alone.

Dr. Wells:  And the book’s all about authorship, but I’m not going to tell you who I am.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Exactly.  Not telling you, ha-ha.  Because keeping a secret now is very hard.

Dr. Wells:  Well, for anyone, you know, for anyone like me who spends a lot of time explaining, well, Jane Austen did not have her name on the title page of her novels; her authorship was not publicly known until after her death; yeah, it’s, it’s as if Elena Ferrante knew exactly what all of us wanted to keep thinking about and has given us that inside her novels and in her own nonexistent life story.

Sarah:  Maybe she’s Jane Austen.

Dr. Wells:  Oooh!

Sarah:  [Laughs] So Jane Austen is immortal.  I don’t know if that variation has been written yet, but Elena –

Dr. Wells:  Yeah, so, like, there are two different Jane Austen is a vampire trilogies.

Sarah:  So maybe Elena Ferrante is Jane Austen.

Dr. Wells:  Oooh!

Sarah:  [Laughs] Now you have to track her down.

Dr. Wells:  My occupational hazard, it’s not just that references to Jane Austen crop up wherever I’m looking, but my occupational hazard is to think that everything has to do with Jane Austen, although –

[Laughter]

Dr. Wells:  – it may or may not actually.

Sarah:  It all circles back.  [Laughs]

Dr. Wells:  Exactly.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s podcast.  I want to thank Juliette Wells for taking the time to talk to me and also to Emma Mohney for setting up the interview in the first place, as she was working on publicizing the 200th anniversary of Emma, which is on sale now if you want to get a copy.

This podcast was brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Break Me Down by New York Times bestselling author Roni Loren, where one couple wrestles for power in and out of the bedroom.  Download it on October 20th.

This music you’re listening to was performed by Sassy Outwater.  That is Sassy on her harp.  This is called “Rumba for S.B.,” so I’m calling it “The Smart Bitches Rumba,” and I haven’t heard any discussion that I’m wrong, so.  I don’t think you can buy this anywhere, but this is our rumba, and I like having a rumba.  That’s pretty rad.

If you have ideas or questions or suggestions or you want to ask me something or ask for recommendations, you can email us at [email protected].  We love your email, ‘cause y’all are awesome.

And have I thanked you for listening lately?  Thank you for listening.  It is awesome that you tune into this podcast each week, and I love hearing how much you enjoy the episodes.  If you feel like leaving a review on one of those podcast sites where you can do that, that’s awesome too!  Or you can email me at sbjpodcast and tell me what you think.

And my housekeeping note of late:  if you would like to sponsor the podcast or the podcast transcript, email me at [email protected].

But in the meantime, on behalf of Juliette and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[our rumba]