“People think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction.”
In Our Time (BBC) · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
From an archive episode on Jane Austen's Emma. Mullan argues that from Mansfield Park onwards Austen was no longer reworking early material or answering other people's novels, but doing entirely new things with fiction.
Transcript
And it is anonymous. But I think the first thing you said is absolutely right. Jane Austen, I think there's two important things. One provable and one my feeling. The provable thing is she cared a great deal about making money. She didn't have much money. Any money that she made from her novels was sort of extra money for her. She didn't have an income. She relied on the charity, in a sense, of her brothers. And so that was very important. But the second thing, I think, is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really high ambitions. I think she knew she was doing completely new things with fiction. She didn't have anybody... I think Mansfield Park was the first novel which wasn't, as it were, responding to other people's novels. She was responding to herself from Mansfield Park authorities. Can we
just take that on briskly, John? She reworked her, when she started to get published, she reworked some of the earlier novels.
Yes, I mean, so it's very important, as Emma says, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, we don't have the originals of those, but they were reworked versions of early stuff. Mansfield Park was not. And from Mansfield Park onwards, she is doing entirely new things. And she is inventing technical... I mean, you know, people think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Eau contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction. I'm
sure we'll come back to that, John. If I come back to you, I'm sure we'll come back to that. And I can repeat that because... Janet Todd, for those who haven't read Emma, would you... I'm sorry, but you can be as brisk as you want. It's seven sentences, you'll do it.
Well, I think not, actually.
Briskly, a