Persuasion

I did think it was a beautifully... shot it's very

like nature-esque um and I put in all caps I was like I want to see my next demand on the Jane Austen viewing public I want to see another adaptation of Persuasion that is my second like Jane Austen like novel because they did the Dakota Johnson one a few years ago so bad it was so bad but I literally after we went home I pulled my copy of Persuasion off the like shelf and i was like reading there's a section where i was like god this would make you i was like i was like molly will love this because even i was like this will touch even her heart like i was like who because you're not even like a bit like a big romance person but it's like what it's like there's a particular line A particular, like, letter from a person in it where, like, you're just like, damn, and that is good.

That is some well-written shit.

But I'm like, but it's not done well.

Right.

We notice that when Mrs. Smith first comes into the story in Persuasion and Anne is kind of studying her because she's poor and she's a widow and she's disabled on top of that.

And yet she has this elasticity of mind that Anne so admires.

And she thinks, you know, where does this come from? Where does this something more in my friend come from? And she attributes it to nature and she attributes it to heaven.

Right, like Wilberforce and so on.

Yeah, the Clapham sect.

Well, it seems like in Persuasion, I think your point about the intensity, I think, is really helpful because, you know, even in her conversations about poetry with Captain Benwick, you know, we see that kind of seriousness of purpose and intensity and that she may be associating with evangelical Christianity at this point, or at least the evangelical movement within Anglicanism.

But also the commitment to social justice that was in that movement.

And I, Molly, am reading all of her works for the first time through this podcast.

If you want to hear Molly read through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, or Persuasion for the first time, you can listen to seasons one, two, three, and four of this podcast, respectively.

But that is not what we're doing here today.

No, today we are talking about Mansfield Park as a whole because, dear listeners, we have finished reading the book.

And just, like... just reminding ourselves of how good Jane Austen is at writing romance

yeah

even in a book like Sense and Sensibility which is so much more focused on the women like in the sisterhood than it is on the romance compared to something like Persuasion it's just really apparent that her heart wasn't in this love story between Edmund and Fanny

no this is super marriage of convenience that being said I I don't know if she intended for him to come across as frustrating garbage pile like he did.

Thank you, Stella Muzzi, John David Rhodes, and Ian Christie, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, her last, and some argue, her best.

Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

1814, Mansfield Park.

And then Emma, then Persuasion.

Oh, and then that's when she purchased, she did purchase Susan back.

And then she died in 1817.

Okay.

Three and four, I have Northanger, Abby, and Emma.

Five was Persuasion.

And then kind of a distant six is Mansfield Park.