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Austen Chat: Episode 40

October 8, 2026

Reading Between the Lines of Mansfield Park: A Visit with Patricia Matthew

Patricia Matthew

In this episode, Austen Chat guest host Dr. Anne Fertig sits down with Dr. Patricia Matthew to discuss Mansfield Park, in all its beauties and complexities, as well as Matthew’s experience editing a new edition of the novel. They also unpack the ways in which Jane Austen weaves social commentary into her novels, and how what Austen doesn’t say is sometimes just as important as what she does say. In the wrap-up, Matthew also shares a reading list of some of her other favorite eighteenth-century novels.

Dr. Patricia A. Matthew is associate professor of English at Montclair State University, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, Regency culture, and abolitionist literature. She is the editor of the Penguin Random Deluxe Editions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey released for Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, as well as the forthcoming Norton Library edition of Mansfield Park. And she is currently writing a book on sugar, gender, and British abolitionist culture for Princeton University Press. Matthew also co-edits the Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, and her work has appeared in the journals Women’s Writing, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language, as well as in The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. Matthew is also the director of The Race and Regency Lab, and in 2024 was a plenary speaker at JASNA's Annual General Meeting.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Patricia for joining us on Austen Chat!

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, the podcast of the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. If you're a regular listener, you may have noticed that I took a break from hosting the podcast this summer. We wanted to keep the Austen conversation going though, so we invited some fellow JASNA members to step in as guest hosts.

Today I'm delighted to hand the microphone to Anne Fertig, Regional Coordinator for the Washington, D.C., Region of JASNA. You may already be familiar with her work. She's the writer and host of Finding Jane Austen, a scripted documentary podcast about Jane Austen's life. Anne has a PhD in English and comparative literature, specializing in 18th-century women's writing, and she focuses on creating digital history and new media projects for public audiences. She co-founded the Jane Austen and Co. web series when she was a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She now works in the museum field in Washington, D.C., as a content producer.

In this episode, Anne talks with Patricia Matthew about Mansfield Park, in all its beauties and complexities, and the ways in which Jane Austen weaves social commentary into her novels. Stick around to the end where Dr. Matthew gives us a reading list of some of her other favorite 18th-century novels.

Patricia Matthew is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, specializing in 19th - century British literature, Regency culture, and abolitionist literature. She's the editor of the Penguin Random Deluxe editions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, released for Jane Austen's 250th birthday, as well as the forthcoming Norton Library edition of Mansfield Park. She is currently writing a book on sugar, gender, and British abolitionist culture for Princeton University Press. She co-edits the Oxford University Press series Race in 19th-Century Literature and Culture, and her work has appeared in the journals Women's Writing,The Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language, as well as in The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. Matthew is also the director of The Race and Regency Lab, and in 2024 was a plenary speaker at JASNA's Annual General Meeting. We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Anne Fertig: Welcome, Dr. Patricia Matthew, to Austen Chat. We are so excited to have you here with us today to talk about Mansfield Park. But before we begin, I want to ask you a question that we ask everybody on this podcast when they first come in, which is what is your Austen origin story? How did you first encounter Jane Austen's works?

Patricia Matthew: Yes, well hi, Anne. Thank you for having me. And I think that question is interesting because I have a couple of Austen origin stories. And so, the origin story of me as an Austen reader, I was—as a college student I read Pride and Prejudice and then wanted to read it repeatedly. And so for a few years, I would read it at Christmas. I don't know why I thought it was a Christmas novel. I think it was a way for me to celebrate the end of the semester. So, that's my original Austen story. And then when I went to graduate school, one of the reasons I went was because I was so interested in her contemporaries. I graduated from college very suspicious of the canon, and I thought there are other stories by other writers. There must be. And why do we read them? Why do we read Austen and her other canonical counterparts and not them? And so, I kind of drifted away from Austen for a while.

And so, I think the other origin story was writing my dissertation and needing a chapter—my dissertation committee insisted and said, "You cannot write a novel—a dissertation about the history of the novel and not write about Austen." And it's so silly that, you know, as a grad student, you just think you know everything. And so, I conceded to write about Sense and Sensibility, which is still, I think, my favorite Austen novel.

And then, finally, my students really pulled me in in a way that has stayed with me now for 23 years—their continued interest and curiosity, what they're interested in, their resistance that sort of underscores their sense that in order to be worldly and educated, they have to have read Austen. Our major is designed—the English major at Montclair is designed in such a way that you can actually graduate without reading Austen. And so their choice is a deliberate one. Whenever she's on the syllabus, whenever I'm offering a class—any class on the novel. And so, that's also in its own way a different origin story.

Anne: I love that, especially because of this question of "why Jane Austen?"—which I think us scholars often grapple with a lot of—as you put it, why Jane Austen and why none of these other wonderful authors who are writing at the same time? So, I know it's like a really big question, but to you, why Jane Austen?

Patricia: I think partly it's her place in the sort of global—when I say canon, I don't necessarily mean canon the way that we use it as literary scholars. I think that she's a global figure and a signal of being educated, worldly, and curious. And I think she has remained popular in large part because of the adaptations. I think she remains popular because you can read Austen repeatedly and find new pleasures.

I was talking to one of the editors I work with, and I was anxious about my own edition. And I said, you know, in a really cranky way, "I mean, do we really need another edition of X?" And she said, "Well, Patricia, when's the last time we had an edition of X?" And I said, "Last month." [Laughing] We keep producing these editions of Austen. I mean, I think the other thing is her books—it's such a—it's such a manageable body of work. You can read the six novels every year without stretching yourself. I think books are beautiful as physical objects. Even as I was wrestling with writing, editing three Austen editions and thinking, "does the world need another Austen edition?" I purchased the Folio—those beautiful boxed Folio editions that they made 1200 copies or some like ridiculously small number. And I thought, "Yes, not only do I need more Austen, I need this Austen in this sense."

So, the books are collectible, the stories—I don't say this often, but the stories really do feel timeless. I think that every generation finds Austen for themselves and they find something in her that is either fascinating or interesting or intriguing. I think pop culture has invited us to consider her in new ways. I think even though I have to tell everyone that Bridgerton is not—these are not Austen adaptations, that author is an Austen fan. I think the fact that so many writers of historical romance novels cut their teeth on Austen keeps that, um, that aesthetic and that world alive for new generations of readers.

Anne: Now you mentioned your own edition. Are you talking about your upcoming edition of Mansfield Park?

Patricia: Well, yes, but I also—at that—in the moment, in that moment, I had seen—happily seen the publication of my Penguin Random House edition of Pride and Prejudice, and then my Penguin Random House edition of Northanger Abbey. And then I was also working on Mansfield Park. And, you know, I'm—I say this—I hope the smile comes through in the audio. I wrote this essay the last time we were celebrating, saying "On Teaching, but Not Loving, Jane Austen." And now, however many years later, I'm producing Austen editions. I get teased a lot about it. I get teased a lot by colleagues and friends and—who've known me for a long time. And then there's a part of me that's like, "Well, why don't I just do them all? Why don't I go ahead and do Persuasion? And you know, we need a good edition of Sanditon." So, I'm maybe a little bit hooked, even though I really wrestle with the work.

Anne: What is the process of editing one of Austen's novels like?

Patricia: So, it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying because—and I think it's a good humility, by the way. I think it's the humility that comes when you know that there have been, for more than a century, brilliant people who have taken up the task of presenting her work and doing it in a responsible way. Some of them—editions—are editions that I read first as an undergraduate, then as a doctoral student, and that I teach from. My Norton Critical Editions have—are really sturdy, but I've used them so much, several of them are wrapped in rubber bands because the binding—I've just used it so much. And so, it's, it's a little daunting to join that community. It's also—I mean, just as my—the way that I think in terms of my work as being built on the labor and brilliance of those who've come before, I want to do justice to their work. And so, so that's sort of the approach. It depends on the kind of editions.

Penguin Random House Deluxe Editions are meant for people who would just go into a bookstore and pick up an Austen novel. So, the Penguin Deluxe editions—they're made—they're beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. But it's a general introduction. This is who Austen is, this is what this novel is. And then they ask their editors to write short essays to highlight specific themes or characters or elements of the novels. I prepared explanatory notes, and then I selected illustrations. What I didn't do, which is what I think people might imagine for those, I didn't do textual editing. In other words, the Pride and Prejudice that's in the Penguin was edited—[unintelligible] I'm gonna forget the name of the editor, but those were pre-edited. So I simply provided the extra narrative material.

Norton was a different project. There I went and I worked with the 1816 Mansfield Park. We know Austen published the 1814 edition, and then she revised it in 1816. It came out with a different publisher. And that required—in addition to explanatory notes, I had to go through and look at—and I hesitate to call them errors—but inconsistencies. Sometimes there are open quotation marks but not quote closed quotation marks. Sometimes French phases—phrases—would be italicized and they wouldn't be italicized. Missing words, and there are—I hate to call them typos—but there are, there are mistakes and errors. It's a clean draft, so there aren't a ton of them. But in order to do that work—and some scholars—and Claudia Johnson comes to mind immediately, sort of discusses the 1814 and she provides information about the 1814 and the 1816 edition. So, Austen changes it from 1814 to 1816, and sometimes it's the difference of a comma. So, the first sentence of the 1816 edition of Mansfield Park and the punctuation is different than the 1814 edition. And as you're reading for that—so I'm reading—you know, I don't know how many times I've read Mansfield Park and how many times I've taught Mansfield Park, but I've just picked up the edition. I've used Claudia Johnson's mostly. Sometimes I use Penguin Classics, depending on the class. But I've just sort of just picked up the edition and just assigned it. Students might have different editions. You know, you say you want this one, but they get the one that's the least expensive.

So, reading it in that way was a completely different experience. Keeping track, double checking, sometimes doubting myself, sometimes seeing things a bit differently, and then, you know, circling and marking the text that Norton will go through and implement. Norton, for the Library Classics, these are meant to be inexpensive classroom editions. And so, I was asked to write an introduction, and I split it into an introduction and an afterword. So, how can I generally introduce the novel and then put little seeds in the reader's brain that I then explore in the afterword with the hope that they'll flower, and then explanatory notes. So, that's that process.

Anne: That seems so daunting. How do you look at the works—the texts of someone like Jane Austen, who is so revered in a way, and make that decision of what is the correct, or even what is the version we're going to go with?

Patricia: Yeah, so I went with the 1816 because she revised it. So, I feel, along with other scholars, that we can trust that that's Austen's vision of the novel that she wanted to leave behind. And in some instances, it's just a missing word. Sometimes the typeset is off. So, I'm hardly ever in the position of feeling like I'm correcting Jane Austen . . . right? These aren't interpretive, you know, decisions. But sometimes—for example, I think in one note she refers to Mrs. Grant as Miss Grant. And that's just a—you know, that's just a thing that happens. My fear or my anxiety or my general—is wanting to get it right and not wanting to reproduce an error that maybe should have been fixed or to fix something that isn't correct.

So I did my own reading of—and I read in three-ring binders—I read a print copy; I did not read it online. And then I looked and consulted with other editions whenever I was concerned about something to make sure that I was reading it right—that I was, you know, that I hadn't gone too far afield. But it's just, it's just this—and I think that when students read it, they'll just read it, right? Maybe they won't notice that some of the closed quotations are missing or some of the punctuation is a little different. But I'll know. I'll know, and I want to make sure that I get it right.

Anne: You know, I realized as I was preparing for this conversation that Mansfield Park is the one that I own the most copies of in different editions. I actually just bought the Harvard illustrated edition over the summer. I have a Broadview edition. I still have my Penguin from college, and it's so beat up, and it still has the sticker on it because I bought it used.

Patricia: Used, the yellow used, right?

Anne: Yes. [Laughter]

Patricia: It's ubiquitous.

Anne: And I can't let go of them. But I realize, like, with Mansfield Park, I always—it's because, like, I always want to see somebody else's take on it. I always want something new and illuminated about it that I always feel like, you know, there's still so much to discover within the text of this novel. And Mansfield Park in particular seems to have this reputation of being one of Jane Austen's most complex novels. And some, you know, find it less accessible, maybe for that reason. Why do you think that is? What is it about Mansfield Park?

Patricia: So, I hate to blame Fanny Price, who I feel very protective of at the end of this project. I think she's—I think that there's so much going on in her head that gets lost. But I do believe that she's not a heroine that we want to be. Right? If there's an Austen quiz—you know how for a while it's, like, which Austen heroine are you? Pretty much everybody wants to be Lizzy Bennet. And then after that, Elinor Dashwood, probably. I'm just guessing, you know, and then I think low on that list are Catherine—is Catherine Morland.

I wrote an essay once about a professor who compared me to Emma Woodhouse before I had read the novel, and I was mortified when I read it, and then felt that Anne was me. You know, I felt Anne. I was Anne—for no good reason, by the way! My father is not the head of a crumbling family. He's not. [Laughter] You know, he's not obsessed with—but he was in the military. He's a retired military person, so maybe he's not Elliot's dad, maybe he's who she loves.

But I just think that there aren't—I think that our primary characters in terms of Fanny and Edmund—their love story is not fun, you know? I mean, it's just not fun. We see the shift in Darcy and Lizzy Bennet, Elizabeth Bennet. We may not be rooting for them, but we see that evolve between the two of them. It just sort of feels at the end that Austen just puts them together, you know. And she even, I think, invites this. She's like, "Listen, I'm gonna leave to other pens the details. You can decide when." It's as if she understood that she's writing a courtship novel, and so she has this social contract with the reader that she has to fill. And so, she has to do it, and maybe it's not so exciting. Fanny is not particularly inspiring. Mrs. Norris is a horrible person, even though she cracks me up. Lady Bertram, you know, doesn't get exercised about anything except for her dogs. I think for many readers, the character who feels the most contemporary is probably Mary Crawford. And I think in the same way that contemporary young women can identify with Lizzy Bennet and still call themselves feminists, they can identify with Mary Crawford and still call themselves feminists—except the novelist doesn't really like Mary Crawford in the same way that the novelist seems to—or our narrator seems to—like Fanny Price. So, we don't have really, I think, someone to root for in the same way.

And the comedy isn't as present as it is in, say, Emma. And the sentimentality—I'm just thinking out loud now, because I'm thinking of how much I love Sense and Sensibility and how much part of my love of Sense and Sensibility is being irritated with Marianne Dashwood, who I just want to shake, you know, or, like Cher in Moonstruck, smack her and say "Snap out of it!" I just, you know—I just—I mean, in class when I teach her, I'm so genuinely exercised by how irritating she is—so much so that invariably some of my students are, like, "Goodness, Dr. Matthew." They don't say "goodness." They may even say, "Damn, Dr. Matthew, what did that—what did she do to you?" It's rather irritating. I don't think anyone in Mansfield Park excites those kinds of emotions.

And, you know, in my edition I, you know, you go back and you look at how Austen's family reacted and responded. I mean, I think even Austen's own mother wasn't crazy about Fanny Price. And the novel sets on her shoulders, right? By the time we pick up—I think by the time everyone picks up Mansfield Park, they have an expectation. I do not think Mansfield Park is anyone's first Austen novel. I don't think anybody wanders into Barnes and Noble or their local independent bookseller or says, "Oh, you know what, I'm gonna read Mansfield Park. I think they pick up Pride and Prejudice. I think they pick up Emma. And I mean, I just think in terms of popular culture, we haven't had the—we haven't had the definitive, iconic adaptation that cements the heroine in a way that makes us connect to her. So, I think all of that is surrounding the novel. And that's before you even get to the heavy subject of the slave trade. I think, you know, students might find it icky that Fanny marries her cousin. Henry Crawford—there's just a lot. What do we do about Henry Crawford? You know, the Bertram daughters are not—there just aren't a lot of likable characters. They're interesting, and I think they're culturally interesting, but I don't think you imagine yourself as sitting and having a conversation with them or going for a carriage ride with them the way you would with other Austen characters.

Anne: Yeah, I think, you know, it's not necessarily a novel filled with the most likable of Austen's characters, but they're still very interesting in certain ways. And you yourself have given talks recently on—for JASNA groups—on social commentary, right, in Mansfield Park. What does that—what do you mean by social commentary in the novel? And where do you find it?

Patricia: Yeah, that's a—you know, I was thinking about—I love that I was thinking about that question, because I was—and I may just—this might just be a semantic distinction. I think there's a difference between observation, which can feel like commentary, but just describing a world that you know, and what you choose to describe is maybe not as important as what you leave out, right? This thinking silence. And so there's observation, and then I think there is a kind of satirizing that Austen does. And you know, satire is social commentary, but I don't always know—I wouldn't always say that Austen's satirizing the clergy to make a comment on the Church of England. Right? We laugh at a rector, we laugh at Mr. Collins, but I don't know that any of us thinks that Austen is criticizing the church.

Anne: Yeah. Good point.

Patricia: She's criticizing [unintelligible]. Right. But then, as she does in Northanger Abbey, when she comes out swinging in defense of the novel, that is social commentary. She just—I mean, it's just un—when I say unfiltered, I mean, she disrupts—the narrator—to defend this defense of the novel. I would put that right up against Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" in defense of poetry, the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." I mean, I just think it's such an important piece of prose that argues for genre. And that feels like social commentary.

I want to say, and I don't want to get too far ahead of us in the conversation, but I think that her insistence that women can be rational and smart and caring and kind and not overly sentimental feels like social commentary, because so much of the writing of the time dismissed women for being overly feeling. You know, I don't think you title a novel Sense and Sensibility without making some sort of social commentary. And so, I think that that's where I see it in Mansfield Park. I think Mansfield Park is as much a social commentary about the importance of the estate. And I'm not obviously not the first person to see this. I always think of him as Alistair. He has a very important last name [Duckworth], The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. That feels like social commentary. I think mentioning Repton and the conversation between Rushworth and his improvements and Fanny's resistance to the improvement—I feel that there's social commentary in there. I think that Sir Thomas's regret at the end of Mansfield Park sort of suggests that Austen is making a—sort of commenting on how—particularly young people in the gentry—are raised. It's a commentary on education. And I think that's consistent across many of the books.

Anne: That's so interesting. Yeah. Because you bring up Northanger Abbey, and to me, the defense of that novel is so direct, it's pretty much breaking the fourth wall.

Patricia: Yeah.

Anne: Right? We have her speaking to us literally as the writer, as the narrator, and telling us. But that—it doesn't seem really to be operating in the same way in Mansfield Park, where she's much more subtle about it.

Patricia: Mmhmm. Yes, yes. And, you know, this is a more mature novel. And so, when she sits down to write this, it's not that—I mean, she always knew what a novel was, but she understood herself as a novelist in a different way, right? Her other novels had done really well. She must have had a process. I mean, by the time—I'm gonna forget the number of years because I always do in these conversations—but by the time she sits down to write Mansfield Park, she's been writing for a very long time. She's written the juvenilia, she's written Northanger Abbey, she's irritated that North—you know, in the back of her mind is Northanger Abbey still hasn't been published. Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice. I think that Mansfield Park's weight might be a reaction to the lightness that she worried about in Pride and Prejudice. She said it, you know, "it wants a lecture" and she's joking, but I think Mansfield Park is—I wouldn't call it a didactic novel by any means, but it is taking on heavy and weighted subjects. And you're right, I think that narrator is not the same narrator in Northanger Abbey, who happily interrupts herself to say, "Yes, novels. I'm doing X, Y, and Z." Calls herself Catherine's biographer at some point, right? I think the narrator in Mansfield Park is always present, but a little more restrained—much more restrained than in Northanger Abbey. But still there, you know. She's still—when she comes in and says, "You know, I don't want to dwell on tales—on misery, and then dwells on it. You just—you just "Come on already, we're ready to wrap this up. We know how it's gonna end by now." But she just understands herself as part of a tradition of storytellers.

Anne: You mentioned earlier this idea of silence in the novels. How do we read silence? Like how—especially in a novel like Mansfield Park, but also any of the others, what do you do with what's unsaid?

Patricia: That's a great way to say that question. I am—because I was thinking sort of topically. So, Austen, by and large, for example, is silent about servants. With very few exceptions, right. We don't think about that. She doesn't mete out punishment in the way that she quote, unquote is supposed to. So, I think Marianne Dashwood, by all accounts—I think in another novel, probably, if in the hands of another novelist, might have died.

Anne: Right.

Patricia: But she doesn't. Right. She loses her blush, but she still marries a man who's wealthy enough to give her exactly the life that she wants. I think there is a way that Austen is not particularly interested in punishing characters for not adhering to even her—what we might think of as her ideals. So, Lydia Bennet is—certainly doesn't have the life she wants. She's away from her family. She sort of is excommunicated to the north when the south is this beautiful aesthetic place. But I think that we're invited to think about her more sympathetically. So, the criticism of Lydia is silent in a certain way. I think even in explaining that she's her mother's favorite, Austen leaves a lot to the readers.

In Mansfield Park—and I talked about this with JASNA, and I think it made its way—I've sent in all the materials that are in copy edits; I'm not quite remembering everything. But I was particularly interested in the silence in the landscape at the ha-ha—that moment where the land doesn't announce itself until you're right at the edge of it. And so, for people who might not remember, that's that architectural element that is designed to separate the land and cordon it off without disturbing the vista. So, you don't see a ha-ha—you don't know it's there; it's like a ditch—until you're right on it. In fact, ha-ha is what—that's supposed to capture your—"Oh, it's there." It can be dangerous. And in Mansfield Park, when Fanny Price says "You'll slip into the ha-ha," right? That's a—this land is silent in how it might be a danger to Maria Bertram. So it's not telling, but the reader understands—and especially Austen's readers would have understood what a ha-ha is.

And of course, you know, I think about the silence of the Bertrams. Austen doesn't do this in her novels, but I said it would be very convenient for us if Austen had had an anti-slavery teapot on the table, or if Lady Bertram was knitting an anti-slavery pillowcase—we know that women did this. So, the silence is not just in that moment that everyone points to when there's silence when Fanny brings up the slave trade. The silence about it exists throughout the novel. Even though when Mrs. Norris mentions the Antiguan property, the plantation, it's one of the times when Lady Bertram is actually the least silent. She says, pretty forcefully, "It's fine. He's got that well in hand." And for a woman who doesn't seem to care about much of anything, to just sort of be—"exercised" is too strong a word. But she actually does stand up to her sister in that moment and says, "We have talked about it. My husband and I have talked about it." And then, you know, goes back to being herself. And so, that distinction between silence and speech.

I'll just say one more thing. When Mary Crawford is trying to pull Fanny Price into her brother, and she says, "I have, you know, I've been silent, but I haven't been blind." I don't know if I've got that quote direct. But she says, "You know, I may not have said anything, but I've seen it." And when her uncle is asking her why she doesn't want to be with Henry Crawford, she doesn't know how to speak to him, but the narrator shows us what's happening in her brain. Her brain is really loud. She's sifting through all of the implications of what it would mean to explain why she doesn't trust Crawford because she doesn't want to accidentally reveal that her cousins have behaved imprudently. Even though if she had said so, that might have been a warning to everyone about what was forthcoming between Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram.

Anne: So, as you know, there's been a lot of research recently by Devoney Looser, amongst others, about the abolitionist ties of the Austen family themselves—notably the Austen brothers. Is this something that you see strongly emerging in a novel like Mansfield Park or any of the others? Or is it something that you think is more couched in those silences?

Patricia: So here's what I wrote. I'm not quoting it directly. I think we want to see Austen as an abolitionist because that aligns with our admiration. But to be an abolitionist and to use that term is a—it's an actual—it suggests something concrete. Right? It was a movement, and people adhered to abolitionist thought, or they were slavery's apologist, or they were ameliorist, right? Let's fix the institution of slavery, not end it. And I don't see in the novel a clear abolitionist stance. I think the novel is sympathetic to the plight of enslaved people. I think the reference to Cowper and the fact that Austen reads Clarkson—I think it's all there. And I think Austen was sympathetic.

But here's the thing: even when Austen's a social commentator—just what you said, it's couched very carefully. She's not a Wollstonecraft, right? She's not an Edgeworth, right? Even when she's speaking for women's rights, she's not doing it from a pulpit. She's not doing it standing on some sort of pedestal waving an equity banner. That's just not who she is as a writer. And so, it's not just that she doesn't write that way about the slave trade. She doesn't write that way—even her social commentary, with the exception of defending the novel as a genre, right? I don't see her as coming up and standing up and shouting anything. In fact, the thing that sometimes irritates me about contemporary adaptations of Austen is that they want the story to be more aggressively political than I think Austen is in any of her writing. It's definitely there. It's definitely there. And I think it's fair to look at her and not to equate—I don't think Fanny is an abolitionist. I think Fanny is an institutionalist. I think whatever her uncle wants, she wants. Whatever the church wants, she wants, you know. I don't think that Fanny is an abolitionist. And she's—and we can't forgive her for not being knowledgeable about it, because she asks questions. She's "I'd love to hear my uncle talk about it." We don't know what he describes to her, right?

Anne: Right.

Patricia: My book project spends a lot of time thinking about the representations of slavery, of the slave trade that circulated in England, which is very—in so many ways, papers over the horror of it. At the same time, you know, Mansfield rules on the Zong case. So—and the circulation of the Brookes image, the slave ship that shows how enslaved people were stacked. So, that's circulating. And we don't know if—Austen doesn't mention it. But the fact that Fanny doesn't come out swinging against abolition doesn't mean that her creator, Jane Austen, is not sympathetic to the slave trade. And I think we want a clearer statement because it's such an uncomfortable business. It's such an uncomfortable—it's a nasty business. It's such an uncomfortable thing for people to think about in a world that they want to imagine where people are walking around in costumes and, you know, gloves and, like, where cos people—I don't do it—people cosplay that world, and they want to separate it from the engine that made it possible, which was the slave trade.

Anne: That's a fantastic answer. And I think, you know, as you talked a lot about this idea of social commentary and the various forms of it, you know, we often do consider Mansfield Park to be the most politically charged of Austen's novels. And maybe that's just because we are reading what we want to be reading into it. Do you find, though, any similar strands of that in the other novels?

Patricia: I think you've hit on it. And thank you. I'm glad that my answer made sense. And I want to just say here on this podcast, it's evolved in dialogue with members of JASNA and Austen and Co. The research—not just Devoney's research, but the research—at my JASNA talk at the AGM, I had a slide up of 30 years of talking about this topic. And so, it's just a topic that people have considered in myriad ways, published in Persuasions, which is such a phenomenal gift to the public—that scholarly, careful thinking from a range of readers. I've been in dialogue; I've benefited so much from that work. I don't know that she is or not, but I think we are keenly tuned into this subject. I think we are just so focused on it from various perspectives.

If you're a person of color in the literary societies of Austen, you are unique. You're one of a small percentage. And it has to feel strange there. It is a world that's dominated by white women with deep investments in a particular version of Austen. I'm always—but also, and I say this, I'm not just being politic—also deeply curious about history. Right? Deeply want—they really want to understand. And so that balance of understanding it and then leaving the fantasy of Austen untouched, that's a kind of tightrope. I was sort of shocked at a meeting when someone came up to me and they were disagreeing with what I had presented in my talk. And unlike at an academic conference, where they would have asked me a question that I could have then answered, I was on my way to get a scone. And they said—and I didn't know—they had the benefit of knowing me, and I didn't know them, and I didn't want to, you know, sort of whip out my scholarly stick and spank them. But I was aware that it's in the air, this sort of question. And I have to be very careful about the invitations I accept, because sometimes people want me to come and tell them a certain story about Austen that I don't believe. And they want to believe it so much, so as part of it, and I don't—I just—as an intellectual, as a scholar, as a black woman, that's not work that I want to do.

Anne: Right.

Patricia: But even if I'm sympathetic to people wanting to have that. So, it's a long answer to your question about her commentary. I don't know that it's more pronounced. I just think that we pay attention to it in very different ways. And I think where we are open to queerness in Austen, people get very uncomfortable because thinking about slavery is thinking about racism, and that's an indictment of the reader and the text. And so people are holding on to two things. I don't know if I said that well, but I think they're holding on to two things at once: their sense of Austen and their sense of themselves as someone who likes a good person whose literature they absolutely adore.

Anne: Yeah, I think that sounds absolutely correct. And first of all, thank you for talking about your experiences. And I think for so many people, Austen is so important to them that, you know, sometimes challenging Austen or—can feel like a challenge. So, absolutely 100%.

So, we're at the end of our time, but I do want to ask you one more question. You mentioned before your essay that you wrote many years ago about how you feel there's so many other authors that don't get the same attention as Austen. Finish this off. Who do we read next? For somebody who's read Austen and wants to move on to somebody 18th- and 19th-century, who would you recommend?

Patricia: Well, she's having a resurgence. I would say Maria Edgeworth.

Anne: That's my answer too.

Patricia: Yeah, Maria Edgeworth. I think Susan Ferrier is not nearly as great a novelist as Austen, but I think her trilogy—Susan Ferrier is really great to read. Who else would I . . . I'm now paying attention to anti-slavery poetry, and so I'm really interested in this collection of poetry edited by Mary Rawson. I always think we need to go back to Evelina and go back to Burney. And then, of course, as I mentioned way before we started talking, we need new—we need as many editions of The Woman of Colour: A Tale as we have of—maybe we don't need as many as we have of Pride and Prejudice, but we—Lyndon Dominique has done an amazing, phenomenal—that is a phenomenal, just critically urgent edition. I think we should have more editions for exactly the reason you said you have multiple editions of Mansfield Park, right? We want other editors with other things to say, even as we deeply respect Lyndon Dominique's work.

Anne: That is a fantastic reading list. Thank you again. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for the fantastic conversation.

Breckyn: Dearest listeners, I am pleased to announce that Austen Chat now has over 200 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for your support. If you haven't yet given us a rating, please consider leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Janeites can find us and join our Austen-loving community. Again, thank you. I remain yours respectfully, Breckyn Wood.

[Theme music]

Austen Chat: Episode 40

October 8, 2026

Reading Between the Lines of Mansfield Park: A Visit with Patricia Matthew

Show Notes and Links

Transcript

Austen Chat Podcast

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