Austen Chat: Episode 32
February 5, 2026
Jane Austen & Her Letters: A Visit with Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
"My dearest Cassandra,
The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation. I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school." —Jane Austen, September 1, 1796
It's been speculated that Jane Austen may have written nearly 3,000 letters in her lifetime. While only 161 are known to have survived, that small collection offers a wealth of information about her daily life, her friends and family, her writing, and her voice. In this episode, historical sociolinguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade shares insights gained from her study of the language in Austen’s letters—from her vocabulary and spelling to her many instances of linguistic playfulness and clues about her dialect and accent.
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands. A member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, she has published widely in her field. Her works include In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters (2014), an in-depth linguistic analysis of Austen’s correspondence.
Show Notes and Links
Many thanks to Ingrid for joining us on Austen Chat!
- Learn more about Ingrid and her work on the Leiden University website.
Listen to Austen Chat here, on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms), or on our YouTube Channel.
Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published February 5, 2026. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
[Theme music]
Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood, from the Georgia Region of JASNA. In our modern era of podcasts, texting, and social media, people may now go their whole lives without ever composing a handwritten letter, and yet it is thought that our dear Jane penned nearly 3,000 during her lifetime. Here to take us through the wonderful world of Jane Austen's personal correspondence is my guest, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Ingrid is Professor Emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, which sounds incredibly cool. She has published widely in her field, and in 2014 she published In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters, which is an in-depth linguistic analysis of Austen's letters. Welcome to the show, Ingrid.
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Thank you, Breckyn. Thank you for having me.
Breckyn: I'm so excited about this. But before we dive into Austen's letters, can you tell us a bit about your background with Austen? When did you first encounter her works, and what is your Austen origin story?
Ingrid: Ah, my Austen origin story. First time I heard about Jane Austen, I was 18, staying with friends of my parents, English people, in England. I was just about to start university, and my parents' friend said that—talking about Jane Austen—he's going to get me Jane Austen's novels. I'd never heard of her, so I stuck that in my mind. And then there was a big, big gap. Of course, we read Jane Austen during my undergraduate studies. That was okay, but then I had a sabbatical in Cambridge, England. And after the sabbatical I was having to teach a master's course on Jane Austen's language. And being in Cambridge, I thought, "You know, they have a wonderful library here," and I started looking for publications on the language of—on Jane Austen's language. And there was so little there that I thought, "Hey, this is going to be a nice topic for a book on the language of the letters." I'd written a similar sort of book before, but that was for letters I had to collect myself. And this time, the letters were all there. So I downloaded them and started analyzing them, and that was, you know, when that got going and turned into a book eventually.
Breckyn: And you really have filled this sort of scholarly niche that was—like you said, there wasn't much there. And you have written so much about linguistics in Jane Austen, and since—that's like a convergence of two of my personal hobby horses or two of my personal favorite topics—I have read a lot of what Ingrid has written. But you mentioned that the letters were already collected. I don't think we can have an episode on Jane Austen's letters without giving a shout out to our dearly departed Deirdre Le Faye. If you haven't heard of her, she is an incredible Jane Austen scholar and, if people are looking to read Jane Austen's letters, she kind of has the definitive volume. She did four different editions, I believe. I have the fourth edition, and it's just an incredible work of scholarship. So, like Ingrid said, a scholar that came before her that paved the way for this was Deirdre Le Faye, and we're kind of all in her debt. Okay, Ingrid, you are a historical sociolinguist, and that is a mouthful. Can you tell us what that means exactly?
Ingrid: What does a historical sociolinguist do? What I do is what modern sociolinguists do, who go and talk to people and try to find out how they actually speak, how they speak to each other, how they vary in their language use. I didn't actually invent this discipline. It was there already. It was sort of becoming new at the time when I was looking for a thesis topic, PhD thesis topic, and I just thought, "Maybe my informants are all dead, but I've got letters so I can study their letters." And that is how it got going, basically. What I do in the letters—I look at who people wrote to. If they wrote to their loved ones, for example, they might use different language from—as we do—from when they would be writing to their publishers, as in Jane Austen's case. We have a few letters that we still have that she wrote to her publishers, and they're much more formal than her other letters. Her other letters are mostly to Cassandra—that is to say, the letters that have survived, and that are in Deirdre Le Faye's fantastic, very authoritative edition.
Breckyn: That is something funny that I enjoy. If you read the letters just straight through, the vast majority of them are to Cassandra, and they're very chatty, and sisterly, and silly, and there's slang. And we'll get more into that because you really get into that in-depth. And then you'll just turn the page, and then there'll be a letter to her publisher, and it's like, "Dear Sir, to whom it may concern." And suddenly she's like wearing a top hat and a monocle, and she sounds very, very formal. And it's this funny whiplash of going to—you see her at her most informal, like in her PJs with her sister, and then you see her writing a business letter to a man in London. I think that's a really fun experience.
Ingrid: Yes. It was sort of like chatting on the phone and talking to you as fast as I can. It was my working title for my book because that is what you feel with her—out of breath when you're reading her letters. She has so much to say. It's family gossip. It's all kinds of things, like dancing at a ball—you know, that sort of thing. It's all in the letters, and she couldn't stop writing.
Breckyn: Yeah, the words are just flowing out of her.
Ingrid: Absolutely.
Breckyn: So you're kind of an expert in this time period. Can you tell us a bit about letter writing in general during Austen's time? Was paper expensive? Would Jane have made her own ink? What are the mechanics of all this letter writing?
Ingrid: The mechanics? I can't tell you offhand if she made her own ink. I wouldn't be surprised.
Breckyn: I think I've read that sometimes she did, but I'm not certain.
Ingrid: I'm sure, I'm sure you're right.
Breckyn: There's a recipe. I think there's a recipe in Martha Lloyd's Household Book about—for ink.
Ingrid: Ah, yes, of course, you're quite right. And, by the way, we have a walnut tree in our new garden, and picking up the walnuts—it really gives you black fingers. So they must have had a walnut tree in their garden, I'm sure. And making ink is—as you say, there were recipes for that. She would cut her own pens, goose feathers, and she complains about how bad they write at times—that sort of information is in the letters—and she needs to switch to a new pen, for example. Now, paper—it isn't just that paper was expensive, it's that there weren't envelopes at the time because the recipient of the letters had to pay for the postage. If you were to fold a letter into four parts or something, stick them in an envelope, you'd have two sheets, and they'd have to pay double postage. So in the 18th century there was a very clever way of folding letters into such a way that you only needed one sheet, you know. And she would fold it—she and everybody around her would fold the sheet in such a way that only a tiny bit of empty space remained for the address, so the address panel.
And if you folded in all the parts of the letter in such a way that it was just the address panel that was showing, you could use the rest of the paper to fill, and that's what she did. So if you opened a letter—I can't do this in a podcast, but I've given classes in how to fold an 18th-century letter. It's really a very ingenious way of folding letters so that the text would remain inside and nobody would be able to read what you've written. And she wrote pretty straightforward things about other people so, you know, she took care to hide all the juicy bits inside the letter.
Breckyn: It's like little British origami, right, the way that they had to fold it in order—
Ingrid: Yes, yes, I think so. But you mentioned the figure of 3,000. That's only a conjecture. We don't know how many people—how many letters Jane Austen wrote. She must have been writing, you know, all day, and a lot she depended on the post, postman, postboy, to deliver her news from her sister, if her sister was staying somewhere else, and from other people. You know, these were the days before the telephone or before other forms of communication. So, letters were very important, and I tried to work out at some point how many letters she actually did write by looking for words like "received," "wrote," "sent," and so on. So, I think 3,000 is probably pretty accurate, but it's basically guesswork.
Breckyn: Most of them are to her sister, and so she's really—
Ingrid: No, most of them that have survived.
Breckyn: Oh, yeah.
Ingrid: She wrote—and I could check that by—I could see that by checking those words, you know, doing a corpus search, as it were, how many letters she wrote to other people—to friends and to other relatives, and so on. But people destroyed those letters, or Cassandra maybe destroyed those letters, or Jane destroyed them herself, because they were very intimate at times. They would have been very intimate at times. And also, there were times when she was so depressed that she couldn't write, so—you know, because she was ill—and either she or her sister didn't want those letters to survive. We don't know, really.
Breckyn: Yeah, but it's pretty educated guesswork, and you do a lot of that in your book. Can we talk a little bit about cross-writing? I have this quote from Emma. It's from Miss Bates. She says, "First of all, I really must, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter—only two pages, you see—hardly two—and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says, when the letter is first opened, "Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that chequerwork"—don't you, ma'am?" Can you shed some—
Ingrid: Chequerwork. [laughing]
Breckyn: Chequerwork. Can you shed some light on that for us?
Ingrid: Well, this is what people did, you know, because they only had one sheet to fill. And you can try it for yourself if you—what she did was she would turn a letter upside down sometimes and then start writing in between the lines. And if you focus on the actual words you can still read it fairly easily. And, also, with cross-writing—you know, if you turn the page you can still read because your eye focuses on the line, and you can still read it. What she also did—and there's this lovely letter online because it came to light, or it resurfaced a couple of years ago— Letter 10 in Deirdre Le Faye's edition—the size of her handwriting changes. So, at first she writes in a normal size, and then she realizes, "Oh, the end of the sheet is approaching." And then her handwriting becomes much smaller and much finer to read. So, that was another mechanism she applied in order to put more text on the sheet of paper.
Breckyn: I have done that on a postcard, where I start in big, and then I'm getting down to, like, [inaudible] "Wish you were here, okay, goodbye," in the corner.
Ingrid: Next time, try crossing the text and see what happens.
Breckyn: I have never tried that, but that would be fun. Okay, Ingrid, you've obviously spent a lot of time immersed in Austen's letters, and so—we got into this a bit, but for listeners who haven't read them—can you give us an overview of her correspondence? I said that she mostly wrote to her sister, but, actually, those are just the ones that survived. How many of her letters do we have? Who was she writing to? What kinds of topics does she cover in them? You have a whole section on her letter writing network and who she would have been writing to.
Ingrid: Yes. I tried to reconstruct her network by looking at who she wrote to. So it's mostly Cassandra, but she also writes to her nieces and nephews. She had a really good relationship with her nieces and nephews, and they would write to her. I think, you know, she never had any children of her own. She never even got married, which is a big thing in the family, because the brothers had to support the mother and two unmarried sisters. So that was quite a thing. But she wrote to her nieces and nephews and some friends—or she wrote to quite a few friends, but only a few letters have survived. And her brothers she wrote to occasionally, but only, you see, if they were away. So the thing is, she and Cassandra—they couldn't live without each other. They were so close—had been all their lives. And whenever Cassandra went to stay with their brother in Kent, looking after the children because they had a lot of children there, they would be away and they would keep in touch writing letters. So back and forth, these letters. She writes about people in the village who they both know, who she met, and she's got news to tell about villagers or people that they both knew. One of them had a baby and the baby died, and those kind of things.
Breckyn: Yeah, she can swap between topics really quickly. Like she'll talk about something really sad, like a baby dying, and then she'll be like, "Oh, and the leg of lamb for dinner..." and you're, like—it does feel a little bit like whiplash, tonal whiplash.
Ingrid: And she uses dashes to start new topics. So Jane Austen's use of the dash has been a great topic. Kathryn Sutherland—she is the Jane Austen scholar, and I'm sure lots of your listeners will have heard her name. She's done a wonderful amount of research on Jane Austen, and making all her material available for analysis for us scholars and other people were mainly interested. And she decided to write about the dash. But if you look at the dashes, dashes were considered a female way—part of a female way—of writing, which I don't think is entirely fair and entirely true. But Jane Austen uses a dash to change the subject, to indicate a change of subject. I'm not sure if she would sit down and write for hours, you know, because she also had a busy life, making ink, or overseeing the washing, or whatever she was doing. She would then walk away, and then come back, and then start a new topic. So, I think there's that to consider as well. We don't really know because we weren't there. But the dashes are very interesting and important because they indicate—often indicate—a new topic.
Breckyn: I think that would be a space saver as well, right? Because I think we would just go to the next line if we were going to start a new topic, but she can't do that. She's fitting it in as much as possible and just providing this little dash, like, new topic, new topic.
Ingrid: Yeah, she needs the space.
Breckyn: I'm a huge fan of Emily Dickinson as well, and her use of the em dash is just masterful. It's lovely. Somebody should do a comparison of Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen and their em dashes.Okay, so what was I saying? Oh, a lot of scholars have mined Austen's letters for references to various topics: food, fashion, the books she read, the music she listened to. So what were you looking for in your analysis, and what did you find?
Ingrid: Well, I was looking for informal language. As I said, if you're a sociolinguist, you want to hear people talk and you want to analyze their speech. And of course, going back in time, before the days of the audio recording, you would not be able to hear them speak, actually, but that was still something I was after. So that's what my first ambition was in looking at the letters. Can we hear Jane Austen use informal language? So, the kind of language you—I don't have a sister but you would use to a sister or to your children. That is what I was hoping for. And so I was looking for speech or the kind of written language that came close to speech. And also to see if you could find differences in usage between the way she would "speak" between quotation marks to her sister, and to her nieces and nephews. Did she use different vocabulary? And yes, she did. So, she would use words like "fun." Now for us a word like "fun" is a totally normal word. But you can tell if you look at the letters—if you compare the letters that she wrote to Cassandra and to her nieces and nephews—you can see that "fun" is much more of a younger generation word, you see.
Ingrid: And the same goes for the word "goodbye." "Goodbye" was also a word that she picks up from the younger generation of Austens.
Breckyn: I love that.
Ingrid: Me too, yes. And I called that "flirting on paper." She was in love with somebody—the apothecary who was treating her brother Henry who was in London, who was 10 years younger—and she was so in love with him. And he only had eyes for her niece. Poor Jane. She wrote a letter to him and she ends it with the word "goodbye." And, to me, that's like flirting on paper, you know?
Breckyn: That is so funny. And you really have to immerse yourself in the letters to pick up on those little linguistic tics, because, like you said, we're so used to the word "goodbye," it doesn't mean anything to us. But if you read all of her letters and realize she never says "goodbye" once, except for this, to this handsome young apothecary, suddenly that means something. There's shades of meaning there. And you mentioned "fun." I love that. I did a whole presentation on informal language in the novels. And do you know—maybe I got this from you—do you know the only Jane Austen character that uses the word "fun"?
Ingrid: Who's that?
Breckyn: Can you guess?
Ingrid: Lucy Steele.
Breckyn: It's a good guess. No, it's Lydia Bennet.
Ingrid: Lydia, yes, of course.
Breckyn: Lydia Bennet is the only character across the six novels who uses the word "fun", and she uses it multiple times.
Ingrid: Right.
Breckyn: Yeah. So I had a whole PowerPoint slide about that.
Ingrid: It fits.
Breckyn: It totally does. Yes. It's an informal, kind of silly word or an empty-headed word in Jane Austen's time, so it goes along with Lydia Bennet. I like that a lot. And so that goes into my next question which is—something that I learned from your book—is about Austen's linguistic awareness. She's very deliberate in her word and grammar choices, and that really carries over into her novels. She has these characters with such distinct ways of talking, like Lydia Bennet being the only character across six novels to use the word "fun," and she's so good at switching between them. I know code-switching is a phrase in linguistics. But what are your thoughts on that?
Ingrid: Well, that's something else I was looking for. I was trying to get to know Jane Austen, hence my title, In Search of Jane Austen. This is a little—I'm going off topic a little bit here. I just wanted to know what she was like as a character. And I found by studying her spelling, which nobody had done—and, of course, you can't study her spelling in the novels because there's the editor in between, and the publisher, of course. Kathryn Sutherland has written a really fantastic introduction—was it Persuasion? I think her edition of Persuasion, I think, I'd have to check that—about editorial changes. Jane Austen's linguistic awareness. She was so strict in her spelling that her spelling looks very different in some respects from standard spelling, but that's what typical eighteenth-century informal spelling—so, in letters—is like. You would spell, for example—there was no spelling. Spelling was not a subject that was taught in schools, and it's only towards the end of the 18th century that spelling becomes socially significant. Before that, people would say, "How do you write "beautiful?" So I know the word "beauty," I know the word "full," so I just link them together."
So you get "beautyfull" with a Y and two Ls, right? And we don't spell it like that anymore. Now, the printers would spell it differently. So they would spell it—because it's in the printers' interest to have shorter words and to have faster typesetting, you know, so they shorten words like that.
Breckyn: That's interesting. I didn't know that it was happening at the printers.
Ingrid: So you find "beautyfull" with a Y and double L in 18th-century letters, you know, quite normal. You find it sometimes in Jane Austen's spelling as well. So, these are not mistakes, but—and she also writes the word "friend" with E-I and not with I-E. But what I discovered is that she's very, very consistent in her spelling. It's always, almost always, "freind" with E-I. And the word "shew," we spell "show" today with an O but she would always spell it with an E.
Breckyn: Yeah. And in studying these things, you kind of were performing this linguistic forensics on her manuscripts, right? Can you tell us a bit about that? Like, her spelling did change over time a little bit, right? And so you can use those changes to date things in her manuscripts that we didn't really know when she had written them, right?
Ingrid: That's right. She becomes more self-conscious about her spelling when she becomes a published author. So when there are typesetters, editors, asking her, "Is this spelling correct?" and so on. And then she writes about that—that's the only time she writes to Cassandra about this, about the spelling she had to think about and change. And by that time I think you can tell—this is Emma, the proofs of Emma, she was reading—she becomes conscious of the fact that there are two standards of spelling. So, there's the printers' spelling and there's the way she used to spell herself. Now, this is not so much to do with the linguistic forensics that you just mentioned, but what I started noticing—and it's thanks to Kathryn Sutherland's website of the unpublished Jane Austen fiction, so her juvenilia, and her other—there's a fantastic website about that—that I started noticing that she does things in her letters—all of a sudden she starts using short words, forms, like abbreviated forms for "could," "should," and "would." Other words like "evening"—she would abbreviate "evening" with "even" and then superscript Gs, the final G; "Elizabeth," "Eliz," final TH; "brother," B with a superscript R.
These words are not difficult to read once you're used to them, but it becomes very pronounced after the year 1805. And so, then I started—I decided to have a look at Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts for The Watsons. The Watsons—Jane Austen wrote—started two novels that she didn't have the time of life to finish, and The Watsons was one of them. Now, there's family tradition that says The Watsons must have been written in 1804, so that's what they think. But it's based on what they remember, you know, talking about, and this is before the death of her father. Her father died in 1805. So, the family used to think, or thought, that she started The Watsons in 1804—so when her father was still alive—and she stopped because in the story the father of the main character dies. Now, I looked at these short forms, and these short forms in the letters correspond with The Watsons—what you find in The Watsons, so, short forms for "could," "should," and "would," exactly like that in The Watsons—only after 1805. So, after her father died. So I think—and I took this against the paper, the make of the paper, which fitted in well too—that she started The Watsons after her father died, and it's only a year or two difference, you know.
So it's not a major find in that respect, in terms of time, but it is a major find in terms of when—either before her father's death or after her father's death—because after her father's death they were, you know, they had no income anymore. Their father was their main source of income. He supported them: her mother, her sister and herself. So then she thought, "Okay, I can write, you know." And she started writing, revising an earlier text that she'd written so that she could try and become a published author. It would take a while still, but it shows that she was very, very much concerned with trying to write as quickly as she could in using these abbreviations. So, looking at—there's this program that you can use; it allowed me to do plot diagrams of the letters. And you can see there's an exact point at which she starts using those short forms. So that was my linguistic forensics. It was so much, if I can use the word "fun," to do because, you know, things fell into place. And again, you know, it's only a minor difference in time, but it shows the kind of things that you can do with her language, the language of her letters.
Breckyn: Well, it's a minor difference but around a major event in her life.
Ingrid: It's a major event.
Breckyn: The death of her father.
Ingrid: And she did stop—The Watsons does stop at the time when the father of the protagonist dies, because to Jane it brought back all these memories, unhappy memories, and the sadness, and everything. [inaudible]
Breckyn: Maybe it was too hard to write.
Ingrid: Yeah, I think it was too hard to write.
Breckyn: That's interesting. I think that's something that most people would never even think that you could do, that you can look at spelling in order to, you know, perform this kind of analysis. I think that's so fascinating. Okay, so I want to just go back because I had another quote that I really like. It was from—I was just talking about how her characters have distinct voices, right? They have a word that you use in linguistics is an "idiolect," right? That's kind of like a person's fingerprint but in terms of how they speak, the words that they use, and, like with Jane Austen, the distinct spelling she used. Okay, so I have this quote. One of the best characters for studying speech, I think, is the elder Miss Steele, Miss Anne Steele. She has such a delightfully distinct way of speaking. And here's one quote from Lucy and from her. And she says:
"'But why should you think,' said Lucy, looking ashamed of her sister, 'that there are not as many genteel young men in Devonshire as Sussex?
'Nay, my dear, I'm sure I don't pretend to say that there an't. I'm sure there's a vast many smart beaux in Exeter; but you know, how could I tell what smart beaux there might be about Norland; and I was only afraid the Miss Dashwoods might find it dull at Barton, if they had not so many as they used to have. But perhaps you young ladies may not care about the beaux, and had as lief be without them as with them. For my part, I think they are vastly agreeable, provided they dress smart and behave civil. But I can't bear to see them dirty and nasty. Now there's Mr. Rose at Exeter, a prodigious smart young man, quite a beau . . . .'"
That's a truncated version of that quote. She goes on for a while. But there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in here linguistically. Do you want to pick some of that out for us, Ingrid?
Ingrid: Well, "ain't" is one.
Breckyn: That's very unusual in Austen's work. That's one of the few instances.
Ingrid: "Ain't" is a, you know, big American thing over the years, which is a (inaudible) or something. Anyway, I'm interested in hearing Jane Austen use "ain't," and I did look at Lucy Steele but, you know, my book is about the letters. I don't think she uses "ain't" at all. But you also said, what is it? "Prodigious..."
Breckyn: Yeah, "prodigious smart."
Ingrid: "...smart, behave civil."
Breckyn: "Dress smart and behave civil." That's called flat adverbs. I know you knew this, but I'll definitely explain for our listeners.
Ingrid: That's why I picked on them.
Breckyn: A flat adverb is largely considered in English a grammatical mistake but lots of people use them sometimes. It's where the L-Y is taken off. Sort of the adverb form is reduced to its adjective form, so instead of saying "dirtily" or "nastily," they take off the L-Y.
Ingrid: "Behave civilly."
Breckyn: "Behave civilly." Or she calls it "a prodigious"—what does she call it? She calls him "a prodigious smart young man" instead of "prodigiously." So that's—you know, this is a rabbit hole that you can fall down that I think is very interesting. But Ingrid has written about Jane Austen's use of flat adverbs, and how this is a grammatical mistake that she uses to indicate the class or the education level of her characters.
Ingrid: Well, it depends. You call it a mistake. Today, we call it, consider it a mistake because we know from grammar—we've been taught grammar, you know—an adverb ends in L-Y, and so we need to watch our L-Ys, as it were. But in Jane Austen—if you look at her very first letter, her very first letter to Cassandra that has come down to us—I think, you know, that might well be her very first letter ever, but we can never prove that because we don't know how many letters there were. But in that single letter there are four examples of flat adverbs. And because I'm interested in flat adverbs, in grammar, in general, I was struck by her flat adverbs, and I started looking at her use of flat adverbs in her other letters, and she doesn't use them. So I thought, "What's going on?" And then you have Lucy Steele, of course, who does use them all the time. So, I figured Jane Austen was still in a learning process, in the sense that she had to learn to deploy the flat adverb for the kind of speakers that were less than standard speakers at that time, or considered less than standard, like the Lucy Steeles.
And so it fits nicely with words like "ain't" and "you was," for example. I don't think your passage contained a "you was," did it?
Breckyn: Not in this one, but Lydia Bennet's letter to—the one letter that Lydia Bennet writes to, I think, Colonel Forster's wife, when she's about to run away with Wickham, has some really fun grammatical mistakes in it.
Ingrid: What I'm trying to say is that she had to learn how to, how to—and this relates to your earlier question—she was so linguistically aware of how people spoke, but she had to learn to make use of them in her fictional writing. And, I don't know, maybe Cassandra told her off for using those four flat adverbs. I don't know. We don't have the letter. So maybe somebody told her off, or maybe she just heard other people using them. This is also The Watsons, I think, I think, yeah—is when she starts using servants' language. We have a servant being quoted who says "please," and "please" is a bit of a bee I have in my bonnet. If I listen to renderings of Jane Austen novels or costume dramas in general, and I pick up on the word "please," I go, "You know, this is wrong. They didn't say "please" in those days."
Breckyn: Really?
Ingrid: It was a servant's word.
Breckyn: Interesting.
Ingrid: And I'd just gone through an article which I was asked to review, and it will be published soon, and this is about the use of "please" and "pray" in the Old Bailey, which is a courtroom in London at the time, so until 1920 or so. And it was confirmed that "please" was only used by criminals and not by judges. So it's a servant's word, and now it's become so general. So if there are any listeners out there who are thinking of writing a script for a historical novel, please watch your "pleases."
Breckyn: That is so funny. So what would they say instead? Like, if they're trying to be, to request something politely, wouldn't they say, "If you please?" No?
Ingrid: "If you please," or "be pleased to," and to us it sounds very formal, but "please" itself the way we use it—
Breckyn: Just "please" by itself.
Ingrid: Just "please" by itself they wouldn't use.
Breckyn: Yeah, and so the more you learn, the more you can be annoyed by period dramas and their anachronisms, right?
Ingrid: Yeah, exactly.
Breckyn: Oh, man. Okay. So the one thing I want to end on is we've talked about her linguistic awareness, but one of my favorite parts of your book is the section on creative language use. The Austen family was so linguistically playful. A lot of them, like her mother, some of her brothers, her nieces and nephews—they'd write silly poems to each other and make up riddles called charades, which people know from Emma, for each other to solve. And Jane and her niece even had a secret language that they invented that they would write to each other. So can you tell us a bit more about some of those creative language uses that you found in Austen's letters?
Ingrid: There was something like a nonsense language between Jane and Fanny, her niece, that they would put a P in front of every word, and it's really difficult because I can't make out what they're actually writing.
Breckyn: I think Deirdre Le Faye kindly translates it in a footnote or an end note for you.
Ingrid: So, what do you make of "pie," "Pope," "pay," "pike," "pit?" They must have had such fun about this. And with Cassandra Esten, another niece who was a lot younger, she wrote a letter in reverse spelling, which is also very funny.
Breckyn: I love that. It's a very cute—it's a cute little birthday letter where she's just written it in mirror writing, the whole thing.
Ingrid: Yes, it's what you do, because I used to do it—I did it once with a nephew as well when he was little, and it's just fun sort of playing with language, and they did that, too.
Breckyn: There's lots of games that they would play in addition to the charades or the charades. I know they played spillikins and bibliocatch but those aren't word games. Conundrums. They would make up all these fun little riddles and send them to each other. And one of the letters is a long poem that Jane Austen writes to her brother Francis on the occasion of the birth of his son.
Ingrid: That's so sweet.
Breckyn: There's all these really cute references to when Francis was a little boy in the nursery, and "we hope that your son will be just like you." And you get this wonderful peek into the Austen family life. Like you said, Jane Austen as a character, who she was as a person. It really rounds out all these different facets of her life. If you haven't read the letters, listeners, I would really recommend them. They are a lot of fun.
Ingrid: Definitely.
Breckyn: Okay, so to end, I just want to ask, do you have any favorite letters or favorite passages from the letters that you would like to share? Are there any that you can think of, any that stick out to you?
Ingrid: At the moment, it's Letter 10, because Letter 10 I did a close reading of, and I wrote a piece on Letter 10 for the Oxford English Dictionary because they have these case studies, and they asked me to do one. And I picked this one because it's available online. You can find it. The Guardian wrote about how it surfaced. Now, this is, at the moment, is my favorite letter simply because I analyzed it very closely. And one particular reason for it is that she refers—she has the words "itty Dordy" in the letter, which she quotes to Cassandra. And "itty Dordy" is in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't think—that was a point I was making in that case study—I don't think it should be in the OED under Jane Austen's name but under her nephew's name, little George, who was three years old, and he couldn't pronounce his own name. "George" is a very difficult word to say. The word "little" is also difficult. L is a letter that's very difficult for children. In Dutch, we have a rhyme for this. So, it is not Jane who made up these words, and you wonder if it should be in the OED at all, but her three-year-old nephew. I love "itty Dordy"
Breckyn: These little private jokes, right, the family, and—
Ingrid: Yes, private jokes. And it shows how much she loved her nieces and nephews, you know. There was—she wrote about them, and Cassandra loved them, too. She would be looking after them at times.
Breckyn: Yeah, there's so many of these little glimpses into their family life and into their inside jokes, and, like you said, pronunciations: "itty Dordy." There's a couple of snapshots you get of, maybe, Jane Austen's accent. You have a section on that where, based on some of her spellings, you get an indication of how she might have pronounced some words.
Ingrid: Yes, because what I found was something that's often overlooked in editions, for example—the self-corrections. I've got two, and I think they're absolutely brilliant. At one point, she wrote "leave" for the word "live," and she then crossed out "leave" and substituted "live" for it. So that, to me, tells us that she would have said "leave" somewhere in between in her dialect at the time. So, now we distinguish between "live" and "leave," but maybe for her it would have been—otherwise, she would never have made that mistake. And there's another one which is even better because she didn't correct it. She wrote "half," which you would pronounce as "haff"—so "haff a loaf of bread," instead of "have." So that, to me, says—in British English you say "half" today—to me, it means that "half," she would have pronounced as "haff," just like you do.
Breckyn: "Half."
Ingrid: So "have" in "I have a thing or two to say to you," which she spelled as H-A-L-F, you know. So to me, that says to me that they were homophones, so words that were pronounced the same. But to me this is evidence of her accent, which is rare, of course, because when you're writing—And then she comments on people. So she comments on a friend, Harriet she's called, who was unable to pronounce the R. And I thought, "What's going on?" But I don't know if you have that in American English, but in British English there are people who will say "Wichard" instead of "Richard." Can you hear the difference?
Breckyn: Yes, I've never heard that, though.
Ingrid: Do you have that, too?
Breckyn: I don't know. I would call that a speech impediment instead of an accent. That's funny.
Ingrid: And maybe it is a speech impediment, but people adopt it, and they copy other people, so it can't be a real speech impediment. So she comments on this. So there were people at the time—and this is a brilliant quotation because it's 30 years ahead of our first evidence that people actually did this, you know. So there are little bits and pieces, and you just have to know, as you said earlier on, you have to dive into the letters in order to identify what's going on.
Breckyn: Yeah. Sort of immerse yourself fully.
Ingrid: When you do, you know, it's fantastic. It makes, you know, my day or my week, you know, if I find something like that.
Breckyn: Something that I really like about your book, and linguistics in general, is that it's this really interesting convergence of humanities and science.
Ingrid: Yes.
Breckyn: Because you're studying Jane Austen, you're studying language and literature, but you are plotting things on graphs, and you're doing these corpus analyses and things like that. And so you can superimpose science on top of humanities, and it gives you really interesting results that you might not have been able to anticipate. And so that's something that I think people should check out your book just to see the different ways that you've plotted some of these things, the changes in her language over time.
Ingrid: I've tried to keep it readable.
Breckyn: Oh, it is. It definitely is.
Ingrid: I mean, lots of figures but not too statistical to make it unreadable, because I wouldn't like that myself.
Breckyn: No, but I'm a nerd and I like the graphs. I think they're really fun. So if you like that kind of visual representation of language, that is another service that Ingrid's book offers us. Okay, we're going to wrap up. I wanted to share one of my favorite quotes from the letters. Do you mind, Ingrid?
Ingrid: Not at all, no.
Breckyn: This is from Letter 17. It's numbered 17 in Deirdre Le Faye's edition. She wrote it in 1799, so when she was still pretty young. She's writing to her sister. She says, "You express so little anxiety about my being murdered under Ashe Park copse by Mrs. Hulbert's servant, that I have a great mind not to tell you whether I was or not." I laughed out loud when I read that. That was so funny. I mean, it's exactly her sort of wry humor. But, also, I am always worried. If I go out at night, if I'm driving or walking, I'm always just like, "Come check for me. Make sure I don't get murdered," telling my husband. So it's just really—the letters are so humanizing. They're humorous and they're humanizing. And they feel surprisingly modern at times, even if she's talking about candles, and ink, and quills, and things. Her personality shines through in a very relatable and modern way.
Ingrid: Yeah, you become part of her life and of her family if you start immersing yourself into the letters.
Breckyn: Yeah. We didn't even get into this, but there are a lot of fun references to the novels. Later on, she calls Pride and Prejudice her "darling Child." She got her "darling Child from London," when she finally gets a copy of it. She talks about editing Sense and Sensibility. She calls Pride and Prejudice "light and bright and sparkling." There's a lot of fun quotes that people have used a lot from the letters where Jane Austen's talking about the novels. So that's another fun thing for people to go look for. Anyway, Ingrid, thank you so much. Where can people find you online? Should they just Google you? Should they find your—I mean, your book is out there?
Ingrid: But if you Google me, my name, Ingrid Tieken, you'll get into my profile, University of Leiden profile, and you can find my email address there. I always answer my emails.
Breckyn: Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ingrid.
Ingrid: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Breckyn: Dear listeners, I just wanted to end today's episode by saying thank you. Austen Chat now has over 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We are thrilled and so grateful for everyone who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please consider giving the show five stars on Apple Podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it is for new Janeites to find us. Join us again next month for another episode. In the meantime, I remain yours affectionately, Breckyn Wood.
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