It's Austen Chat's third anniversary! To mark the milestone, we're delighted to share "Jane Austen: Material Girl"—a conversation between authors Paula Byrne and Hilary Davidson recorded at JASNA’s 2025 Annual General Meeting. Both have written extensively about the significance of material objects in Austen's life and work. Tune in for their lively discussion of ordinary things—toothpick cases, lace cards, muslin shawls, flannel waistcoats, and more—and their extraordinary importance. ...

"Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." —Jane Austen, 1796, letter to Cassandra on arriving in London Jane Austen was very aware of life’s darker side, and beneath the genteel polish and decorum of her novels lurks a world of adultery, theft, seduction, dueling, poaching, smuggling, and more. In this episode, guest Susannah Fullerton, president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, guides us through the sordid underbel...

Jane Austen's novels feature a number of characters we might describe as "hypochondriacs" today: Mr. Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove, and Mrs. Churchill, to name a few. Although she never used the word herself, Austen was adept at exploring how the worries and complaints of individuals preoccupied with their health affected the people around them. Professor Sarah Marsh joins us in this episode to discuss health and medicine in the Regency era, the parallels between the health of individuals and the ...

"Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion." —Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen often wove needlework and other domestic crafts into her novels in thoughtful and meaningful ways. In this episode, Professor Jennie Batchelor joins us to discuss Austen’s own skill with a needle and explore how she used such “women’s work” to reveal her characters’ strengths and flaws, illuminate their social and power dynamics (think ...

"My dearest Cassandra, The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation. I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school." —Jane Austen, September 1, 1796 It's been speculated that Jane Austen may have written nearly 3,000 letters in her lifetime. While only 161 are known to have survived, that small collection offers a wealth of information about her daily life, her friends and family, her writing, and her voice. In this episode, historical...

Happy 2026, listeners! To kick off the new year, we’re sharing something special: Austen Chat’s first episode recorded in front of a live audience. Jane Austen lived during a remarkably dynamic period of British history and was well aware of the forces shaping her world—colonial expansion, booming global trade, revolutions in Europe and the Americas, and slavery and the abolition movement. It was also a world that included people of color whose lives were far richer and more influential...

“Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful . . . .” —Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice Jane Bennet, the eldest of the five Bennet sisters, is an undisputed beauty, but Austen tells us Jane also “unite[s] with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper, and an uniform cheerfulness of manner.” In this episode, we sit down with Susannah Harker—beloved by Janeites for her portrayal of Jane Bennet in the icon...

Join us for a chat with noted Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland about Jane Austen’s surviving manuscripts and what they reveal about her writing process and creative confidence. Kathryn also shares the story behind the ambitious digital project that brought Austen’s scattered manuscripts together in a virtual archive and talks about some of the material objects she included in her book Jane Austen in 41 Objects—reflecting on how tangible artifacts can bring us closer to the writer we think we...

Bath bun. Bobbinet. Poor basket. Vanity-bait. These are just a few of the words the Oxford English Dictionary credits Jane Austen with using for the first time in print—and almost all are words related to domestic and everyday life. In this episode, we sit down with scholar Charlotte Brewer to explore the Dictionary’s 19th-century origins, its reliance on volunteer readers, its ongoing digital evolution, and the literary biases that shaped whose words were recorded. A must-listen for word ner...

"She has many rare & charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them."—Jane Austen, Jack and Alice Drunken brawls. Cannibalism. Heroines behaving very badly. Such mayhem may seem worlds apart from the sedate drawing rooms of Austen's novels, but it is par for the course in her teenage writings. In this episode, we welcome Lesley Peterson for an exploration of the whimsical world of Austen's juvenilia—the hilarious and often absurd stories she penned in her youth. Along the way, we’ll ...