Paula Byrne: evaluation

Transcript context

…How is the farce related to Austen? She loved farce. In her letters she talks about going to see Don Juan, and it’s a farce, and she’s like — “a compound of cruelty and lust,” she calls it. There’s other farces — The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, not very feminist, by Susanna Centlivre — and she’s laughing, and she says, “The farce really pleased me.” I think she had quite low taste. I think she was hard to please, so she really liked the farce. Also she used to take the children and the family, so they’d like a good farce. I think she was quite eclectic in her taste. These clowns were really funny. They were really good. As I say, she wasn’t a snob. She wasn’t an intellectual snob. She did want to see Mrs. Siddons in the great Shakespearean roles, but she also loved comedy. She is a comic writer, which we all forget about, which is the most important thing to remember about Jane Austen is how funny she is. I argued in my very first book that she could never have been such a good comic writer if she hadn’t watched all these farces, if they hadn’t performed them at home, if she hadn’t read them, because her sense of comic timing is derived from 18th-century theater. Pride and Prejudice is so much dialogue, it’s like being at a play. Then she used to read her novels aloud. That is like being at a play as well. For me, that was such a big and undervalued influence. How is Mansfield Park set against a background of war, total war, you could say, by the standards of the time?…

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