Pod life

Does the world need another Jane Austen podcast? Color me skeptical.

A rummage through Google and memory turned up eighteen non-fiction examples of the genre, and I doubt I found them all. There are podcasts sponsored by mainline Austen organizations, including Chawton House, Jane Austen’s House, and the Jane Austen Society of North America. There are podcasts devoted to excavating historical context, or dissecting Austen adaptations, or both. There are podcasts hosted by sibling therapists, by a mother-daughter Janeite duo, and by a distant Austen cousin. There are podcasts with punny titles (Pod and Prejudice, Sips & Sensibility) and podcasts with portentous titles (Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities, Jane & Jesus).

But if you’re hungry for yet more, the first episode of a new Jane Austen podcast is coming our way on Tuesday. Titled Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, the six-episode series is sponsored by the UK edition of The Conversation, a non-profit online newsroom that aims to make academic research accessible to the general public. True to that mission, Jane Austen’s Paper Trail promises “a journey through Austen’s life and times, with the help of the UK’s top experts.”

“We’ll head to a scandal-filled tearoom in Bath to ask whether Jane was a gossip, visit a glittering Regency ball to find out whether she was a romantic, and visit her house in Hampshire to find out what she thought about being a writer,” promises host Anna Walker, a senior editor at The Conversation.

I can’t say that Walker’s intro fills me with confidence, what with her commonplace-yet-misleading claim that Cassandra Austen “burned nearly all of her sister’s letters” and her vow—apparently a statutory requirement of these kinds of projects—to “uncover the real Jane Austen.” To paraphrase Austen herself,* this cliché is so well-worn that I dare say Adam met with it in the first Austen biography he opened.

Grudgingly, however, I must admit that pedantic Janeite killjoys such as yours truly are not the intended audience for this kind of thing. Interview the right “top experts,” and you could have yourself an entertaining, albeit familiar, survey of the territory.

And Walker has an intriguing paper trail of her own: She’s the author of a non-fiction work titled The Little Book of Vaginas. Will she find a way to draw on this expertise in her search for “the real Jane Austen”? I guess we’ll have to tune in to find out.

* In the (unburned) Letter #108, in Deirdre Le Faye's standard edition of Austen's correspondence.