Northanger Abbey 1-3: “Holding Out For A Hero”

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We're starting our final novel with gusto! What exactly is the deal with Austen's first and last heroine, Catherine Morland, and why is she unfit for the job (in her own opinion)? Listen to find out…

Show Notes

Welcome to our sixth (and final??) season of Reclaiming Jane! We’re always excited to start new material, but we’re especially excited to start such a fun book. Even if it is slightly tainted with the knowledge that it’s Austen’s last published work…

Persuasion is now cemented as one of our top Austen novels, so Northanger Abbey has some big shoes to fill. We may have made several comparisons to Perusasion over the course of this episode (we couldn’t help it!).

This is also a shorter book, which means we’re covering 3 chapters per episode instead of 5 again. Anything you want to hear us discuss this season? Got any ideas for what you want to see in a post-NA Reclaiming Jane universe? Sound off on social media and let us know!

Transcript

Reclaiming Jane Season 6 Episode 1 | Northanger Abbey 1-3: “Holding Out for a Hero”

Emily: [00:00:00] This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.

Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers.

Emily: And I'm Emily Davis Hale.

Lauren: And today we're reading chapters one through three of Northanger Abbey through the theme of love.

Emily: It's so exciting to be back. It's so exciting to be doing our final Austen novel for Reclaiming Jane.

Lauren: I don't like that. I don't like the word final.

Emily: I know. You know, considering two and a half years ago, I, well, almost exactly three years ago, we were conceiving this whole project. I don't know if I ever thought for sure, like, yeah, we're gonna make it through all of them.

I mean, obviously that was the plan from the beginning, but it was just so nebulously in the future and now we're here.

Lauren: People kept asking, what are you gonna do when you get to the end? And we're like, ah, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And now that bridge is looming on the horizon and, we still don't have an answer.

So yeah.

Emily: We'll, keep you all updated.

Lauren: Yep. We will eventually be forced to have an answer. So one is forthcoming, but it, it does not yet exist.

Emily: Mm-hmm. We'll get there because right now we still have a whole novel ahead of us.

Lauren: And what a novel it is. I am so excited for Northanger Abbey because after the beautiful melancholy of Persuasion, I think we're getting a great return to humor with this book.

Emily: Yeah, Northanger Abbey is another one that I don't really know anything about. [00:02:00] I was not even entirely sure who like the heroine was beforehand 'cause I had heard the name Catherine Morland, but for some reason I thought, I'm pretty sure I thought Northanger Abbey was like a Bronte novel.

Lauren: That is fair because it's definitely out of the usual genre of what we think of when we think of a Jane Austen novel.

And part of that is because, especially for listeners who are unfamiliar, this was the first novel that she wrote, but the last novel that was published, so this is like a young Jane Austen cutting her teeth on novel writing and satirizing the novels of the day, and not quite the Jane Austen that we've seen in the books that we've covered on the podcast so far, where she has her own voice and her own perspective rather than satirizing other books, which is also hilarious and great. But this is early Jane Austen that just happened to be the last Jane Austen book that was published.

Emily: Which kind of makes it feel perfect for being the last one we cover because it was the last published, but chronologically it was the first she finished, so it's wrapping it all up tidily, we can go back to her early roots in writing while also looking at what didn't come out until posthumously.

Lauren: Yeah, it's a nice full circle moment.

Emily: Definitely.

Lauren: We have the perfect theme to read it through.

Emily: We really do! Love. What a great contrast with, starting Persuasion with death.

Lauren: Wonderful. So with, with that, Emily, I do believe you are up to recap first.

So do you wanna get us started with the recaps so we can dive into our very first Northanger Abbey episode?

Emily: I would love to.

Lauren: All right. You have, as always, 30 seconds on the clock. On your mark. Get set. Go.

Emily: So right as the novel opens, we meet Catherine Morland, a girl who is totally unlikely to be a heroine, which okay, wow.

She has an unremarkable, very large family and is pretty mediocre and has very average teen girl interests. She gets invited to go to Bath with some acquaintances, and they do touristy things like going to a [00:04:00] ball and to the theater and to a concert, and to all the shops. And finally in our last chapter, she's introduced properly to a new person, a Mr. Tilney, who is a clergyman.

Lauren: That was perfectly 30 seconds.

Emily: Yes. Alright, Lauren, it's your turn. Are you ready?

Lauren: I hope so.

Emily: Okay. On your mark, get set. Go.

Lauren: Catherine Morland is a perfectly ordinary girl, but she really wants to be the hero of her own story, and she gets that chance when she finally becomes passably pretty around the age of like 15, and then goes to Bath at 17 with Mrs. Allen. she knows no one in Bath. It's incredibly boring, which is very disappointing until she meets Mr. Henry Tilney, who knows a disturbing amount about muslin and also is a very great conversationalist and she's very excited to see all the different shenanigans that she can get up to.

Emily: Wow. Made it with like three whole seconds left.

Lauren: Let's go.

Emily: It helps that these were not very active chapters.

Lauren: Easier to summarize for sure. Definitely.

Emily: So yeah, we begin with meeting Catherine Morland, who is said right off the bat not to have the characteristics of a heroine, but we're defining heroine in a pretty narrow way here.

Lauren: It's definitely heroine as in like The Princess Bride where there's dramatics and people coming to save you.

Or even a fairytale where you have an evil stepmother and someone who's trying to do you wrong, and there's so many things that you must overcome. Catherine could be a heroine of like, a contemporary fiction novel where the whole focus is to be on ordinary people living ordinary lives and finding the beauty in that.

But that's not what she wants to be the heroine of. She's kind of disappointed by the fact that like, you know, her mom didn't die in childbirth. She's perfectly healthy. There's no one out to get her.

Emily: Her father's not a villain. She hasn't been orphaned. She can't be a Gothic [00:06:00] heroine the way she wants to be.

Lauren: Exactly. How is she supposed to have any intrigue if her parents are alive and like, give her money to go to Bath?

Emily: Yeah! It's so unfair! But it's so interesting reading this, especially coming right from Persuasion. Catherine feels like such a young protagonist. She feels so much like a teenager, like this is a baby right here.

She has these frivolous little hopes and dreams. We're really going back to like Marianne territory. From Sense and Sensibility. She has these ideas of what her life could look like if only it were a little bit different.

Lauren: She is definitely very similar to Marianne, but we also didn't really read Sense and Sensibility from Marianne's point of view.

We were really in Elinor's head, and so this is the first time where we've had somebody with like, the personality and characteristics of Marianne as the focal point of the story and as the narrator where we get to see all the events of the novel through her perspective. So this will be interesting and it definitely does feel much, much younger.

Emily: Yeah, most of the other protagonists in Austen novels, they tend to be the more practical people in their circle with Emma as the exception. But even Emma is running an estate day to day, so she has to have at least that kind of logistical mind. Catherine doesn't have to have any of that.

Lauren: Not at all.

That's the other thing with Catherine is that, you know, her family's neither too rich, nor too poor. You know, there's nothing that can be considered dramatic there, where she doesn't have the, the wealth and the status of Emma, but she's also not a Fanny where she could make her life to be utterly tragic, and so that way she can be a heroine. Because she's not poor and destitute.

She's another perfectly normal, perfectly average, respectable family.

Emily: And that's so disappointing.

Lauren: What are you supposed to do with that? [00:08:00]

Emily: You go to Bath, apparently.

Lauren: You know, I guess you go to Bath with someone who is a fine companion, but also a little bit more concerned with what it is that she's wearing than Catherine's wellbeing.

Emily: Yeah. Mrs. Allen makes so many noises about, oh, I wish we had more acquaintances in Bath, or, oh, I wish I could introduce you to someone, you could dance with. But then she just sits around the rest of the time making comments on what people are wearing.

Lauren: Yeah, it says that upon arrival to Bath, before Catherine can be introduced into society, she must have the right thing to wear, which on its face seems fine.

You know, like don't go out into society and immediately make a fool of yourself. But they spend days like, getting the right dresses for both Catherine and Mrs. Allen to wear. And then they finally go to, I think, the upper rooms first. and they squeeze through the crowd to get there. And I also love that we get such a realistic depiction of what it would've been like to go to these balls at Bath, whereas before, we're less concerned with the logistics of getting to a place like that and more concerned with like the interpersonal dynamics that occur when we go to these places. But because Austen is really hammering home the point that Catherine really wants to be in a Gothic novel where she would walk in and the crowds would part for her and everyone would remark upon how beautiful she is. We get the reality of, you get there, it's hot, it's crowded, you're like fighting to squeeze in between people.

You can't see the dance floor. So you're just kind of stuck. And then they finally do get to a vantage point where they can see the dance floor. Catherine doesn't know anyone, so she can't go dance with some dashing hero because she's not been introduced to anyone. Social propriety means she can't just go up and speak to someone, and the only person who could introduce her to anyone, is just kind of like, 'oh man, Catherine, this really sucks. I wish you could dance.' And then leaves it at that.

Emily: Yeah, just physically and socially, it's all very awkward, extremely. It's so not novel material.

Lauren: Not at all. And to a 17 year old, [00:10:00] that is just even more disappointing.

Emily: Yeah. Like I said before, it's very funny coming directly from Persuasion to this because Anne would've just been like, Ugh, yeah, this is how it goes.

But Catherine is like, oh, deeply disappointed that everything hasn't magically aligned to fulfill her fictional dreams.

Lauren: I also really love that we had Persuasion right before this because you had, not to draw too many comparisons between Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, but the difference in the characters' reactions to going to Bath, going to Bath for Anne is something that she dreads.

She does not wanna be there. It's not something that she's particularly excited about. It means that she's leaving her home, blah, blah, blah. For Catherine, it represents like, change and excitement and she is giddy about going to Bath, and I just, I thought that that was an interesting shift having just come off of Persuasion.

Emily: Yeah. I'm sure this episode at least, we're going to have a lot of back and forth between Persuasion and Northanger because they're just so perfectly contrasted. Like we even have the same setting.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Same setting, and two completely different protagonists.

Emily: So different. I'm loving it right now.

Lauren: God bless her.

I feel like that's something we're gonna be saying a lot over the course of Northanger Abbey. Like, oh, Catherine.

Emily: Bless it. But in a completely different way from how we said it about either Fanny or Emma.

Lauren: Yes. But eventually Catherine does get some excitement because she meets a Mr. Henry Tilney.

Emily: Yes. We meet Mr. Tilney who knows how to talk about Muslin, which is very impressive and is charming and has what seems like a little bit of flirtation there, where he's making comments about how like, oh, she'll be able to write home about this funny man. She met at the lower rooms.

Lauren: They have a pretty good, pretty good rapport going.

They have some good banter. It seems like Catherine's able to give as good as [00:12:00] she gets and they have like a nice little back and forth going on.

Emily: It seems promising, but it is also very early in the book. Who knows what mysteries the rest of the text hold.

Lauren: Who knows. We do know though that Mr. Tilney is from a perfectly respectable family, because although Mr. Allen has done nothing else over the course of the first three chapters, he did make sure that he did a little bit of digging into the background of Catherine's dance partner and was perfectly satisfied with what he found out.

Emily: Totally respectable. How, again, disappointing.

Lauren: Yeah. Not a Lord.

Emily: But he was charming.

Lauren: He was charming. No title. Doesn't have 10,000 a year, you know?

Emily: Who knows, maybe he'll get Catherine into some Gothic trouble at some point.

Lauren: We shall see.

Emily: We shall indeed. Yeah. Like I said, I don't really know anything about Northanger Abbey, aside from like some of the names associated with it. So it'll be a fun new mystery experience for me.

Lauren: Ooh. Shall we do, based off of literally absolutely nothing. What are your predictions for Northanger Abbey?

Emily: All right. My predictions are that Catherine will try and find herself some kind of excitement. I think it'll probably involve Mr. Tilney in some way right now, given what I know about previous Austen love interests, I don't think Tilney is gonna be the end game because he's very charming right off the bat.

Then, I don't know, he seems pretty respectable, so maybe not. Well, this is a, it's an unknown quantity. It's her earliest novel, so I can't necessarily rely on the patterns that have been leading up to our reading this book. So, Hmm. I could be wrong about everything. I, the one thing that I'm certain of is that Catherine will try and find herself some kind of excitement.

Lauren: That is a good guess. And it was a curve ball of a question. So it's, it's hard to make predictions [00:14:00] when even the patterns that we have to rely on technically have no place here because these were written before the patterns that she had established, like you said. So.

Emily: That in itself will be interesting to see if she didn't establish those quirks of her writing in this first novel and then, developed them later.

Lauren: I dunno. But I'm very excited for this book and I love that we get to talk about this first section through love. It's already something that you can tell that Catherine is striving for from the first first couple chapters we'll say.

Emily: Yeah. And it, it doesn't start out seeming like a very fraught topic.

Catherine, I assume, is pretty well surrounded by familial and platonic love. She has a large family. She's one of 10 children, right smack in the middle. Both of her parents are perfectly nice, and they care for her as they care for all of her, their children. She has acquaintances, I assume friends as well.

Lauren: One would think, I think there's 40 families in their town, so unfortunately no dashing young gentlemen, but one would think that she has some female friends at a respectable age.

Emily: Yeah, there's just perfectly average love in Catherine Morland's life. No tragic lack of it. No outstanding blossoming of a, you know, with a mysterious stranger or anything.

But she is, she's loved. Absolutely. And presumably she also loves the people around her.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. And I think one of the things that stands out too is that in previous Austen novels, marriage was something that the characters either judiciously avoided like Emma or were reliant upon for whatever social situation that they were in.

Catherine does not seem to be too [00:16:00] stressed about it yet either because it's not top of her mind because she's 17 and in her own head about things, or just because it's not as, Life ruining as it may have been for other characters. You know, there's no mention in the first three chapters of something like your father's estate is entailed away upon someone else and we'll all be out on the streets and destitute.

Like, you know, there's not a sense of foreboding as there is with other books.

Emily: Yeah, I mean, for one, her father's just a clergyman. it says that he's had two pretty good livings and Catherine has three older brothers, so like the family's pretty well secure.

Lauren: No, no panicking and no mother trying to pawn off her daughters on any eligible gentleman who happens to walk by.

Emily: And as you said, Catherine's only 17, which at the time, contrary to popular belief, was still quite young to get married.

Lauren: She's a baby. She's not worried about it.

Emily: This is her first time outside of her own provincial society.

Lauren: She gets to go be young and have a good time, and she wants to fall in love. But she doesn't seem particularly concerned with marriage.

Emily: I. I think she's more concerned with having an interesting time than with securing her future.

Lauren: Even like the experience of being loved or seen is something where she's content with very little. because in the first chapter it kind of sets up that Catherine was this very plain child, very unremarkable, bit of a tomboy, liked getting into male sports and tumbling downhills more than she liked studying music or lady-like pursuits, but.

She's gotten older, you know, she's filled out, she's gotten a little prettier, and so she's not used to being complimented on her looks. But there were one or two men who she overheard saying that she was quite pretty and this is enough for her.

Emily: You could live off that for days.

Lauren: She truly could.

Emily: Also, poor thing.

we learned that she's just not particularly intelligent either. She struggles a little bit with, [00:18:00] with her academics.

Lauren: Catherine is no thoughts, head empty, but like, in a cute way. She just wants to have a good time. She's trying. She's just not quite connecting the dots all the time.

Emily: She's definitely set up to be completely mediocre, like she is good looking enough.

She's not exceptionally intelligent. She's not talented at anything. She doesn't work hard enough at anything to gain real skill. She just likes reading novels of no substance. There must be no reflection.

Lauren: Honestly, what a relatable character.

Emily: Seriously.

Lauren: Like. Yeah, my life is just normal. I kind of suck at school, but it's fine.

I really like reading books that I can finish in a day that don't challenge me too much, just chilling.

Emily: Mm-hmm. But yeah, none of that lives up to what she sees in the heroines of her novels.

Lauren: And those would be novels where there's grand dramatic flourishes and life ending loves that tear your heart in two when they end and everything is, is heightened in the novels that she's reading.

There's no room for average. It must be exceptional and dramatic or otherwise there's no point and none of that is unfortunately present in Catherine's life.

Emily: We'll see how it progresses.

Lauren: Also, we're three chapters in and yet no mention of an Abbey.

Emily: No mention of an Abbey. Hmm. How unusual.

Lauren: Hmm. Anything else on love before we move on to your historical topic?

Emily: I think that's all I have. It wasn't really explicitly stated in the text, it's just sort of part of the background setting that, well, of course it's there. She's a perfectly average person.

Lauren: She's just Catherine.

Emily: Just Catherine.

Lauren: Well, perfect. I think we can move on to historical context that I'm happy to hear what you've got going on.

Emily: Excellent. Because I wanna talk a little bit more [00:20:00] about her reading material.

Lauren: Ooh, okay.

Emily: I'm not gonna have much more to say than we already have.

Lauren: But still this is a perfect connection, so I'm ready.

Emily: It is still a very good connection. Yeah. So it's not outright stated, but pretty well implied, especially from the comments that the narration makes about how Catherine is not a heroine.

That a lot of her literary choices tend toward the Gothic fiction. So Gothic fiction arose in the late 18th century, mid to late 18th century, really held together by a sort of loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting, especially with the past, haunting the present, as well as some supernatural elements.

It's named for the medieval setting that was characteristic of many early works in this genre. The first recognized Gothic work, the first one to be labeled such was Horace Walpole's novel, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. So it's not a very old genre at the point where Austen is writing.

Pushing 40 years, but apparently it's prolific enough to be satirized by Young Jane Austen. Gothic fiction had a really heavy influence on early Romantic writers, like the ones that Anne Elliott is reading in Persuasion. which to me again, sets up a really interesting contrast between Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Just looking at how those literary habits are treated by Austen in these two different protagonists. But we are told that Catherine is not a Gothic heroine. She doesn't have a villainous father or an absent mother. She's not isolated by her surroundings. She's just none of that. None of that actually applies to her, but she wants to be a heroine so badly.

[00:22:00] Then Austen, of course, includes these quotes in chapter one from the kinds of reading materials that, that Catherine enjoys other than the explicitly Gothic, referred to as being the kinds of things that Gothic heroines would read so that they have, you know, the right quote at the right time, which I completely relate to.

I was also like this at 17.

Lauren: The other thing that I find hilarious about the quotations that Austen includes is that they're misquoted because poor Catherine is still not that bright. So she has these quotations, but they're not correct.

Emily: Yeah. So fortunately we are given the names of the people that Catherine purports to be quoting.

And they're all vastly popular writers, poets, playwrights of the time. The first is Alexander Pope, who is a prominent poet of the early 18th century, known for his satirical and discursive poetry. So it's interesting that Catherine is reading Alexander Pope. There's also Thomas Gray, who was a poet and historian, James Thompson, who was a Scottish poet and playwright, and then of course, Shakespeare.

But it's just, it's such a basic selection of like the popular, oh, everybody knows this kind of authors and it's nothing that really stands out. And Catherine doesn't seem to have any particular investment in really digging into and understanding these works. But this list of, of works that she is misquoting, as well as the fact that they're being misquoted and her motivations for reading these particular things is such a perfect little character encapsulation of Catherine Morland

and I just, I of course think that Jane Austen has done a wonderful [00:24:00] job with the materials at hand.

Lauren: I was so hoping you were going to make this your historical connection, so thank you.

Emily: Of course. Especially after I talked about the romantics for Anne. Like, gotta follow up. Gotta talk about the breadth of popular literature at the time.

Lauren: And the context and extra information about like what the Gothic novel is will be so important for the rest of the book. So I'm glad that this is in our first episode because understanding the Gothic novel will help put so much more of the rest of Northanger Abbey into perspective.

Emily: I'm so glad.

Lauren: Yay. Perfect.

Emily: Well, I am fascinated to hear what you have for pop culture today.

Lauren: So I was torn between, two different things. Well, I won't say what I was going to do because I'm definitely going to include it in a different episode, but then I changed my mind when I got to a specific quote from Tilney in chapter three.

When Catherine is having her first conversation with Tilney. He's talking about the talent of writing agreeable letters, but then proceeds to critique the way that women write letters. So, He says, you know, "as far as I've had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars." To which Catherine responds, "and what are they?" And Tilney says, "a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar."

So I, I don't know how the usual style of letter writing among women is so great if he basically says they have no subject, your grammar sucks and you don't know how to use periods correctly, but whatever. And so based off of that quote, I wanted to relate that to internet speak because I think that that's also such an interesting topic.

And the specific thing of the infrequent use of stops made me think of internet language specifically and the way that we use grammar on the internet. because what are periods, they don't exist. If you use a period in a text message, I [00:26:00] think you're mad at me. Like, what? So, the first article that I wanted to connect it to, Is, this is like a very short extract from the book Making Sense, the Glamorous Story of English Grammar by David Crystal, who's a linguist, but one of the extracts from this book, he's talking about how "the most obvious novelties of the Internet's influence on English relate to the use of punctuation to mark constructions, where many of the traditional rules have been adapted as users explore the graphic opportunities offered by the new mediums."

So there are different things that we can do to play around with language and grammar and sentence construction. Now that we have things, like emojis or different ways to kind of like visualize how we're speaking. And he says, "we see a new minimalism with marks such as commas and full stops omitted," again with the full stops, "and a new maximalism with repeated use of marks as emotional signals."

So like, fantastic!!!!! With five exclamation points after it, or adding a bunch of exclamation points in the middle of your sentence to mark! Every! Word! So that you read it just like that. "And we also see some marks taking on different semantic values as in a full stop as a note of abruptness or confrontation in a previously unpunctuated chat exchange."

So like I said, if you're using a period in a text message, whereas before we were completely ignoring the rules of grammar. Now instead of reading that period as you using proper punctuation, now I'm interpreting that as, 'oh, now we're being serious. Now you're angry with me.' And I don't know why the tone of the conversation has shifted.

And we see symbols such as emoticons and emojis, replacing whole sentences or acting as a commentary on sentences. And so this was great, but it wasn't like 100% what I was thinking of when I was thinking of internet speak. So then I specifically Googled Tumblr speak and then I got to where I wanted to be.

As anyone who was on Tumblr in like 2012 to 2014 well knows, Tumblr had its own [00:28:00] influence on internet speak, internet language, internet grammar, because there really was a language to Tumblr that you only understood if you were within that community and on it quite constantly. There is so much of Tumblr linguistics that have bled out into other quarters of the internet to where people are now using it without ever having been on Tumblr and not realizing where it came from.

But so many internet grammar conventions come from Tumblr. Like that's where, that's where modern internet language conventions anyway. But like, a lot of those that have emerged in the past decade or so, they emerged from Tumblr. So there is a cool blog post on, it's like evolvedlanguage.weebly.com. They had a good interpretation of Tumblr linguistics, and in the last paragraph of their blog post, they said,

"So much of Tumblr speak uses non-standard grammar, spelling, and punctuation. However, not out of laziness or lack of knowledge. It is a conscious design decision. Importantly, not using punctuation is a way of using punctuation. It's a creative way to communicate, expressing more emotion in place of excessive words to describe how one feels. And Tumblr speak is mostly bonafide, although there is a considerable amount of sarcasm and it's quite emotional overall.

And just because language is non-standard doesn't mean it's negative or that it's a detriment to communication. Tumblr speak is its own incredibly effective and efficient mode of communication."

And so when I was reading that quote from Henry Tilney about how women don't use grammar properly and you don't use periods the way that you should and your letter subjects are deficient, it was just reminding me of all the different ways that people critique the way particularly women communicate online.

Because a lot of this is like read as very feminine, the way that these different grammar constructions happen. And it's not wrong. It's just different.

Emily: And to add to that, a lot of [00:30:00] studies of language change have found that women tend to innovate changes that are later adopted throughout their communities and then spread out to other communities.

So like a lot of the Gen Z slang that we see nowadays, that was innovated mostly by black women in the last several decades and then was adopted throughout the rest of the black community, and then especially through the internet, was co-opted by other demographics. And now it's just what the kids use.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. That, that drives me nuts. Every time I hear someone say, oh, such and such is Gen Z slang, it's not. And I think it's an entirely new study to see how so much of like black language and queer black language specifically has been co-opted by like an entire generation of people who think that it's theirs and that they came up with it while completely divorcing it from the origins of where it came from.

Like Slay Queen is not Gen Z, that is black queer slang specifically that-- you guys did not come up with that!

Emily: And especially that line of diffusion from black women through the black community to the white queer community is fascinating.

Lauren: It really is.

Emily: You know, generally if you hear some new piece of slang that's never entered your lexicon before, it probably came from black women like 20 to 30 years ago. First.

Lauren: You're just now catching up.

Emily: Yeah. And now it's reached the rest of the world.

Lauren: Exactly.

Emily: We could get a whole into a whole other conversation about like linguistic appropriation and stuff like that, but that's a different podcast.

Lauren: That is a whole other podcast project and one that I would very happily engage in.

But for today, I just wanted to offer. 200 plus year late rebuttal to Henry Tilney and a defense of the way that, that women were writing letters with [00:32:00] absolutely no evidence for Henry Tilney's claims that everything was wrong, and even if they were, it was just different. It was not wrong. And we continue to create new innovations in language today, only now it's online with emojis and 10,000 exclamation points.

Emily: I know this is only our first episode, but I guarantee that this topic is going to remain one of my favorites for the season. '

Lauren: cause it's so good! I could talk, I mean, not just as like as a topic for the podcast, but as a topic of conversation in general, I find it so fascinating.

Emily: I can recommend for anyone who is curious about internet language and how it changes in these spaces.

the book, Because Language by Gretchen McCullough has been very popular for several years now. yeah, if you wanna learn more about that, check it out.

Lauren: Perfect. I think that's all I got. Shall we do our final takeaways? Have we reached that point?

Emily: I guess so. It's you up first.

Lauren: I think that my final takeaway from our introductory three chapters is that average love is just as beneficial and noteworthy and main character esque as the Gothic love that Catherine seems to be searching for because she has so much love in her life already.

Like you noted, she has a lot of siblings, she has parents who care about her and I think it is normal and fair, especially for a 17 year old, to want the kind of like dramatic love that you see in books. But that also like my personal takeaway from these three chapters is that you don't need it to be a dramatic, all-consuming love for that love to be worth it.

You can just have like the normal love of the people around you and that is perfectly lovely and fulfilling.

Emily: Related to that. I think my final takeaway is sort of the grass is always [00:34:00] greener on the other side. Like your status quo can be perfectly lovely, but it's never going to seem exceptional.

Lauren: That's so true. I'm sure Fanny would've loved to be Catherine.

Emily: Oh my God. Fanny would've given anything to be Catherine. Poor Fanny.

Lauren: Poor Fanny.

Emily: Over a year later, we're still poor Fanny.

Lauren: She'll always be Poor Fanny, that poor woman, I just wanted so much better for her.

Emily: Fanny Price deserved better.

Lauren: She really did.

Emily: Well. We have officially launched into Northanger Abbey.

Lauren: Yay! I'm very excited for this book, you guys. I think this is gonna take us into some new fun directions.

Emily: I cannot wait. Lauren, what is our topic for next episode?

Lauren: We've got five of spades. Our topic for next episode is betrayal. The illustration is of a young lady with a fan and a very wonderful and dramatic hat, and the description is, 'In Sense and Sensibility, Lucy Steele appears sweet and kind, but her actions are treacherous.'

Emily: I really hope we get some juicy material for betrayal next time.

Lauren: I really hope so, because the, the places we can go with betrayal and Catherine's imagination are endless.[00:36:00]

Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters four through six of Northanger Abbey through the lens of betrayal.

Emily: To read our show notes and a transcript at this episode, check out our website reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find the full back catalog and links to our social media.

Lauren: If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon at Reclaiming Jane Pod.

Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis Hale. Our music is by Latasha Bundy, and our show Art is by Emily Davis Hale.

Lauren: See you next time, nerds.

Emily: If you're listening to a Jane Austen podcast and don't know who Shakespeare is, I don't know if I can help you. I think there was some massive misunderstanding in your education.

Lauren: Like where did, how did you get here? What happened? Right.