Lesley Castle: “With Friends like These…”

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Who needs enemies?! The catty denizens of Lesley Castle (and “friends”!) take us through a tragically incomplete story, with guided detours by your hosts into the letter-writers’ educational background and some surprisingly salient parallels from women’s basketball.

Transcript

Emily: 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 "Lesley Castle."

[intro music]

Emily: This story was so much.

Lauren: You did finally get the epistolary novel that you wanted in true form this time.

Emily: It was unfinished, unfortunately, because I want to know what else would have happened.

Lauren: I have not had this feeling since I did not filter by "complete fan fictions only" on fanfiction.net or AO3.

Emily: Yes, that's precisely what it is!

Lauren: I knew it was unfinished when we started it, but I had forgotten by the time I got to the end. And I turned the page and it was a new story. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, wait.

Emily: Follow through!

Lauren: I need to know what the outcome of this is. What do you mean? This is, this is not the ending. And I have not felt that betrayal in a long time because I have long since matured and learned to only filter by complete stories, because I know that pain, and I was not going to go through that again until I was just cruelly edged from 200 years in the past.

Emily: [laughs] Yeah, see, I will absolutely read works that are still in progress, because I love to jump in and get those updates, um, because hope springs eternal when it comes to fan fiction. But I think that Lesley Castle is probably past its expiration date. I think we're not getting that.

Lauren: It doesn't matter how many reviews I leave, I'm never gonna know. Tragedy. The real tragedy, though, is that I'm the one who has to recap this epistolary novel that's incomplete, and I'm not really looking forward to that, to be honest.

Emily: Yeah, I did text Lauren earlier and say how incredibly relieved I was to check our notes and realize that I did not have to recap this one.

Lauren: Yeah, uh, I have historically not performed well this season with my recap, so I'm really hoping for a little bit of a redemption arc. And I'm going to do my best to speak that into existence. [laughs]

Emily: This is a tough one to try and redeem yourself on, so we will reserve judgment.

Lauren: I appreciate that. I do love a challenge and we're gonna see how it goes.

Emily: Alright, are you ready?

Lauren: Uh, you know, yes. [laughs]

Emily: Okay. Approach it with confidence and faith in yourself.

Lauren: Thank you.

Emily: And, you know, speak it into the universe.

Lauren: I love it.

Emily: Alright. On your mark. Get set. Go.

Lauren: Okay. So this novel is a series of letters between multiple women, but mainly between Margaret Lesley and Charlotte Lutterell, who are talking back and forth about the drama that is going on in their personal lives with fathers, with friends, with frenemies, with sisters.

And it is series of dramas in which we have women who have run off from the family, we have women who are getting engaged and stealing daughters' fortunes, we have escapades in London, and then it all comes to an abrupt end because Jane Austen never got to finish it.

Emily: Perfectly timed.

Lauren: That is - honestly, I can't get into detail or we would never finish it in 30 seconds. I was just going to flail. So we just have to do a general overview because y'all, there is so much to talk about.

Emily: I feel like that was a pretty good summarize-recap.

Lauren: I appreciate that. I think I at least knew not to fall into the danger of trying to recap event by event, because once I once go down that road, there's no coming back.

Emily: There's no escape.

Lauren: No.

Emily: So Lesley Castle opens with Letter the First, which is from Miss Margaret Lesley to Miss Charlotte Lutterell, written on January 3rd, 1792, which - 1792 is actually the year that this was composed by Jane Austen. She would have been 16 years old.

Lauren: Yep, spring of 1792, and it was addressed, this manuscript at least, to her brother Henry, who later wrote her a fake banknote saying that she should be paid the sum of a hundred and five pounds for her unfinished novel.

But we're starting off with a bang as far as the the first letter in this novel because Miss Margaret Lesley is writing to Miss Charlotte Luttrell, or Lutterell rather. I'm missing a syllable here.

Emily: It is spelled "Luttrell" later, so I think it's Luttrell.

Lauren: Yeah, it goes back and forth. It might be another idiosyncrasy.

Emily: We start, uh, I feel like the most sort of in media res of any of Austen's that we've seen because the letter opens, "My brother has just left us."

Lauren: No further context, even for the letter.

Emily: Not even for the letter. Yeah.

Lauren: Like, no, there's no greeting. There's no, my dear Charlotte, simply, my brother has just left us.

Emily: And it transpires that Margaret's brother has discovered that his wife was, you know, basically kind of a nasty person and, what is it, did she elope with somebody?

Lauren: Mm hmm. "The worthless Louisa left him, her child, and reputation a few weeks ago in company with Danvers and dishonor."

Emily: What a turn of phrase.

So, Margaret and her sister have been left to the care of the sweet Louisa, the innocent Louisa, the young two-year-old child of their brother.

Lauren: And she has nothing but wonderful things to say about this two-year-old child in a very strange way of complimenting her, given that, again, her dear little niece in her words is but two, however, "She is as handsome as though two and twenty, as sensible as though two and thirty, and as prudent as though two and forty."

I know that there is a thing where when it's your niece or your baby, you think they're the most incredible baby to ever grace this earth, but this is taking it a step further.

Emily: It's a little much.

Lauren: It's a bit much.

Emily: But Baby Louisa seems to be maybe Margaret's current favorite family member. Um, it seems that she has nothing against her own sister, Matilda, but her brother is distraught at the dissolution of his marriage. Her sister in law has run off with some dissolute. Her father is 57 and still remains "the beau, the flighty stripling, the gay lad, and sprightly youngster, fluttering about the streets of London, gay, dissipated, and thoughtless at the age of 57." While she and her sister are secluded in this isolated castle in Scotland.

Lauren: She does take pains to remind her friend of how wonderful she and her sister are. And at first I did think this was a bit of like, a rare moment of clumsy exposition because it is hard to provide detail in epistolary letters when you want to give context to the reader but in the actual situation in which you're writing, the other person would know all these details about the subject of the letter or the narrator. But as the story goes on, as you will later see, it doesn't feel like clumsy exposition. I think it's just an early way of showing that this letter writer is completely full of herself, because she, she thinks very highly of her and her sister and describes why in great detail.

Emily: It's a character choice. She does say, "We are handsome, my dear Charlotte, very handsome, and the greatest of our perfections is that we are entirely insensible of them ourselves." Is that true?

Lauren: Is it? Hm.

Emily: But it does give you an excellent sense of Margaret's character, that she has a high opinion of herself and is not quick to forgive people who she sees as slighting her.

Lauren: Not at all. But someone who has an even higher opinion of herself, we will find out, is the Miss Charlotte who is the recipient of this first letter, who clearly can think of no one but herself.

Emily: The most horrific tragedy has just befallen her, because her sister's fiancé died suddenly. And Charlotte had taken all of the time to prepare their entire wedding feast, and now who is going to eat it?

Lauren: She is vexed, because her sister's fiancé died - violently, I might add! was thrown from his horse and fractured his skull. So was thrown into sudden death. But while he is on his deathbed, and her sister comes running into the room, understandably frantic and hysterical, because her fiancé might die, and all Charlotte can just say is, like, well, this is really worse for me, because you know how long I spent making every single dish for your wedding? And who's going to eat it now? It's going to spoil. Ma'am!

Emily: Yep, literally, she's informed that her imminent brother in law is about to die, and she says, "good God, you don't say so. Why, what in the name of heaven will become of all the victuals?" [laughs] Girl, there's pressing priorities here!

Lauren: You know what it honestly reminded me of? There's a clip from the Princess Diaries that's been going viral on Twitter again recently where, um, Mia is talking to Lily, her best friend, at the very beginning of the movie because Lily is complaining about something she has to do with her dad. And Mia says, well, hey, at least you have a dad. And Lily says, you're still upset about that? It's been like two months.

Emily: Absolutely insane.

Lauren: What do you mean? Insane behavior. Insane friend. Terrible sister.

Emily: Truly.

Lauren: And the mother is no help either. [laughs] Apparently, um, after the sister collapses out of just pure emotional exhaustion, Charlotte and the mother are sitting in the room with the sister after they've gotten her settled. And whenever there's a moment where Eloisa feels slightly calmer, they're trying to just console her by complaining about all of the waste that is going to come from this wedding feast being uneaten.

And rather than trying to say, you know, I'm sure everything will be fine, why don't you go and sit with your husband - which they also prevent her from doing, because she immediately wants to go and run to him, and they say, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. All they can think about is to begin eating the food immediately. And so this is what they do.

Emily: They're not going to waste time.

Lauren: To the point where even Charlotte says, "Dear Eloisa, there's no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle." Because, as she says, she was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her.

"I beg you would not mind it. You see, it does not vex me in the least, though I may suffer perhaps most from it after all. For I shall not only be obliged to eat up all the victuals I have dressed already, but must if Hervey should recover, (which, however, is not very likely) Dress as much for you again, or should he die (as I suppose he will), I shall still have to prepare a dinner for you whenever you marry anyone else.

Emily: Unhinged! Who do you think you are?

Lauren: And then she ends this letter with, Oh, by the way, uh, your dad got married. And I just thought you should know.

Emily: Yeah, not even that. It's, I heard your father's getting married, so I wrote to my friend in town about it, and then the letter closes with, "I have this instant received an answer from my friend Susan, which I enclose to you, and on which you will make your own reflections."

The enclosed letter: "My dear Charlotte, you could not have applied for information concerning the report of Sir George Lesley's marriage to anyone better able to give it to you than I am. Sir George is certainly married. I was myself present at the ceremony, which you will not be surprised at when I subscribe myself your affectionate Susan Lesley."

Lauren: What?

Emily: Plot twist!

Lauren: I literally wrote in the margin of my book, DRAMA.

Emily: Such drama. While gallivanting off about London as this sprightly lad of 57, Margaret's father has married himself to a lady who is presumably around her own age.

Lauren: And so when Margaret writes back to Miss Charlotte, she can't really be bothered about all of the nonsense that's gone down with how Charlotte treated her sister, but she is very concerned about who this woman is, who her father has up and married while in town.

And I wrote in the margins that this is very much giving Sir Walter and Margaret is very concerned that if "his wife should be of an extravagant turn, she would encourage him to persevere in that gay and dissipated way of life to which little encouragement would be necessary." As in, he already spends all of our money as it is, if he has married somebody equally stupid with finances, we're going to be destitute in a matter of months.

But even so, she only talks about that for the first paragraph. And then she says, Oh, yes, my brother has run away to Paris, he's basically gone on a gentleman's European tour, which usually you do before you get married, but he's using this as a way to recover from heartbreak, which, relatable.

Emily: Yeah, that's, I can't blame him for that, honestly.

Lauren: You know what, running away to Europe to get over your problems sounds like a great idea, actually.

Emily: Yeah, that's like the ideal get-over-it trip.

Lauren: Exactly. And she then detours into giving Charlotte the whole sort of details of how he met the horrid Louisa in the first place.

Emily: Who had given in to her father's schemes and plans for her and presented herself as being so sweet and lovely [in a devious voice] until you get to know her. Until you're locked in.

Lauren: It's like, I think this may just be the benefit of hindsight. I am sure that you were one of the people who was also taken in by Louisa. You just don't like her now because she ran away. Which, I mean, valid. If somebody cheated on my brother and dipped, I would also hate that girl, so.

Emily: Yeah, for sure.

Lauren: [laughs] That's understandable.

Emily: Persona non grata, absolutely.

Lauren: 100%. You're dead to me. I don't know your face. I don't want to see you.

Emily: Of course, Charlotte's next letter returns immediately to the question of the food, which fortunately, um, has been nearly cleared out the pantry, so we don't have to worry about all of the waste of her time.

Lauren: If we were worried at all. Like, Margaret certainly wasn't. She includes one line at the end of her previous letter that shows affection and sympathy for her sister, but not for her.

Emily: Unfortunately, Charlotte goes on to describe the new Lady Lesley, um, in less than ideal terms. She's kind of short. She uses too much rouge. She's "naturally extravagant and not very affected. She never reads anything but the letters she receives from me and never writes anything but her answers to them."

Lauren: She's a great time when she's in a good mood, and she's really, really lively, you know, when she's not in a bad mood. And she plays and she sings and she dances, but she has terrible taste and she's not good at any of those things.

Emily: And Matilda had said in her last letter that, well, if you, Charlotte, consider her a friend, then she must not be all that bad. And Charlotte's like, no, actually, it's more a whim that we're friends. We don't really like each other.

Lauren: It's like, this was a friendship of convenience, and now it's too awkward to cut it out. She's too polite to say that she doesn't want to talk to me, I'm too civil to say that I don't want to talk to her, and so our letters just continue.

Emily: Wildest reason for continuing a friendship.

Lauren: I mean, but I feel like that's not unheard of in today's day and age either when you're in a friend group, or you are polite to this person, and there are too many social rules in place to get you to be able to say, I actually don't want to talk to you anymore.

And so you make nice every time you see them, and you might even hang out every once in a while, but you don't actually enjoy their company. I don't know, it felt very Southern to me.

Emily: Yeah, actually, a little bit. I see that. It's the etiquette of it.

Lauren: Exactly. But the TL;DR of this letter is that, um, sorry to say it, but your new mother in law's awful. Uh, good luck.

Emily: But Charlotte does give us a little bit of information. She and her family have gone to Bristol at, unfortunately, a very unfashionable season of the year. And there's only one family that they could even imagine associating themselves with, who are apparently quite pleasant people.

And the wife of the couple even has a very charming brother, who Charlotte has decided to get for her sister. Because, she says, "Perhaps you may wonder that I do not consider myself as well as my sister in my matrimonial projects, but to tell you the truth, I never wish to act a more principal part at a wedding than the superintending and directing the dinner."

Lauren: She is the epitome - you've heard the derogatory "always a bridesmaid, never a bride," but that's honestly what she aspires to.

Emily: Yeah, that's her dream.

Lauren: That's all she wants. She just wants to be in charge of all the food, and she has so many food metaphors throughout all of her letters. It's really funny.

Emily: [laughing] It is really funny. Honestly, that's the most valid thing she's said, is, no, absolutely not, I'm out of this game.

Lauren: It's like, I don't want to play, but I will make all the food for you, and she even complains in this letter that when they are hanging out with the one agreeable family, that the veal was terribly underdone, and that the curry had no seasoning, and she should have been there to fix the food.

Emily: "I could not help wishing all dinner time that I had been at the dressing it."

Lauren: Honestly, that's the most relatable thing that she said. This food is under seasoned and I'm not happy. I get it, girl.

But we can't spend too much time with them in Bristol because then we get another letter from Margaret to Charlotte saying that her father has returned.

Emily: And the outcome is less than ideal.

Lauren: New wife in tow and everyone is not getting along. They are not one big happy family.

Emily: Not at all.

Lauren: We get a quite short letter from Margaret to Charlotte, basically saying, yeah, her ladyship is just as terrible as you said she was going to be and can't compare to myself or to my sister.

And then we get the other perspective because we get a letter for the first time not from Margaret or Charlotte, but from Lady Lesley herself to Charlotte, shit talking her two daughters in law.

Emily: What a fucking letter this is! Oh my god. She complains about absolutely everything at Lesley Castle. It's so far away from London, they "have no music but Scotch airs, no drawings but Scotch mountains, and no books but Scotch poems, and I hate everything Scotch."

She's so ready - the minute they get to Lesley Castle, she's ready to turn around and head back to London.

Lauren: And honestly, I wrote in the margins that it reminded me of Meredith in the Parent Trap. But without any of the charms that actually recommend Meredith at all.

Emily: Yeah, for sure.

Lauren: Especially in how she describes the two girls, Matilda and Margaret, which she calls the Scotch Giants, and says, "I am sure they would frighten you out of your wits, and they will do very well as foils to myself, so I have invited them to accompany me to London, where I hope to be in the course of a fortnight."

Emily: Oh, and also, hearkening back to the sweet Louisa that we learned about in Margaret's first letter; "Besides these two fair damsels, I found a little humored brat here who I believe is some relation to them. They told me who she was, and gave me a long rigmarole story of her father and a Miss Somebody, which I have entirely forgot. I hate scandal and detest children." She's so awful!

Lauren: Just bitter and angry and ill tempered for what?

Emily: No apparent reason. Just hates everything and everyone.

Lauren: Charlotte was not exaggerating when she said, I tolerate her, and we're friends, but she's not, she's not a good person.

Emily: And she's very put out that her brother William, uh, as she interprets it, seems to have taken a liking to Matilda, the elder Lesley daughter, and... yeah, she's really not happy about this.

Lauren: Not at all. And she immediately sets out to have a conversation with her brother about is going to turn him against her because no, no, no, no, she can't have that. And she also knows that her brother is not going to marry anybody without a fortune. And although Matilda and Margaret should have a fortune, Lady Lesley makes sure to point out "Matilda's is entirely dependent on her father, who will neither have his own inclination nor my permission to give her anything at present."

Emily: She is immediately scheming that these daughters of the first marriage will get nothing.

Lauren: We need to revive the Fanny Dashwood Hate Club and add Lady Lesley to it, because this woman sucks.

Emily: Absolutely.

Lauren: Terrible. Terrible!

Emily: Susan Lesley, go fall in a pit.

Lauren: Oh my god. And even in the conversation with her brother, her brother is tired of her too. He cannot stand her either.

Emily: Mm hmm. He's, at the very least, trying to be polite about her new family, even when she's dead set on shit talking them. And she won't have it. She wants somebody to insult them with her.

Lauren: Even to the point of, when he tries to compliment the appearance of the daughters by saying that they somewhat resemble their father, she goes, Or no, she says that, um, "they're very like Sir George," which she does not mean as a compliment. And her brother responds, you know, you can't really think that they look like their father at all. He's very plain. And he's trying to compliment them and say that the girls themselves are very pretty. And she says, "Oh, everyone knows Sir George is horribly ugly. And I assure you, I always thought him a fright." Girl, that's your man.

Emily: Yeah, you know precisely why she married him. And it was not for any affection.

Lauren: Not at all. She's made it abundantly clear. It's for those jewels.

Emily: And William tries to get her to backtrack on this. He says, "You surprise me extremely by what you say, both with respect to Sir George and his daughters. You cannot think your husband's so deficient in personal charms as you speak of, nor can you surely see any resemblance between him and the Miss Lesleys, who are, in my opinion, perfectly unlike him and perfectly handsome."

Lauren: Like, your man might suck, but they don't.

Emily: But also, stop talking so bad about your man! Oh my god!

Lauren: Truly!

Emily: Yeah, Susan seems to have no concept whatsoever that she is talking to a friend of Margaret's.

Lauren: Not at all, especially given the descriptions of her appearance or descriptions of the two sisters' appearance, because she writes with the assumption that Charlotte has never seen them before, which is interesting, because you can see how she characterizes them when she doesn't think that her reader has any context.

Emily: She insults their height. She insults their complexions.

Lauren: Especially their height. And then her brother also knocks her down a peg towards the end of their conversation because he's clearly had enough. And she is talking about how horridly pale they are. And her brother responds, says, well, they always have a little color. And after any exercise, it's considerably heightened. And she just continues to double down and double down until her brother responds, "well," which even she says, "he replied in a tone of vexation and glancing an impertinent look at me. 'If they have but little color, at least it is all their own.'" Which is making fun of her being overly rouged, which was very out of style at that point in time.

Emily: But, "this was too much, my dear Charlotte, for I am certain that he had the impudence by that look of pretending to suspect the reality of mine. But you, I am sure, will vindicate my character, whenever you may hear it so cruelly espoused. For you can witness how often I have protested against wearing rouge, and how much I always told you I disliked it. And I assure you that my opinions are still the same." Girl, Charlotte has already given you up.

Lauren: She already clocked your tea. Whoo, and so then Charlotte, who has now received letters from both the mother in law and the sister, or daughter in law rather, then writes to Margaret like, girl, I got letters from you, and I got letters from your new mother in law, and the two of you hate each other. But she's not getting in the middle of it. She just says you guys are both pretty, leave it at that. Anyway, I'm going to continue talking about myself.

Emily: Of course. And continues to talk about food and about how terribly gloomy her sister has been, really bringing down the mood.

Lauren: And how different she and her sister have been their entire lives. And it really wasn't a problem until her sister decided that she was going to get married and when she decided that she was going to stop giving Eloisa as much attention. Instead of being annoyed, Eloisa was like, Oh, thank God. Stop with the fake applause. She was like, Wait a minute, you were supposed to be annoyed that I wasn't giving you attention anymore. Why do you not care? Why are you indifferent?

Emily: Backfired.

Lauren: Truly. But Eloisa is still sad that her fiancé died, which Charlotte can't seem to understand, but as a shocker to everyone, mere weeks after her fiancé unfortunately suddenly died, she is still upset and does not seem to have moved on.

Her description is, "poor girl, she still laments his death with undiminished constancy. Notwithstanding he's been dead more than six weeks, but some people mind such things more than others."

Emily: [high pitched] It's been six weeks! Aaaah!

Lauren: People's European tours last longer than that. Their little vacations. You know what I mean?

Emily: Unreal.

Lauren: And she only says that to say that they're not going to leave Bristol anytime soon, because Eloisa's spirits are so low that she's very averse to moving, and it's very vexing.

Emily: So, tragically, they will not be able to meet the Lesleys in London, as she had expressed a hope of before, or as Margaret had. Someone did.

Lauren: They wanted to meet in London.

Emily: But Eloisa seems to be having a better go of friendship than Charlotte is, because she and Mrs. Marlowe, who is the lady that they met in Bristol, um, exchange a very loving and effusive couple of letters. They're so close and so tender with one another. VERY close and VERY tender with one another.

Lauren: I was wondering if you picked up on that as well, because I definitely highlighted a couple of lines and just said gay. Gay, gay gay. [laughs]

Emily: Yeah. Absolutely. We are creating the queer subtext here.

Lauren: I don't even, it's, it's barely subtext at this point. And I know it is my 21st century sensibilities being placed upon this text, but I'm sorry. So many of this was just so queer coded.

Emily: Yeah. I mean, we do also, we have the example of all these other letters right here of other ways that young ladies might speak to one another. And these two stand out in their affectionate sensibilities.

Lauren: Two quotes in particular from Mrs. Marlowe's letter back to Miss Eloisa that stood out to me. Number one is when Mrs. Marlowe is noting how quickly she responded to Eloisa's letter and she says, "But do not imagine that I claim any merit in being so punctual. On the contrary, I assure you, that is a far greater gratification to me to write to you than to spend the evening either at a concert or a ball." I could be doing anything else, but you know what I really want to do what my heart wants is to sit here and write this letter.

And then in the same letter, after, you know, paying so many compliments and all these other things, she's talking about the Miss Lesleys and she says, "But though one may be majestic and the other lively, yet the faces of neither possess that bewitching sweetness of my Eloisa's, which her present languor is so far from diminishing."

"What would my husband and brother say of us if they knew all the fine things I have been saying to you in this letter?" which I highlighted and just wrote, HELLO?!

Emily: Yeah. Same.

Lauren: What?!

Emily: She says, "It is very hard that a pretty woman is never to be told she is so by any one of her own sex without that person's being suspected to be either her determined enemy or her professed toad-eater."

Lauren: I don't know what's going on between the two of them, but I'm glad that Eloisa at least has somebody to listen to her who is smart, because Eloisa is still really sad about her husband. And like, granted, like, I'm making fun about how gay this is. But Eloisa is still just like pouring her heart out about I'm really sad, and nobody will let me be sad.

And Mrs. Marlowe says, you know, I am really glad that you feel enough trust in me to share that. But I'm also not going to let you dwell on it. So I'm going to talk about something else. Like, excellent. Yeah, that's a good friend.

Emily: Yes, this is an acceptable approach. Complaining about wasting the wedding feast is not the way to go, Charlotte.

Lauren: From your own sister! That's your sister!

Emily: From your own sister. Oh my god. Just unbelievable. So I'm, I'm happy for, for Eloisa and Emma.

Lauren: And they're the last people that I'm happy for in this because the last letter that we get in this novella made me write at the top of my page, "with friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Emily: Seriously. This final one is once again from Margaret to Charlotte, as we began.

Lauren: And we thought that Charlotte was bad before, but Margaret is being incredibly self centered and cruel in this letter to Charlotte. So we had seen Lady Lesley say to Charlotte that she's going to bring Margaret and Matilda with her to town because she finds them both to be incredibly ugly and so they're going to make her look better. And then Margaret says something quite similar to Charlotte, when she is basically talking about how she is drowning in young men, and it's so difficult. And she says, "How often have I wished that I possessed as little personal beauty as you do, that my figure were as inelegant, my face as unlovely, and my appearance as unpleasing as yours?"

Emily: Are you sure you're friends?

Lauren: Oh my god. Eviscerated!

Emily: Yeah! For what?

Lauren: Charlotte says how much she doesn't like Lady Lesley in her letter to Margaret, and it's glaringly evident that the two of them don't like each other either. They're locked in the same kind of, like, polite correspondence, but I see no actual affection for either person.

Emily: Yeah, we've seen affection in two letters, and it's not between these two.

But of course, you know, insulting Charlotte simply isn't enough. She also has to go and insult her stepmother for dripping in jewels and, oh, doesn't she know that simplicity is more elegant, and just hates Lady Lesley so much.

Lauren: And she also is, um, completely convinced of her own charms, especially when it comes to Mr. Cleveland, who she believes to be completely attached to her, although he did not speak, but she can imagine everything he would have said had he opened his mouth. What exactly convinces you that he's attached to you, my dear?

Emily: Does she know our two protagonists from last time?

Lauren: She might.

Emily: I feel like they would get along like a house on fire. Derogatory.

Lauren: Maybe it's the Jane Austen manuscript universe. Who needs the MCU when you have Jane Austen?

Emily: Yeah. But our final wind up is that they have heard from the brother, who went from Paris to Italy, converted to Roman Catholicism, and married a Neapolitan noblewoman.

Lauren: And, funnily enough, um, the fallen Louisa also is in Italy, also has converted to Roman Catholicism, and is also soon to be married to a Neapolitan nobleman.

Emily: Just, sure.

Lauren: Honestly, I really wonder where this plotline would have gone if Jane Austen had finished this, because it feels like, to me, that they're both going to leave their new spouses for each other again.

Emily: Yeah. Oh my god. The brother invites his sisters to come and visit him, and bring his daughter along, and Sir George wants to go as well, but Lady Lesley refuses. She says, "No, I have once in my life been fool enough to travel I don't know how many hundred miles to see two of the family, and I found it did not answer, so deuce take me if I am ever so foolish again."

Lauren: Tell us how you really feel.

Emily: And that wraps it up. That's where it ends. We're left hanging.

Lauren: I just wrote down, Jane Austen, come back from the dead and finish this. I feel like I clicked an incomplete fanfiction.

Emily: [laughing] Yeah. Oh my goodness. I've gotta say, the juxtaposition between the very sweet letters of actual friendship, it really, really stands out. And I think made me realize how little affection there was in the letters between Charlotte and Margaret, because Susan writing to anyone is like, oh, you're just a bitch. Yeah, and especially once Margaret starts insulting Charlotte in the last letter... All these people just hate each other, except for Eloisa and Emma.

Lauren: It's just the E's. They're the only ones who actually like one another. And I wonder, too, if that was the intent of including those two letters, just to show us what it's like to actually correspond with somebody who you care for and hold in high esteem, where if you hadn't gotten it already, just based off of the general tone of these letters, none of these subjects actually like one another. However, here are two letters in which you can actually have a civil and sentimental conversation that makes sense and actually honors the other person.

Emily: And with this being unfinished, I also have to wonder if their relationship would have played more of a role in the ongoing story, or if that was really just kind of a one off thing.

Lauren: Right. Yeah, we'll never know if it was only going to be those two letters that were just going to kind of juxtapose the other relationships, or if they were going to play a greater role and advance the plot in a different way.

Emily: We'll never know.

Lauren: [sighs] Can somebody - I know the archives have been combed over god knows how many times. Go look again. Just look to see if there's like one more page.

Emily: Oh, just fire up the Google doc, write a fanfic.

Lauren: [laughs] Or that. If there's one contribution that I hope this podcast makes, it is inspiring people to add to the Jane Austen fan fiction.

Emily: I am still so disappointed with myself that I have not managed to actually get in there and write anything because I've had like three or four concepts and just haven't gotten to them.

Lauren: I am just saying - You don't actually have to participate in NaNoWriMo, like, by signing up. However, National Novel Writing Month is coming up and will be in progress by the time this episode releases. So, if there were ever a time to just buckle down and like, churn out a fanfiction, this would be it.

Emily: You make a very good point.

Lauren: I do do that now and again. Well, okay. What were your overall thoughts of the bit that we got? So we're going to have to resort to fanfiction to finish Lesley Castle, but of the portions of Lesley Castle that Jane Austen did write, what did you think?

Emily: I thought it was very funny. I definitely think that her scathing humor comes through.

Lauren: Yeah, I would definitely have to agree. I think - I appreciate the more subtle sarcastic wit of adult Jane Austen, but I also have just been so deeply entertained by her just letting it rip in these youthful stories as well. I think there's a time and a place and a use for everything for both restraint and for a bit more of like a maximalist approach, and I am having a lot of fun with her just being as snarky as she wants to be.

Emily: Yeah, I think that's also why it was so fun to go from Persuasion, which is such a masterful and subtle novel, straight into Northanger Abbey, which was so much less subtle than that. And now continuing on with the Juvenilia, having read all of the future of Jane Austen, the places where she goes, the places where she develops her craft, and just seeing just the, the barbs that underlie that genius.

Lauren: 100%. Yeah. We keep saying it's like getting a peek behind the curtain, but it really is. It's like, you get to watch her develop as a writer and see where she's pulling from as she begins to draft the stories that may have inspired, in part, the published novels that we get, or even just the creative journey that she takes to be able to write those books is really cool. I thoroughly enjoyed this. I may have liked it more than Love and Freindship, actually.

Emily: I think I did too, yeah.

Lauren: Just for sheer entertainment value.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. There's still frustration with the characters, but it feels like there's more going on under the surface, because we very much get that Laura from Love and Freindship is an unreliable narrator just because of how outrageous her own telling of the story is, but it is... I can't necessarily say that it's subtle here, but it's a step down from the previous outrageousness of Laura in both Matilda and Charlotte's, I think.

Lauren: Yeah, I think the characters in Love and Freindship feel more like caricatures, and these feel more like real people, but with the full force of Jane Austen's, like, snark and sarcasm unleashed.

Emily: Mhm. There's still obviously caricatured elements, like Charlotte's constant use of food metaphors, which was just so funny. She says at one point she was "cool as a cream cheese," and I just laughed.

Lauren: I cannot. Yeah, there's still definitely some caricature elements, but they feel a little bit more drawn out, I guess, as characters than the Love and Freindship characters do, by design.

Emily: Yes, absolutely.

Lauren: Yeah. I think that also contributes to why I like it so much.

Emily: Oh, just, wow. What a wild story.

Lauren: And we'll never know how it ends.

Emily: Ugh.

Lauren: If I pay you 105 pounds, will you-? No, I'm kidding.

Anything else that you want to kind of call out or name about Lesley Castle before we move on to our historical and pop culture connections?

Emily: I think that hit everything for me. Was there anything we missed for you?

Lauren: No, I don't think so. Yeah, I think that about touches on all the high points.

Emily: Excellent.

Lauren: Well then, without further ado, what's our historical connection?

Lauren: Margaret says in her first letter that it's been four years since she left school and was separated from Charlotte. And I think I've talked a little bit in previous seasons about some aspects of female education, but they were specifically at school together, which is different from at home education.

In the 18th century, education for both girls and boys was divided between private at-home teaching and public school teaching. So either you had governesses or tutors or whatever at home or just your parents, or you actually went to an institution. But public education for girls, especially at boarding schools, which is presumably what they attended, was really not widely supported. The mother was seen as being the most appropriate instructor or educator for her daughters.

And I have a quote from the headmaster of Tonbridge School at the time, Vicesimus Knox. He says, "It has been asked why I approve of public education for boys and not for girls, and whether the danger to boys in large seminaries is not as great as to girls. I must answer, in general, that the corruption of girls is more fatal in its consequences to society than that of boys, and that as girls are destined to private and domestic life, and boys to public life, their education should be respectively correspondent to their destination."

Which really reflects the more general shift happening at this time towards the "separate spheres" treatment of gender, where women are ideally, I guess, sort of relegated to the home, while men deal with issues outside.

There's also, with boarding schools, the issue of the total lack of any kind of national authority for education or curriculum. Boarding schools were functionally unregulated. So anybody could start one, anybody could run one, anybody could work at one. And it was really difficult for parents to assess the professionalism of teachers.

There's a line from a play called The Governess, where a teacher calls out the existence of quacks in medicine, and then says, "There are quacks in our profession as well, for I suppose if boarding schools were to be examined into, there would be found a great number whose governesses are decayed tradesmen's wives, and not possessed of more education than is necessary to provide for a family and manage a kitchen." So there's some very strong opinions on the quality of boarding schools in general.

Lauren: Evidently!

Emily: Yeah. Um, so there's obviously a huge range of potential subjects that could be taught, there's a huge range of quality of instruction, but there would have been in schools a general core curriculum of modern languages, history, and geography, and then anything else depends on sort of the preferences and the expertise of the staff.

So, Charlotte and Margaret were likely together at a boarding school, and they probably had basic instruction in those subjects, but we really can't know how well they were instructed or anything else that they might have learned, aside from Charlotte specifically mentioning that she's learned cookery from her mother, that she was instructed at home in that skill set.

Lauren: Nice, thank you!

Emily: Yeah, I was so surprised to learn about how vehemently disliked boarding schools seem to have been.

Lauren: I don't know that I would have assumed that, and granted, it's from a very limited perception of like gothic or gothic inspired media where children are sent away to boarding schools. And so I think with that as my only frame of reference, I would have assumed that parents were at best apathetic towards boarding schools, not necessarily that they loved them, but that they were just like, eh, you know, the concept of childhood is a relatively modern one, and the way that we treat children now is also very different, so I think I just assumed that parents didn't care that much. I did not know they had such strong feelings against boarding school.

Emily: Yeah, and it's just another place where I'm so constantly surprised at how vastly education has changed in the last two centuries.

Lauren: And it also makes total sense that there was no regulation, no teacher certification, like no one, especially not young women. They're not training young women in, like, the Regency era equivalent of a teacher school to go and instruct the youth. That's just simply not happening.

Emily: Like, you have the universities where there would be expectations for standards of male professors. But, yeah, when you get down into those lower levels of education, anything goes.

Lauren: Wow.

Emily: Yeah... What do you have for pop culture today?

Lauren: Female drama.

Emily: Ooh!

Lauren: In light of all of the cattiness, for lack of a better word, that was on display in all of these letters, and with the queer subtext that we are placing upon the two letters between Eloisa and Emma, I was just thinking about all the different interpersonal drama that occurs in between women, but in particular, queer women. I think that women are encouraged to fight with words, and so while people who are raised and socialized as men are just as dramatic, they're taught not to verbalize it, whereas women are taught to, either compete with one another or to fight with words, and so that drama tends to come to the surface a lot more often. I want to make that clear because I feel like I could easily say women are more dramatic than men in this pop culture connection. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that with women, that drama's more often verbalized and front and center and men are just as dramatic, but they show it in different ways.

So now that we have cleared that. I wanna talk about queer drama in the WNBA. The WNBA finals just ended - ongratulations to the New York Liberty for winning the season's WNBA championship. But because so many people were watching the WNBA this year, it also meant that people were more familiar with the benefit of watching a league in which a vast number of the participants are queer, which is that you get people on opposite teams who are dating one another, you have people on the same team who are dating, you have people who are exes who are now playing against each other on the court, and it is excellent. It elevates the experience by so much.

Self.com has a good kind of like summary or overview of it on their website. It says, "In a lot of workplaces, there are rules against dating a co worker, but in the world of elite and professional women's sports, it's not an infrequent occurrence for two teammates to be romantically involved. Wives Allie Quigley and Courtney VanderSloot won a WNBA championship together with the Chicago Sky in 2021. Mercury player Diana Taurasi met her wife, Penny Taylor, when they were teammates in Phoenix. WNBA players Brianna Stewart and Candace Parker met their wives, Marta Sarge and Ana Petrakova, respectively, when they were playing basketball overseas during the W's offseason. PWHL Montreal and Team Canada players Marie Philippe Poulin and Laura Stacey, who are engaged, granted the new professional women's hockey league its own version of the women's soccer 'they're lesbians, Stacy' meme, which is, 'she's gay, Marcus.' And trust me," says the author, "I can tell you as someone who has been reporting a women's sports for nearly a decade, for every relationship the public knows about, there are tons of hookups and breakups that never leave the locker room."

And when people started to get ahold of it this year, because viewership of the WNBA increased thanks to players like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, who were absolute superstars in women's college basketball and then debuted as rookies in the WNBA this year. Uh, so a lot of people who are watching them and watching their matchups from college have now turned to WNBA and slowly viewership expanded from people just watching Caitlin Clark or just watching Angel Reese to beginning to watch the WNBA teams and the rest of the league as well, which is fantastic. It's a net positive.

But as people began to watch the teams, they also began to pick up on the different relationship dynamics and started to realize, Oh, there are other storylines at work here. You can just watch the WNBA purely for basketball. But when you understand the other interpersonal dynamics that are also happening, it makes everything so much more entertaining, especially when you have people who are playing against each other in the finals who then have to go home to the other person whose team just absolutely spanked them in like a knockout game or something like that.

And I was thinking about, as someone who is an admitted fanatic of drama - I adore reality TV. I like drama that's not mine. Like, why it's something that... I guess that people are drawn to. Why is that the thing that people are making TikTok videos about when they could be talking about the basketball itself? Why are they talking about the relationship dynamics of the women who are playing on the court? And I think there is something to be said for honesty in drama. By which I mean that most of the time we are told that we need to be nice and polite and, you know, not to offend other people and a lot of times in interpersonal drama, whether it's breakups or catty letters back and forth or a catty fight on reality TV, we're often seeing people at their honest, unfiltered selves.

It might be terrible, and it might be completely dislikeable, but it's honest, and I think that's why, um, people root for reality TV villains or why they're completely invested in a stank look that somebody gives to their ex girlfriend on the basketball court. It's like they were drawn to authenticity and drama and honesty and all the different ways that it presents itself.

And as much as I disliked the, like, characters of Margaret or of Charlotte in Lesley Castle, I also was very entertained. They're terrible, but they are being honest, if nothing else. And even in a society where they're constrained by politeness, even when Charlotte says, I'm only continuing to correspond with this woman because we're too civil to do otherwise, they're being accidentally or purposefully honest in their letters to one another. As far as their emotions go, they're very upfront about who they like, who they dislike, and I think we are drawn to that, especially when it's presented in a way that feels contrary to the way that we're supposed to be. Whenever people act terribly, we're entertained.

Emily: We can at least give them that. They are honest.

Lauren: They are honest and they are entertaining if nothing else. And that is my convoluted, meandering pop culture connection for today.

Emily: It was fun regardless. Thank you.

Lauren: You're very welcome. I hope you enjoyed the journey.

Emily: I did.

Lauren: Welcome to my brain.

Emily: Well, that wraps up our history and pop culture segments. So, we gotta figure out final takeaways for this mess.

Lauren: Oh god.

Emily: I think my takeaway is to stop pretending to be friends with people who make you miserable.

Lauren: Mmm, excellent.

Emily: What do you got?

Lauren: I think my final takeaway, honestly, is just to be kinder to one another. Not everything has to be a way to one up someone else or to put them down. Sometimes it's okay to just be kind and find some empathy. And not even just okay. Encouraged, actually.

Emily: Yeah. I like it.

Lauren: That's my takeaway. So many of them suck.

Emily: Just terrible people. Oh my God.

[outro music]

Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading Evelyn.

Emily: To read our show notes and a transcript of 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 get 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: We'll see you next time, nerds.

[music ends]

Emily: Maybe by the end of November, I'll actually produce the fanfic I've been sitting on about, um, God, who was it? Was it Fanny Price and what's her name?

Lauren: Oh yeah. Oh, I forgot about that.

Emily: The scene when she comes in out of the rain and has to change her wet garments? Like, I'm sorry, that's just asking for it.

Lauren: Mary.

Emily: Mary, thank you. Crawford. Mary Crawford.