The Humour of Jane Austen

In this month’s programme we are departing from our usual approach of introducing the most recently read book from our English Reading Circle. Instead we going to talk about  an English novelist whose work is probably even more popular today than when it was first published at the beginning of the 19th Century – Jane Austen, who was born exactly 250 years ago. And we are particularly going to introduce you to some of the humour in her novels.

Extracts Read

Pride and Prejudice
Mr Darcy’s first appearance.
Mr Collins’ proposal to Elizabeth Bennett.
Lady Catherine De Bourgh’s visit to Elizabeth Bennett.

Sense and Sensibility
Mrs John Dashwood convinces her husband not to give his stepmother and half sisters any money, though he promised his dying father to do so.
Mrs John Dashwood gets a very unwelcome surprise.

Northanger Abbey
Henry Tilney’s opinion of the novel
Jane Austen, as narrator’s, opinion of the novel

Music played

• Introductory theme music to the BBC TV 1995 dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice, composed by Carl Davis
• Regency dance tune Mr Beveridge’s Maggot, played in the ball scene in the BBC TV 1995 dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice

Next month we will be introducing Ian McEwan’s latest novel What We Can Know. It is set almost a century in the future, in 2119, in a UK partially submerged by rising seas, and is centred on Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the fictional University of the South Downs, who is investigating a lost poem, read aloud at a party in 2024.