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[Assistant] Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen, each of those has been the subject, or will be the subject, of more than one lecture.


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[Assistant] It's not a very controversial opinion. I feel Jane Austen is up there with what I've called the giants. We don't know much about her.


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[Assistant] Anymore on the fact that we know as much as we'd like to know about Chaucer or Shakespeare.


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[Assistant] For the early part of Austin's published career, she jealously guarded her privacy.


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[Assistant] She was, as far as her publishers and her first readers were concerned, a lady. Nothing more, nothing less.


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[Assistant] Not an author, not a wife, not a young woman. That was her authorial description.


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[Assistant] Northanger Abbey, for example, was advertised as by a lady.


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[Assistant] It's hard to think of this, this spinster whose fiction is so spinsterly.


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[Assistant] We never, for instance, in her fiction, see two men talking together without a lady or at her present.


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[Assistant] It's hard to think of her as a thoughtful theorist about fiction, about her art, about her instrument.


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[Assistant] But that Jane Austen, Miss Austen, certainly was. She was thoughtful about the nature of fiction, what Henry James would have called the art of fiction.


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[Assistant] She would, by the way, have hated the intimate personal affection, the relationship with her as a real person, which the regiments of Janeites, as they're called, presume to have with her.


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[Assistant] One of the main advantages of writing, Jane Austen said, was that one did not have personally to know or more importantly to like these people on the other side of the printed page. She was not generally a sociable person. She didn't give herself, as some writers do, to her public.


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[Assistant] As many of the great Victorian writers did, for instance, whom we'll be looking at a little bit later.


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[Assistant] Jane Austen, like the Bronte sisters, who we'll also be looking at later, cooked her fiction in the home, so to speak, domestically. But she cooked it with great art.


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[Assistant] She composed her fiction and read aloud early drafts and trial runs of her narratives to her family. Their opinions mattered to her. She bounced her stories off them and revised them in the light of the response that she got. Most of all probably


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[Assistant] It was her brothers who mattered to her, and it was her brother who negotiated the ladies' terms with the publishers. Women, we have to remind ourselves, could not sign contracts at this period. They were very much the inferior sex in everything, but in authorship as much as in anything else.


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[Assistant] Now Jane Austen's was, of course everyone knows this, a respectable clergyman's family.


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[Assistant] There was probably no more respectable family in the length and breadth of England. Nor did she ever really leave that home.


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[Assistant] She was born in a rectory, very fine building by the way, uhm, which was her father's house in 1775. And she died unmarried of this parish, as the church notice would put it, in 1817, aged a mere 41.


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[Assistant] She's buried appropriately enough in Winchester Cathedral, which is a beautiful but very much a provincial.


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[Assistant] Structure of the church. She would have hated, one suspects, the grand literary company in Poets Corner in Westminster, though...


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[Assistant] In terms of her achievement, that certainly is where she deserves to be, as do Chaucer and Shakespeare.


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[Assistant] Before moving to Jane Austen's theory of fiction, let's say something about her life. And that life is, from our point of view, very easily summarized because we don't know a lot about it.


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[Assistant] But we can, I think, gather and perhaps even assume that nothing much other than novels happened in Jane Austen's life. Compared, for example, to the tumultuous career of her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, which we looked at in an earlier lecture.


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[Assistant] Judging by her character's names, Jane did not much like the name Mary. There's no admirable character in her fiction who bears that Christian name. And I do wonder sometimes whether there's not, as it were, a subtextual critique of the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman.


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[Assistant] Uh, Jane Austen, one may assume, had not really very fierce views on the rights of women. She accepted the world into which she'd been born, and the way that world ran, and particularly the status of women within it. She did not, in her fiction, protest.


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[Assistant] Well, before looking at Pride and Prejudice in detail, which is the novel which I want most of all to concentrate on, let's anatomize or profile the Austen heroine, because in fact,


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[Assistant] Her heroines are always, an Austin heroine is always at the center of the narrative, and the heroines change, but there is in fact a residual character, there is a kind of Austin-ishness, uh, in her, in her women. What kind of, what kind of animal, what kind of person is the Jane Austin heroine?


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[Assistant] The first point to make is that the, the Austin heroine, as I said, changes over the years, the course of the 20 years in which Jane was writing fiction.


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[Assistant] That heroine, or the image of that heroine, the notion of that heroine evolved, as great authors' work characteristically does.


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[Assistant] Now, in what's generally regarded as one of the earliest of her works, it's very hard to work out dates of composition of Jane Austen's works because the publications bear very little relation to it and because in fact she was, as it were,


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[Assistant] Changing her, her, her novels, uhm, they, they didn't, they didn't come out and immediately like, for instance, we know that uhm,


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[Assistant] We know that Jane Eyre, for instance, she's written in a few weeks, and we know exactly when those weeks were, but we do not know exactly when Jane Austen was writing, composing and revising and altering her fiction. But generally speaking, we can assume that Northanger Abbey,


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[Assistant] Uhm, is an early novel, perhaps even the earliest.


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[Assistant] Now the heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland, is just 15. That also lends credence to the fact that this is an early narrative of Jane Austen's. Catherine,


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[Assistant] Is that that first crux or crossroad in a girl's life when she's growing from tomboyish adolescence into womanhood. She's very described, one of my favourite lines in Jane Austen is, is she's described as a girl, a tomboy girl playing baseball, which in fact was


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[Assistant] You know, quite a popular game with, with, with young girls in England. Right after the present day, they call it rounders. She also rides horses.


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[Assistant] Elastic, lovely word, is one term of praise which is applied to Catherine by the lecherous General Tilney, who we, who we may distrust.


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[Assistant] Uhm, distrust because of his, his actually eye for the, the young lady. She is, what, what is meant by that term supple is, what is meant by that term elastic, she's supple. She's, she's in fact, she, she bounces around. She is also, by the way, one of ten children.


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[Assistant] Of a large family, and by no means the most highly regarded offspring of a country parson.


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[Assistant] A man not unlike J. Noster's own father, who's comfortably off but, but not rich. He has two livings, uhm, they bring him in not much short of a thousand pounds a year, which is good income at that time. But naturally enough, the, the Reverend Moreland is more interested in his older sons, who will bear his name.


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[Assistant] Than, than any of the girls in the family who, who will become some other man's property and responsibility very soon and carry somebody else's name.


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[Assistant] As I say, there's no protest in Jane Austen against the social systems in which her characters find themselves.


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[Assistant] Well, the plot of Northanger Abbey is very simple. Catherine is taken off to Bath.


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[Assistant] By a rich, childless friend of the Moreland family.


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[Assistant] A bath is a watering place, it's a spa, but people don't go there for their health or at least...


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[Assistant] The people of Catherine's generation don't go there for their health. It is a marriage market.


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[Assistant] And the Moreland family, fond as they are of their Catherine, she's a very lovable child, they won't be sorry to have at least one child off their hands. They've got nine others, they've got to dispose of them all one way or another.


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[Assistant] And her odious brother, John Thorpe, sets his cap at her.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Isabella is a veteran of the, of the bath season. People go there at a certain time of the year.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and look for, look for potential mates or partners.


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[Assistant] But Isabella is, as I say, she's been at Bath three or four seasons. Uh, she's an old hand, which in fact makes her rather a suspicious character because why has no one, why has no one taken her? Uh, what is, what is she, what is she doing? She's, she's a very striking woman, but there's something about her which suggests that she's been, as it were,


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[Assistant] The phrase is left on the shelf. Uhm, and because of that, as I say, she's, she's, she's perhaps, you know, not, we, we too in fact have an aversion towards her, though in fact the novel elicits this response very delicately.


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[Assistant] Anyway, more to Catherine's liking than John Thorpe, Isabella's extremely unlikable, dislikable brother, is Henry Tilney.


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[Assistant] Who's a clergyman? He's clearly in Bath in search of a wife.


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[Assistant] Now, the Reverend Tilney, who's in his mid-twenties, wants above all an innocent girl. Someone whom he can shape. Someone whom he can, as it were,


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[Assistant] Put into the mold of the, of the ideal wife, which he, as an extremely prosperous, well-off clergyman, a provincial sort of clergyman, uh, wants to have as his mate for the, the rest of his life. And someone who will bear his children, of course.


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[Assistant] He has, as I say, a fortune, he's well off, he's warm, as the, as the phrase was. Uhm, so he, he's not looking for money, he's not looking for a diary, he doesn't want a wife who brings with her money or a settlement or property, uh, to the union.


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[Assistant] Henry's father, the obnoxious General Tilney, would probably disapprove, but of his marrying someone who is dourless.


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[Assistant] And this is one of the, one of the interesting twists in the plot. General Tilney is deluded.


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[Assistant] Perhaps he deludes himself into thinking that Catherine is an heiress. Because the woman who's brought her, the friendly woman who's brought her to Bath is very well off. And he assumes, the general assumes that Catherine will inherit that woman's money, which in fact she won't.


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[Assistant] Uhm, I've, I've sometimes wonder, wondered, uhm, there are always these little kind of, as it were, suspicious sort of, not quite narrated subplots in, in Jane Austen. One of the things that makes her fiction fascinating, I've always wondered whether Henry deceived his father on the point of whether or not Catherine has money or not. You know, what, as I say,


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[Assistant] When one reads Jane Austen, one of the pleasures of reading Jane Austen is she makes you a very lively reader. Janeites, whom I mentioned earlier, make it a ritual to read Jane Austen, all Jane Austen's six major novels, once a year.


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[Assistant] What's wonderful about this writer is that like Shakespeare, every time you come back to her, you find something else. She does something else for you. Well this, this basically is the plot of Northanger Abbey. Who will, who will Catherine marry? And how will she actually sort of get to the altar? But, this is not the theme.


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[Assistant] of the novel. It's not Austen's perennial theme. Uhm, marriage is a plot line, but at the heart of Northanger IP is the question of what is it to be grown up.


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[Assistant] What is it to be morally mature? How in fact do you become the kind of person who can deal with the complicated issues which life poses you?


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[Assistant] Fascinatingly, Jane Austen intertwines that question with another question. What in the process of growing up?


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[Assistant] Bring us back to that point I was discussing earlier, the art of fiction and Jane Austen's notion of what fiction is and what fiction can do and what it can't do. And what it shouldn't do, indeed. Now, the powerful instrument


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[Assistant] Which Jane Austen holds in her hand, the novel, can, she believes, can in fact help


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[Assistant] Every Sunday, Jane Austen would go to church and hear sermons. Those sermons would make her a better person. This in fact was the whole rationale of Anglicanism. But the novel too could have that function.


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[Assistant] Anyway, to go back to what the novel is doing in Catherine Moreland's little life, in Bath, thanks to the, the Spars numerous circulating or lending libraries and the pernicious influence of Isabella Thorpe, who has been at Bath long enough to know how to use those for recreational purposes, the libraries, there, there is a kind of fiction, purveyed,


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[Assistant] One might say to this kind of fiction, it's gothic fiction of course, and the principal exponent.


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[Assistant] The celebrity author in gothic fiction is Mrs. Anne Radcliffe. And notably, Anne Radcliffe's great bestseller, The Mysteries of Udolpho.


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[Assistant] There is, there is some terrible sort of awful, horrifying mystery. And this in fact, uh, excites the reader. Uhm, not only excites the reader, in fact it excites emotions of which Jane Austen, one has to say, is, is very suspicious.


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[Assistant] Uhm, everyone knows gothic. The classic gothic situation is a young girl, scantily dressed, finding herself alone in a mysterious castle or haunted house.


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[Assistant] Why she's alone, why she's foolish enough to run through corridors and open, open strange, strange doors and look in cupboards and places and, and passages that she shouldn't. Of course, uh, one never asked because the gothic, gothic novel carries one along on its kind of stream of, of excitement and sensation. Now I'll say a word or two about, about Anne Radcliffe.


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[Assistant] She's an important figure in English literature. One incidentally always talks about her as Mrs. Radcliffe, as one talks about Jane Austen as Miss Austen, if in fact one gives her a title. She's an important figure.


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[Assistant] She's been totally eclipsed by Jane Austen and Jane Austen's style of fiction. One of the problems about reading Northanger Abbey is that most people who read it don't read the mysteries of Udolpho, the castle of Udolpho story, and without that you to some extent lose something of Austen's narrative.


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[Assistant] Now the gothic novel, which is the genre in which Radcliffe is writing, is a late and bastardized offspring of the romantic revival, and it came to England via Germany.


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[Assistant] We've already examined what most would regard as the greatest work in gothic fiction in the early 19th century, namely Frankenstein.


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[Assistant] But writing a generation before Mary Shelley...


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[Assistant] Mrs. Radcliffe, whose dates are 1764 to 1823. She lived incidentally to read Northanger Abbey, although she'd long since, uh, ceased writing.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Mrs Radcliffe enjoyed phenomenal short-lived success in the last years of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th century.


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[Assistant] As I say, she was known authorily as Mrs. Radcliffe, and we're very proud to be that. That's on her title pages. Childless.


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[Assistant] Anne Radcliffe consoled herself by writing, by letting loose her imagination, fed as it was by the extravagances of German romance.


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[Assistant] Her two most popular gothic novels, both of which are mentioned prominently in Northanger Abbey, The Mysteries of Udolpho came out in 1794, and The Italian came out two years later in 1796. They earned her sums


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[Assistant] Not far short of a thousand pounds, which is millions in today's value. She was, as I say, she was probably one of the most successful early best sellers in fiction.


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[Assistant] Northanger Abbey, by contrast, earned Austin ten pounds. Though in fact it's lasted rather better than the mysteries of Udolpho.


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[Assistant] Udolpho the Castle, and as I said, there's a hugely sinister mystery in a strange and surely very horrid picture, which we come back to time and again, which is shrouded by a black silk veil. There's something, something really awful behind it.


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[Assistant] But consider the opening paragraph, which is I think a fair illustration of Radcliffe's scene painting skills and what she was offering to the sensation hungry reader of the 1790s and early 1800s.


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[Assistant] On the pleasant banks of the Garonne in the province of Gascony stood, in the year 1584, the Chateau of Monsieur Saint-Obert.


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[Assistant] From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guien and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vine and plantations of olives.


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[Assistant] To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees whose summits veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms seen and lost again as the partial vapors rolled along, were sometimes barren and gleamed through the blue tinge of air.


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[Assistant] And sometimes frowned with forest of gloomy pine that swept downward to their base.


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[Assistant] That in fact is, that is in fact welcome to this novel. They're the opening paragraphs. And very rich they are.


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[Assistant] Bit like, bit like eating three sugar donuts one after the other.


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[Assistant] Mrs. Radcliffe, God bless her, had never left the shores of England. Those majestic Pyrenees existed, as she saw them, only in her fevered imagination. And of course in the fevered imagination of her readers, reading it in Bath, surrounded by a rather quotidian, banal townscape. People like the Thorpes and the Morlins.


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[Assistant] Now, mysteriously, uh, Anne Radcliffe gave up writing with the Italian, uhm, which is another superheated gothic extravaganza. It's plausibly hypothesized that her husband put his foot down, uhm, so that you have no more, Anne. We, we, we've earned enough money and you're making a fool of yourself writing this stuff.


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[Assistant] Now, Jane Austen knew Radcliffe's work very well, and a host of other gothic novels, as Northanger Abbey makes clear, she in fact was, she was, she was steeped in it in a sense, but she clearly suspected that bad novels poisoned the mind. Worse than that, they corrupt fiction, they prostitute it.


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[Assistant] One could be affectionate, one could be sarcastic in a kind of friendly way about novels like Udolpho, but the novelist should.


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[Assistant] Must aim higher than simply tingling spines, which is what Anne Radcliffe does.


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[Assistant] When she, when Catherine Moreland is invited with a proposal of marriage in prospect to the Tilney's home, Northanger Abbey, Catherine assumes it will be another Eudulfo. She fantasizes a Radcliffean plot in which the general, a widower, has murdered his wife and she sets out in crepidly to crack the mystery.


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[Assistant] There's a climactic moment in the narrative when Henry, the man who intends to marry Catherine, suddenly realizes the preposterous turn which Catherine's imagination has taken, that she is in fact trying to create this gothic novel out of his life, his family, and he confronts her. And there's a wonderful, a wonderful


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[Assistant] Disillusion, not disillusioning, in fact he tears away the fantasies, the kind of cobwebs of fantasy which...


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[Assistant] Catherine Inn. This is his speech. It's a long speech and Jane Austen doesn't normally give her characters long speeches, but this is a very powerful one. Henry speaking.


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[Assistant] That we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities, such atrocities as you've been imagining?


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[Assistant] Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known? In a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open.


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[Assistant] Dearest Miss Moreland, what ideas have you been admitting?


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[Assistant] They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame, she ran off to her own room.


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[Assistant] What Henry is saying is realism. We live in a real world, not a, not a gothic universe. And fiction, we deduce, must accommodate to that real world, as Miss Ostens notably does, and Mrs. Radcliffe notably doesn't.


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[Assistant] Catherine Moreland, the novel struck girl, grows up amid tears and consternation on the spot. Shocked into maturity by Henry's wonderfully corrective outburst. We live in a modern world, we've got newspapers, we've got roads.


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[Assistant] This is not 1584 and Eudolfo. He still loves her and will make her his wife. I have no fear of that, but he does not want a stupid wife.


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[Assistant] Catherine thereafter is a grown woman with a realistic, not a gothic take on the world. Now novels are, are in part a, we assume, novels can in fact


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[Assistant] They can in fact delude, but at the same time, they can help you grow up.


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[Assistant] Hereafter we assume Catherine Morland will be a reader of novels like Northanger Abbey, uh, not like Udolpho.


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[Assistant] Now, of course, you know, Jane Austen is aware of the fact that she too is writing novels, that she and Anne Radcliffe will be lumped together in the popular mind. Is she not fouling her own nest in Northanger Abbey by, as it were, satirizing, criticizing, downgrading fiction?


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[Assistant] It's more complicated by the fact, as I say, that Austen actually liked gothic fiction. I mean, she could actually take it on board and enjoy what it had to offer.


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[Assistant] This is clear from her inwardness, uhm, with the plots of novels like Mrs. Rightless and many other gothic novels which are alluded to in Northanger Abbey.


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[Assistant] Now the point for Jane Austen is not fiction, but how fiction is used. And more importantly, the relationship of the novel to moral maturity and moral growth.


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[Assistant] In another early novel, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen pondered in the characterization of the two Dashwood sisters, which was the royal road to maturity. Sense, rationalism, as it's embodied in the elder sister, Eleanor,


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[Assistant] Or sensibility, passion, as it's embodied in the younger sister Marion. Which is better?


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[Assistant] Well, typically, both and neither, the novel leads us to conclude, a via media between the two is ideal, a middle road, a typical English compromise.


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[Assistant] When finally, after many trials and tribulations, the man she loves proposes to her, Eleanor, the incarnation of sense and self-control, bursts into tears. It's one of those quiet but infinitely effective climaxes of a really paradoxical kind which Austen specializes in.


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[Assistant] Northanger Abbey and Stenson Sensibility are early.


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[Assistant] Earlier I stressed, not immature, Austin works. We don't know the exact dates of composition because, as I said earlier,


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[Assistant] Austin prepared her work over long periods among her family.


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[Assistant] Another novel with a place name as its title is late. Probably that is around 1810 in its composition. Mansfield Park.


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[Assistant] In Mansfield Park, Austin debates what is a central issue for her. Should a woman marry for love or for interest?


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[Assistant] Prudently, that is, with an eye to financial settlement.


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[Assistant] The opening of Mansfield Park, wonderfully ironic, recalls the decisions on this all-important question of three sisters of the Ward family who pre-exist the novel but


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[Assistant] Stand there over the novel as really some three kinds of question mark. This is how the novel begins.


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[Assistant] About thirty years ago, Miss Mariah Ward of Huntington, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baroness lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.


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[Assistant] All Huntington explained on the greatness of the match. And her uncle, the lawyer himself, allowed her to be at least 3,000 pounds short of any equitable claim to it.


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[Assistant] She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation. And such of their acquaintances thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Moriah did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage.


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[Assistant] But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them. Wonderfully crisp sort of exposition this.


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[Assistant] Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, found herself obliged to be...


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[Assistant] Attached to the Reverend Mr. Norris. Miss Ward suggests that she's the eldest of the sisters by the way.


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[Assistant] The Reverend Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law, was scarcely any private fortune.


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[Assistant] And Miss Francis fared yet worse. Miss, Miss Ward's match indeed, when it came to the point, was not contemptible. Sir Thomas being happily able to give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield. And Mr and Mrs Norris began their career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand a year.


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[Assistant] But Miss Francis married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family. And by fixing on a lieutenant of Marines without education, fortune or connections, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.


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[Assistant] Now, none of the ensuing marriages of these three marriages quite works, although one fails more spectacularly than the other two. That of Frances, who married for love, the disoblige, wonderful, Austin-ish word, her family.


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[Assistant] Mrs. Frances Price ends up worn down in an impoverished Portsmouth house with a drunken, rather savage husband and ten children.


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[Assistant] The second sister, Mrs. Norris, marries a clergyman, and although comfortably off with her thousand a year, Jane Austen always gives us money values.


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[Assistant] She never achieves the social status she craves and is a hanger on of the third sister, now Lady Bertram, who has ended up a landed title lady but a discontented neurotic mother whose affections are lavished on her pug dog while her daughters with no maternal discipline kick over the traces and go to the bad.


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[Assistant] There is no magic formula, the novel seems to say. This opening sets the stage for the novel proper. The story of Fanny Price, the namesake daughter of the disobliging Francis.


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[Assistant] Adopted as an act of family charity from Portsmouth, that impoverished house in Portsmouth, to Mansfield Park, a grand estate, where she's never quite accepted.


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[Assistant] Now Fanny, despite everything, manages to resist pressures and make the right marriage choices. Not only that, she matures into the proper


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[Assistant] Inheritrix of Mansfield Park and has all the social responsibilities that go with it as a leading figure in society.


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[Assistant] So these are the questions that Jane Austen asks. Sense or sensibility? Love in a cottage or love in a castle? Marriage or independence?


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[Assistant] One thing is certain, time moves on and time is the woman's great enemy. She has only a few years.


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[Assistant] In which to make these important choices, if in fact she's lucky enough to be asked.


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[Assistant] In Jane Austen's last complete novel, Persuasion, the heroine.


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[Assistant] And Elliot has lost her bloom. She's on the edge. She's 28 years old. Uhm, and will she, can she, can she, can she in fact marry at that age? She's almost at the end of the gangplank.


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[Assistant] The point is that Jane Austen in her novels is asking the most, even though her novels are written on the famous two inches of ivory that she described as her


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[Assistant] As her workspace, Jane Austen's novels are pondering the most important questions in a woman's life. How does that woman determine the course that her life is to take?


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[Assistant] What the novels, it seems to me, are saying, what Jane Austen's novels are saying is that the, these decisions are what philosophers


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[Assistant] It depends. It depends on the situation in which the woman finds herself. And what can help you negotiate these situations? Well, very often novels can.


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[Assistant] When the, the novelist Anthony Trollope, who adored Jane Austen and thought Pride and Prejudice the greatest novel in the language, was asked, what good are your novels, Anthony? He wrote 47 of them. He said, well they, they help young girls make the right decisions about their marriage, about the suitors who ask them to marry.


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[Assistant] That, it seems like a, it seems like a kind of, as it were, a sarcastic, ironic reply, but in fact it seems to me to embody a truth. And Jane Austen's novels...


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[Assistant] They're very delightful, they're very entertaining, but they are, they are,


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[Assistant] Essentially, it seems to me, great moral work, as great in their morality as anything that Shakespeare or Chaucer wrote.


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[Assistant] Oh ho, care to join us young lady? We've got a lovely breeze blowing today.


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[Assistant] We try to catch sight of it every time it takes flight. Make sure it's in good health and all that.


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[Assistant] It's not really a danger to people, but its hunger can drive it to hunt larger prey.


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[Assistant] Let's just hope it never develops a taste for us. Surely you've seen our newsletter, haven't you?


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[Assistant] It's filled with fun facts about our beloved bird. I'm quite proud of it.


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[Assistant] Perhaps, I put a post up on the notice board asking for help, but uhm...


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[Assistant] Well, far be it from me to turn down such an offer.


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[Assistant] We've tried to feed it before, but it seems to prefer catching its own prey.


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[Assistant] If something smelled enticing enough though, it might be moved to come and take a closer look, I suspect.


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[Assistant] I sometimes wonder if it mistook me for a supper.


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[Assistant] The subject of the lecture, this lecture, is George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch. It is, Virginia Woolf famously declared, the first novel in English for grown-ups.


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[Assistant] Now Wolf did not mean of course what later generations would understand by the term adult fiction. What she meant was fiction or a novel for morally mature people. Also in the


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[Assistant] 30 odd years which separate Middlemarch from Oliver Twist, which we looked at. The novel has come a long way. In Oliver Twist,


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[Assistant] Dickens called on melodrama, sentimentality, to almost coerce the reader into certain kinds of emotional response.


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[Assistant] Dickens also felt the need to tie every thread together. Nothing must be left hanging. And this leads, of course, inevitably to certain improbabilities. I mean, you'd think that everyone in London was somehow


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[Assistant] Related to or connected with, with the hero. George Eliot has brought, or at least she's come at a time when she's helped bring the novel beyond that. The novel can dare to be, as it were, to have loose ends. To, to, as it were, to be as, as messy in, in many ways as, as, as life is.


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[Assistant] Now to go back to that praise of Virginia Woolf, the first novel for grown-ups in English, it's very high praise to live up to.


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[Assistant] Henry James was perhaps less flashing when he lumped Middlemarch together with other fiction leviathans of the Victorian period as a great baggy monster. Wonderful phrase.


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[Assistant] Well, for ourselves, we can begin by saying that Middlemarch is all of the above. It's a great novel.


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[Assistant] And it's also a big novel, in the Jamesian sense, too big perhaps, and also perhaps too big for our crazy, hurried times. We perhaps rather, as it were, sort of blanch or sort of recoil from the idea of reading a novel which is 800 pages long. It's very loose-knit, the narrative.


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[Assistant] I began by saying it is not as tightly compressed as artificially compressed as one would get in Dickens, but that loose knittedness means that sometimes it falls apart, almost falls apart, it strains at the edges.


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[Assistant] Now, there is in fact a genetic reason for this. The manuscripts of, of Middlemarch


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[Assistant] Indicate that it began as two separate novels which were fused at a quite late stage of conception into the author's magnum opus. Maximum opus, we can say. It's very large. I'll say a bit more about the doubleness, the duplicity, the two, the two-yolked egg aspect of, uhm, of Middlemarch later on. First of all, who wrote it?


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[Assistant] Initially in eight bi-monthly serial parts over the years 1871 to 1872 by the publisher John Blackwood and subsequently as four massive volumes. And the author is listed on that title page, those title pages of course, as George Eliot.


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[Assistant] But this George Eliot never existed in the real world. It's a pen name, a male pseudonym for a remarkable woman writer, Marianne Evans, as she was born.


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[Assistant] Why did Marian Evans, a female chauvinist if there ever was one, write behind the protection of a male mask? One can almost imagine a beard on that, on that kind of imaginary George Eliot.


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[Assistant] When her novels first came out, most readers assumed the author was male. It's not a mistake one would have made, I think, with, uh, Ellis Bell and, and Wuthering Heights, or, or even Cura Bell and, and Jane Eyre more so. As soon as one hears that voice in the mind, one hears a, a, a woman author.


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[Assistant] Indeed, one opportunistic fellow called Liggins caused George Eliot slash Marion Evans immense chagrin by claiming that he was the mysterious author of Middlemarch, or not of an earlier novel in fact, Adam Bede.


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[Assistant] Now the reason for this changing of gender is complicated and ultimately I think rather enigmatic.


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[Assistant] The most intellectually forceful of novelists, George Eliot, I'm gonna call her that from now on, did not want to be associated with the troupe of what she called, memorably, silly novels by lady novelists. Women's romance, that is. She wanted to write, and indeed did write, fiction of ideas.


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[Assistant] Those ideas that were making and reshaping Victorian society and culture.


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[Assistant] Now, it may be that she was also inspired in her choice of name, George Eliot, by the great French blue stocking novelist, Georges Jasson. George Sand, if one wants to anglicise the pronunciation.


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[Assistant] Possibly even she was inspired by Charlotte Bronte, who chose to launch herself as we saw in the world of literature as the male-sounding Cara Bell.


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[Assistant] Springing as she did from a rural, provincial, evangelical background, the Midlands town called Middlemarch in the novel, the area around Coventry in real geography, Miss Evans did not want to cause embarrassment to family members who, like many of their community, their evangelical community, had suspicions about fiction.


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[Assistant] Thought novel writers were scandalous bohemians. Like that naughty Mr. Dickens, for instance, who threw his wife out after she'd born the brute ten children. And then this is Dickens picked up with an actress half his age, Ellen Turner.


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[Assistant] It may be that she was, as it were, sort of reluctant to embarrass relatives, but whatever the motive.


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[Assistant] It was as George Eliot that Marian Evans came on the scene with her first works in the 1850s.


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[Assistant] And it was as George Eliot that she enjoyed her first runaway success with writing fiction. And it is as George Eliot that posterity reads and admires and enshrines her in the pantheon of great writers.


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[Assistant] But ask yourself, in the following short quotation from Middlemarch, do you hear in your mind's ear a man's or a woman's voice?


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[Assistant] I'll read it twice, doing it as Dickens would say, in different voices.


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[Assistant] If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,


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[Assistant] It would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat. And we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.


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[Assistant] As it is, the best of us walk around well wadded with stupidity.


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[Assistant] That's a, that's my ultramasculine voice. Now let me just try and do it falsetto, uhm, in, in my imitation of what might be thought, uh, female inflection.


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[Assistant] If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk round, well wadded with stupidity.


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[Assistant] I hear a man's voice that may be my own sort of predisposition.


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[Assistant] Whatever, it's a wonderful observation, loaded with unforgettable epigram. Once heard, no one ever forgets the phrase, that roar which lies on the other side of silence.


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[Assistant] And the authority in that authorial voice, what gender does it belong to? Male baritone or female contralto? Now let's compromise. It's super gendered. It's, if you like, the voice of God.


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[Assistant] Or a novelist who thinks she's God, as detractors of Eliot liked to sneer. She had plenty of detractors.


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[Assistant] Eliot's background was extraordinary, admirable, and if one is thinking in terms of the usual hand-me-down conventions, wholly un-Victorian, she was non-conformist of the call.


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[Assistant] Least of all did she conform to the historical age into which she was born and which, in middle march, she examines.


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[Assistant] With an intelligence which, you know, resent her moral authoritarianism or not, puts her in a class of her own.


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[Assistant] She's not merely clever. George Eliot is a philosopher novelist. The articulate prophet of what she called the religion of humanity.


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[Assistant] A moral code which would fill that hole where in less knowledgeable eras, previous eras, simple religious formulae used to be and used to be adequate. They're no longer adequate.


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[Assistant] In the modern world that she was living in and writing about. Novels, Eliot firmly believed, could, like religion, make us better people and they were necessary.


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[Assistant] Now, how they did this, she was interestingly specific about. Fiction, she believed, has the power to dissolve egotism and make us more sympathetic or altruistic to our fellow human beings.


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[Assistant] Novels make us realize that other people have what Georgielic called an equivalent center of self. Put another way, you're as important to you as I am important to me. Now anyone who's brought up children knows that it's an extremely hard lesson to get across and for many it never gets across at all.


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[Assistant] In Middlemarch, Eliot uses a striking and strikingly highbrow image to picture the egoism which conditions our view of the world, our wadding of stupidity, as he called it in that earlier quotation.


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[Assistant] This, remember, is from a novel. It doesn't actually sort of get the novel galloping away in narrative terms, but it is very important to George Eliot's vision, which underlies the novel.


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[Assistant] An eminent philosopher among my friends who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier glass, that's a looking glass, or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions.


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[Assistant] Place now against it a lighted candle as a center of illumination, and lo, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun, the candle.


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[Assistant] It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its lights falling with an exclusive optical selection. That's pretty highbrow stuff.


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[Assistant] These things are a parable, she uses the biblical analogy. The scratches are events and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. Of Miss Vinci, for example.


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[Assistant] The narrative then goes on to describe how recent difficulties in her marital life, which are going in all sorts of different directions, are selfishly viewed by Rosamund Vintsey. She is the center of her universe.


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[Assistant] Rosamund never, she's a very limited character in the novel, Rosamund never ever gets that lesson about equivalent centers of self that I was referring to earlier.


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[Assistant] Fiction then has a higher mission than mere entertainment for George Eliot.


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[Assistant] Nor was she averse to making her readers work hard. Optical selection, what's that? In the above passage, I would argue one has to think more.


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[Assistant] Think more concentratedly than you would with a, any kind of passage of reflection, moral reflection from say the great clubman Thackeray or the great showman Charles Dickens. Not of course, and I stress this, not that they're lesser novelists, but they demand less of the reader than George Eliot does.


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[Assistant] Let's look a little at the background of this remarkable writer, George Eliot.


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[Assistant] She was born, say, Marian Evans, in 1819 in the rural midlands of England. She was brought up in the environs of Coventry, Warwickshire, Middlemarch country. Her father, whom she idolized, but whose strict Christianity she could not subscribe to eventually, was a steward or a state man, and a state manager.


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[Assistant] It was an exquisitely painful but intellectually necessary moment in Marianne's adolescence when, to her father's grief, she declared she could no longer accompany him to Sunday service.


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[Assistant] That, if you like, was her non-Servian. I will not serve. She gives an idealized portrait of her father whom she continued to love as Caleb Garth in Middlemarch.


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[Assistant] Young Marion read avidly. Her father's position gave her access to a good library and there was an active self-improving intellectual life in the non-conformist communities of provincial towns like Coventry where she was brought up. A kind of salon culture.


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[Assistant] The non-conformist, low Anglicanism, in which Eliot was born, was less prejudiced than society at large to women learning things. And she learned. Did she learn? Eliot became the leading woman intellectual of her time.


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[Assistant] She was largely self-taught and introduced to higher learning by congenial friends. She taught herself foreign languages, think how difficult that is, and entered into the theological disputes of the time, notably what was called higher criticism.


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[Assistant] Or the theory that the Bible was not literally but metaphorically true. Jonah was not swallowed up and disgorged by a whale, something zoologically impossible. It is a metaphor for the captivity and release of Israel.


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[Assistant] From bondage. Now, one had to read through, not just in important texts. Though, Eliot brought this, of course, to her writing of fiction.


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[Assistant] Eliot was introduced by friends to the writings of such contemporary sages as Herbert Spencer, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martinow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.


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[Assistant] On her father's death, Elliot embarked on her career. Fiction was not then in prospect for her. She was aiming higher than that. Her first major literary effort...


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[Assistant] Was the translation from the German of David Strauss' Life of Jesus. A classic text of the higher criticism I've just been talking about.


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[Assistant] Elliot moved necessarily to London, because that's where all the important things were happening culturally. And she became a leading light in the capital's higher journalism. Not easy to do if you're a woman at this time.


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[Assistant] In critical writings over this period, she formulated what we may call her philosophy. It was strongly influenced by the work of the pioneer of sociology, the French philosopher Auguste Comte.


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[Assistant] Now essentially, Comptism believed that society advanced, progressed through stages from primitivism to a scientific organization of itself. But that final, or as he saw it, third stage, could be morally conditioned.


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[Assistant] To apply labels was a free thinker. But also, throughout her life, a stern moralist.


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[Assistant] Her thought on such matters, her thinking on such matters was strongly influenced by the man whom she chose to live with. It's very much her choice. George Henry Lewis.


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[Assistant] Like her, Lewis was a leading light in London's higher journalism. He was a popularizer of science, an editor, and a comptian.


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[Assistant] He was also a married man who, true to his free-thinking philosophy, had no objection to his wife and the mother of his children deciding that she preferred to live with another man. And, and he allowed her to do so. It was a moral decision.


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[Assistant] This was the mid-1850s, a no-divorce period, as Dickens, who also had his wife's problems in the mid-1850s, makes clear in his novel, Hard Times.


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[Assistant] Divorce was only possible, believe it or not, by an act of parliament.


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[Assistant] Individual divorce, that's it. You want to get divorced, you had to get parliament to agree with that.


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[Assistant] Now George Eliot and George Lewis became what we would call partners for life. It was a marriage of minds.


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[Assistant] And, and of bodies. Elliot was 35 years old at the time. There would be no children.


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[Assistant] Free thinkers as they were, the two Georges, George Lewis and George Eliot, probably used contraception.


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[Assistant] In 1857, Eliot, at Lewis's suggestion, embarked on fiction with some short stories.


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[Assistant] Scenes of clerical life, they were called. And they were published in Blackwood's magazine, and they were encouragingly successful. They were very well received.


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[Assistant] She went on to publish a long novel, Adam Bede, which came out in 1859 in three volumes. Set at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. She's writing, remember, in the middle of the 19th century.


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[Assistant] The setting of Adam Bede was the Methodist revival. That evangelism which would vitalize and morally reform the country over the next hundred years. That's what she was interested in. The ideologies which made Victorianism. It was hugely successful. Not least because everyone wondered,


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[Assistant] Who could the author of this wonderful work be?


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[Assistant] It's a kind of very powerful novel, not just in the quality of the thinking.


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[Assistant] This destroyed Adam B's world. His sense of hierarchy is destroyed by...


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[Assistant] By losing the woman he loves to the squire. He, he idolizes the squire, but he loves the woman. And so in fact...


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[Assistant] He becomes at worst susceptible to reforming influences, which come to him from another woman, Dinah, who's a Methodist preacher.


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[Assistant] It's a, it's a novel which has a, has a very powerful storyline and it ends with a near hanging.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Hetty kills the child which is born, her seducer, and is almost hanged at the gallows and saved at the eleventh hour. It has a good story to it, but it is the quality, as I say, of thought, the philosophical dimension, which makes it as powerful and as re-readable today as it is. Now over the next


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[Assistant] Few years, George Eliot would go on to write other great novels. Middlemarch, Felix Holt the Radical, a study of early trade unionism and of proletarian revolt. Romula, a historical novel set in


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[Assistant] The Florence of the time of the fierce moralist, Savonarola. And for this novelist, Deadly Elliot received the largest payment any English novelist that Hitherto had, £10,000. It translates into millions. And finally, her last great novel, Daniel de Ronda, a complex study of marriage, morality, and Zionism.


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[Assistant] And strange brew. Zionism had never been dealt with, the question of the Jews in England had never been dealt with as sensitively and as


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[Assistant] And indeed, as perceptively, as George Eliot did in that last great novel. Typically, I mean, George Eliot being George Eliot took lessons in Hebrew to prepare herself for this novel from London's senior rabbi. That's the kind of author she was.


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[Assistant] Elliot never married Louis, who died before her. She did, however, in later life, marry a younger disciple, twenty years her junior. It was, after a rather rocky honeymoon, a happy marriage. She died prematurely in 1880.


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[Assistant] Having written no fiction after Lewis's death and devoting herself instead to putting his papers in order.


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[Assistant] She was denied the place she merited in Westminster Abbey, being too immoral for that place, had she not lived in sin with George Henry Lewis.


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[Assistant] History, of course, has recognized her as one of the greatest moralists in English literary history. She's buried in Highgate Cemetery.


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[Assistant] Uh, in, in that area which is reserved for religious dissenters next to George Henry Lewis, the man whom she loved. That place, the home of English intellectualism, Hampstead, has no objections to the couple sharing their last bed, one is glad to say.


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[Assistant] Now I want to devote what remains of this lecture to the masterpiece hailed by Wolfe, Middlemarch.


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[Assistant] You'll note it's named not after a hero or a heroine, but a place. An imaginary town, based as I say quite clearly on Coventry, in the late 1820s, early 1830s. Why that period? Because it's the period just before the first reform bill.


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[Assistant] Reform is, as will be clear, Elliot's great theme. How do you make society better? That's her, that's her big question.


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[Assistant] Uh, to cut to her conclusion, not by passing bills emancipating voters in parliament, not allowing them to vote, but by, not by legislation, but by making people better. And that...


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[Assistant] As the novel suggests, it's very tricky. How do you make people better? How do you reform people? You forget reforming the law.


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[Assistant] It's a vast canvas that she has in, in Middlemark. There are many strands of plot and subplot and a huge dramatic personae.


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[Assistant] That was the Rosamund Vinci mentioned earlier. She's beautiful, but she's vacuous, selfish, egotistic and ultimately destructive of his idealism.


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[Assistant] Now the other plot line is centred on Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist.


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[Assistant] Dorothea dreams of being a helpmate to genius. She wants to be one of Milton's daughters. She wants to subordinate herself, but nonetheless do something very important in life.


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[Assistant] Dorothy identifies as the man of genius, the Milton, to whom she will dedicate her life.


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[Assistant] Edward Cazorlan. This, this, this in fact is, is the man to whom she will be help-mate.


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[Assistant] Now, Cazorban is a desiccated scholar whose great project is as intellectually sterile as, as he is himself personally.


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[Assistant] Dorothea sees herself as a latter-day St. Teresa, a woman who will change the world. Alas, on her honeymoon in Rome, the eternal city, surrounded by the same ruins as Edward Gibbon was inspired by, she realizes her terrible mistake. She's thrown her life away.


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[Assistant] This is the scene I want to look at. Remember, as I read it, that novels...


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[Assistant] Particularly those silly novels by lady novelists that George Eliot so despised typically end with a happy marriage.


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[Assistant] This novel, Middlemarch, is effectively beginning from that point. Not a happy marriage, but a very unhappy marriage. This is Dorothea, waking up.


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[Assistant] I'm not waking up, I'm coming to consciousness of the failure of her marriage on her wedding trip, her extended honeymoon. Two hours later...


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[Assistant] Cazorbin, uh, has just gone off to the catacombs, uh, to pursue his research. Very symbolic that he should go to a house of the dead.


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[Assistant] Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room, or boudoir, of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina. I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly.


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[Assistant] Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shaven grievance that she could state even to herself. And in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. Typically she blames herself.


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[Assistant] She had married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls, that she had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties.


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[Assistant] From the very first she thought of Mr. Cazorban as having a mind so much above her own.


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[Assistant] That he must often be claimed by studies, which she could not entirely share. Moreover, after the brief, narrow experience of her girlhood, she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.


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[Assistant] But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness of her bridal life.


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[Assistant] She's distraught. A recent critic has suggestively compared the traumatized condition of Dorothea, as she's here described, to the dreamlike strangeness that rape victims report.


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[Assistant] Dorothea that is has experienced something that feels like violation.


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[Assistant] Now, there's a great deal of speculation about what's actually gone on in The Honeymoon, but the point is, you know, whether or not it was consummated. But the point is, Dorothea is destroyed. But here is where the novel gets complicated and fascinating. That destruction of our ardent idealism is a necessary step to growth, rebirth, and eventually,


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[Assistant] After many trials and much suffering to regeneration and fulfillment.


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[Assistant] Life as Elliot sees us, and I think we can take this right the way back to her early nonconformity, is very hard.


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[Assistant] At the end of her life, Dorothea, who's been widowed and has now happily remarried to another man, realizes that she was never meant to be a St. Teresa of the 19th century. The 19th century has no room for St. Teresa's. It's too crowded, it's too bureaucratic, it's too complicated.


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[Assistant] And I want to finish with the wonderful final sentences of this greatest of novels, because remember I said at the beginning that we've come a long way from Dickens, not that Dickens wasn't a great novelist, but Dickens would never not have ended his novels happily.


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[Assistant] Never not have ended these novels with everything to some extent coming together so that we, as it were, walk away feeling, as it were, sort of all's well in the world.


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[Assistant] This is how she describes, and the novel at the end concentrates.


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[Assistant] Specifically and, and very closely on Dorothea. She is now, as it were, the center, uh, of the novel's actions throughout, as we, as we realized. The no, the novel ends with the rest of Dorothea's life and a, and a, it, it's a beautifully sort of measured and


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[Assistant] Mixed sort of response that, that description of how Dorothy's life will go on from here elicits in the reader. Certainly concludes George Eliot.


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[Assistant] Those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error and great faith the aspect of illusion.


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[Assistant] For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.


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[Assistant] A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming her conventional life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of her brother's burial.


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[Assistant] The medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.


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[Assistant] But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorothea's, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.


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[Assistant] Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.


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[Assistant] Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her


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[Assistant] For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.


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[Assistant] And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.


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[Assistant] There are pilgrims that go to the tomb of Saint Teresa, but no one will go.


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[Assistant] Because it leaves us unsatisfied. We really want, we want Dorothea, as it were, we want our happy ever after. But Georgia Elliott will not give us that. Why will she not give it to us? The reason she won't give it to us is because life is not like that.


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[Assistant] It seems to me that what George Eliot has done is taken realism, that, that innovation which Jane Austen introduced, she in fact read Jane Austen very carefully.


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[Assistant] She takes that realism and she takes it to its furthest extent, as far as it can go. It's very difficult. Reading that passage aloud, I felt, you know, I had to think as I was reading that. I think I could almost still say it by heart.


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[Assistant] She demands, as I say, a lot of the reader, but on the other hand, she gives so much back to the reader. This, in fact, is a great novel, and it seems to me it would be impertinent


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[Assistant] To deny that it does not, if we read it as it deserves to be read, that it does not make us greater than we were.


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[Assistant] Then we, then when we turn the first pages of Middlemarch, A Story of Provincial Life.


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[Assistant] Mount Sumeru, said Wukong. The Bodhisattva Linji lives there.


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[Assistant] Maybe he can help me deal with the Iron Immortal. He was able to stop the Great King Yellow Wind's wind magic.


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[Assistant] It was me! Shouted Wukong. I'm in your stomach now! And I won't stop punching and kicking until you give me that fan! Voomf! Pow!


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[Assistant] If your troops had shown any less valor, I dare say you may not have made it at all.


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[Assistant] I think they caught whoever was behind that attack yet?


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[Assistant] If they mean to continue west, there are only two ways off this continent, by sea or by air.


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[Assistant] Should Shinra come calling, I doubt I'll smell them till it's too late.


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[Assistant] Your mother is so nice, Alma, said Barbara. She said to me,


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[Assistant] We love to see Alma's friends.


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[Assistant] She wants me to stay for a week. Alma smiled. She likes you, Barbara. You're a good friend to me. And my mother knows that, she said. She looked around her at the street. After six years away,


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[Assistant] This city feels very different to me. Barbara smiled. Yes, she said.


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[Assistant] And next month, everything changes for you again, Alma said. A new life in Salzburg. I'm really happy for you.


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[Assistant] It's a famous hospital too. I'm lucky to get work there. She turned to her friend. But what about you, Alma?


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[Assistant] Look for work here? I don't know, said Alma slowly. Before I can answer that question, I need to tell you a story. The story of Nina. They started walking to the river and Alma began her story. Nina was my little sister. She was beautiful.


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[Assistant] Much more beautiful than me with her black hair and green eyes.


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[Assistant] There were always boyfriends at the door, but they changed all the time. Then when she was 18, she began to study at the university. One day.


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[Assistant] She came home with a smile on her face. What is it, Nina? I asked. You look excited about something, or is it somebody? Tell me. I met someone today, she said happily. He's called Dragan, and he's studying maths too, and he's


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[Assistant] He's wonderful. That's great, Nina, I said. Where in the city does he live? My sister did not answer this question.


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[Assistant] I knew my little sister very well. Nina? I said, come on, tell me, where does Dragan live? Again, Nina said nothing, but I knew the answer. It was bad news. Bad news for Nina, bad news for our parents, bad news for everyone.


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[Assistant] Two weeks later, Nina brought Dragan to our house. Dragan was tall and dark with bright eyes and a quick smile. He loved Nina and she loved him. We could all see that. Dragan had dinner with us and then we had coffee and talked. Then my father spoke, Dragan,


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[Assistant] He said, your people are not our people. I looked at Nina. She was quiet and watched my father carefully, but she said nothing. Dragan looked worried.


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[Assistant] We live on this side of the river, and your people live on the other side, my father said.


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[Assistant] We have our places of warship, and you have yours. We are different. We have our ways, and your people have their ways.


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[Assistant] Thank you, said Dragan quietly. And Neena smiled at him, at my father, at me, at everybody.


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[Assistant] After that, they were always together. At the university, at home, in town, it was always Nina and Dragan.


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[Assistant] They studied together and went to parties together. They were two young people, happy and in love. And then the war began. At first things were difficult, but they could still meet sometimes. But then things began to change. When the university closed,


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[Assistant] Nina and Dragan could not see each other every day. They talked on the phone, but it was not the same.


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[Assistant] Nina left our house very early one morning. Nobody heard her. Dragan left his house too, and they both walked carefully and quietly to the bridge. They just wanted to see each other. Nina left a message for us in her room. I'm not going.


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[Assistant] Uh, some terrible news, he said. I'm so sorry, so sorry. At once my mother began to cry. My father put his arm around her. Tell us, he said.


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[Assistant] It's about my daughter, yes? My little Nina.


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[Assistant] It happened this morning, our friend said. On the bridge, your daughter saw her boyfriend Dragan on the other side. She called his name and he ran onto the bridge and somebody shot him.


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[Assistant] When he fell, she ran onto the bridge at once. She took him in her arms, but somebody shot her too. They died on the bridge together. We are trying to bring their bodies back, but it's very difficult. I am very sorry.


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[Assistant] I went to Nina's room. Next to her bed, there was a photo of her and Dragan. She told me once, I can't live without him. And it was true. But now they are together. Forever. So we waited. Those were terrible days. Nobody said very much.


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[Assistant] And my mother cried a lot. In my room at night, I cried too. And then, on a beautiful spring day, we went to a hill above the town. It was sunny all day. Nina loved the sun, I remembered. And there, we buried them together.


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[Assistant] My sister Nina, and her Dragan.


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[Assistant] When did you leave and go to Austria? A week later, Alma said.


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[Assistant] My parents sent me to my mother's sister, Anna, in Vienna. I did not want to leave them, but it was dangerous here. More dangerous every day.


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[Assistant] You are back in your hometown, said Barbara. Why now? When the war ended, Alma said, I wanted to come back, but I wasn't ready. Finish your studies first, my parents said, and they were right. But now it's the right time. I needed to see my family.


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[Assistant] And I needed to go to the bridge. Alma stopped and turned to her friend. Her face was white. And there it is, she said very quietly. Just along the river, look. You can see it now. Barbara took her friend's arm. Let's go over there to that cafe.


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[Assistant] She said, you need to sit down. The Bridge Cafe, said Alma. I remember it. Nina often waited for Dragan there. Yes, let's go there. I feel close to Nina there. They crossed the road.


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[Assistant] And sat down at a table outside the cafe. They both had coffee and Alma began to look better. Are you okay? Asked Barbara. Yes, thanks said Alma. I just need some time and some more coffee perhaps.


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[Assistant] Barbara felt the warm sun on her face.


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[Assistant] Huh. Alma and Barbara had another coffee and watched the river. Just then a big black car stopped near the bridge.


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[Assistant] A beautiful young woman in a long white dress got out of the car with a young man.


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[Assistant] She carried a bouquet of white flowers in one hand and the young man held her other hand. They walked onto the bridge and when they got to the middle, they stopped. The young woman took two flowers from her bouquet. She dropped one flower into the river and her husband dropped the second flower.


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[Assistant] The man said, what do you want to know? Those two young people on the bridge said Barbara, what are they doing?


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[Assistant] Why are they dropping flowers into the water? It's their wedding day, said the man. In the war


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[Assistant] Two young lovers died on the bridge. They were called Nina and Dragan. We don't want to forget them. Now after a wedding people come here


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[Assistant] And drop two flowers into the river. One for Nina, one for Dragan. Watch them now.


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[Assistant] They are saying their names. Barbara was afraid to look at Alma's face. Alma sat so still. So still. On the bridge.


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[Assistant] The man and woman watched the flowers in the water for a moment. The man put his arm around his young wife. Then they walked slowly back to the car and drove away.


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[Assistant] Who did it first? I don't know, said the man at the next table, but now


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[Assistant] Everybody comes here on their wedding day.


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[Assistant] Love is more important than more.


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[Assistant] Thank you, said Barbara, thank you very much for telling us that story. She looked at Alma's white face. Come, she said quietly, let's walk onto the bridge together.


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[Assistant] She took Alma's arm and they walked onto the bridge.


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[Assistant] At the middle of the bridge, Barbara stopped and looked out over the river.


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[Assistant] The answer to my question, she said. I can live here again. This is my home.


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[Assistant] They walked off the bridge. The two flowers together in the water moved slowly away on the river.


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[Assistant] I need your help, said Wukong. I'm traveling to the western paradise with the Tang Monk.


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[Assistant] But he was captured by a demon. Guan Yin said you can help me.


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[Assistant] I'm much more powerful than the pig.


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[Assistant] As long as I'm protecting you, no demon will ever harm you.


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[Assistant] Age of the honeybee end. Until then, my liberators of love.


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[Assistant] Give me that fan right now! Yelled Wukong. Or I'll destroy the rest of your mountain!


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[Assistant] Sorry to tell you, but you've been eliminated from the race. The Aussies struggled at the start, but one by one the Kiwis fell.


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[Assistant] Argentina is the largest Spanish-speaking nation and its huge landmass sees extremes of both temperature and landscape.


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[Assistant] It's from the banks of the iron-rich Parana Delta River in Argentina that teams embark on the final leg of our race around the world.


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[Assistant] So they're departing first at 3.04pm. Fly to Hollywood, California!


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[Assistant] Teams will now fly to Los Angeles, California.


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[Assistant] Situated in the heart of Los Angeles, Hollywood is the home of the entertainment industry. On arrival at LAX, teams must search the car park for their marked cars.


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[Assistant] With only one flight available, all teams are now on a flight from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, due to arrive the following day at midday.


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[Assistant] Hollywood Boulevard's walk of fame is populated by dozens of movie look-alikes. Using a Polaroid camera, teams must have their photos taken with three film characters who were portrayed by famous Australian-born actors.


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[Assistant] Only when their pictures have been approved at Ray's Photo Lab will they receive their next clue.


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[Assistant] Pink's has been operating for 74 years and is a Hollywood icon. Once here, each team member must finish one of Pink's famous hot dogs.


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[Assistant] Fly to Melbourne Australia. Teams must fly to Melbourne, Australia's sporting and cultural capital. Once here, teams must make their way to Moorabbin Airport.


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[Assistant] The Otway Rangers in southern Victoria are famed for their spectacular waterfalls and dense forestry. Teams must search this 600 metre treetop canopy walkway for their next clue.


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[Assistant] Once here, teams must scour the rugged coastline by air, land, and sea to find three pieces of a puzzle.


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[Assistant] Once they believe they've cited the clue, they must return to land and give the correct word to the fisherman on the jetty, who will hand them the first piece of the puzzle.


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[Assistant] Lockhart Gorge is named after the famous 1878 shipwreck of the Lockhart. Teams will find their next clue on the majestic cliffs overlooking the gorge. Head there by taxi. Search for your next clue.


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[Assistant] On this series of the race, at every pit stop teams met a local greeter, each wearing a distinct national costume.


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[Assistant] You're the winners of the first ever Amazing Race Australia vs New Zealand and you are a quarter of a million dollars richer. Congratulations. Wow.


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[Assistant] Ashley and Jared? You're team number three!


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[Assistant] What you don't know is Virgin Australia has put up bonus prizes for the runners-up coming in second and third.


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[Assistant] Should I get my left lane then bro? It's cool. Came out of the airport and the plan of sticking with the pack fell apart when we went straight ahead and everyone else peeled off.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but that's what he said. We gotta go back the other way. I didn't even know where we were. Our map didn't have the smaller streets and that's all I could see. We just did like a circle. Are you okay, Ryan? I am completely turned around.


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[Assistant] How's your first parallel park? We finally get a Hollywood.


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[Assistant] Thor is definitely right. Thor's definitely right. It's the English maybe.


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[Assistant] The six box we've just run down to get to this photo booth, we're going to have to run back, get more photos and then run back down it again.


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[Assistant] We don't know how small it is either. We wanted to actually systematically go through the castle using our hands so we could actually feel if there was any changes.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it was really tough. There was a piece of driftwood which had the word gorge on it.


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[Assistant] Who's got a knife for detail? This is going to be memory one. You're good, man. You've done really well with the memory. We had an inkling that in the final leg there'd be some sort of memory challenge. I don't know if I've got a


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[Assistant] So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers.


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[Assistant] Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. So you know.


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[Assistant] You get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done and things stay civil.


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[Assistant] They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan. And then ...


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[Assistant] And I didn't really write words. And so we were here.


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[Assistant] And then two months turned into one month. It turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline


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[Assistant] Still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could. I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters. Humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters.


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[Assistant] Sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline.


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[Assistant] I thought that was the end of everything. But a week later I get a call. And it's the school.


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[Assistant] And they say, is this Tim Urban? And I say, yeah. And they say, we need to talk about your thesis. And I say, okay. And they say, it's the best one we've ever seen.


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[Assistant] What goes on in the heads of procrastinators and why we are the way we are? Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people.


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[Assistant] The Instagramification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things. Easy and fun. Now, in the animal world,


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[Assistant] But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant for the sake of the big picture, and that's when we have a conflict.


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[Assistant] The Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well.


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[Assistant] Anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing that the monkey is terrified of. Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently.


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[Assistant] And finally, finally, the rational decision-maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk. Now, the panic monster explains all kinds of ...


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[Assistant] And this entire situation with the three characters, this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty. But in the end,


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[Assistant] I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in.


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[Assistant] From all different kinds of people, from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who are nurses and bankers and painters and engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.


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[Assistant] Turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination.


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[Assistant] Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained.


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[Assistant] To the short term, because the panic monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So, if you want to have a career where you want to be a self-starter, something in the arts, something entrepreneurial, there's no deadlines on those things at first. Because nothing's happening at first. Not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get some momentum, to get things going.


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[Assistant] Working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working. Now if procrastinators only mechanism.


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[Assistant] Of doing these hard things is the panic monster. That's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations,


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[Assistant] The panic monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for. So the effects of procrastination, they're not contained. They just extend outward forever.


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[Assistant] And I thought, you know, that's why these people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. It's not that they're cramming for some


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[Assistant] Project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator at times in their own lives.


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[Assistant] And some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines. But remember, the monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there. Now I want to show you one last thing. I call this a life calendar.


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[Assistant] So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar.


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[Assistant] We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the instant gratification monkey. That's a job for all of us.


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[Assistant] My girl was a shepherd girl. She was, had a hat on her head. My girl in Cambodia. My girl in Cambodia.


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[Assistant] Russia, Kostroma, then we had, uhm,


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[Assistant] Don't know. He said something about getting more firepower, then took all.


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[Assistant] Ugh, shoulda known this would happen. So, you're friends with her, right?


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[Assistant] Since she quit, would you mind picking up the rest of the wheelies for me?


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[Assistant] Luggage for a Shinra executive. Gotta make sure it gets to his hotel safe and sound.


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[Assistant] Johnny, send me to check on you guys. Help you find materials.


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[Assistant] There's a question I never had the chance to ask your father. Perhaps you could speak on his behalf.


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[Assistant] We used Avalanche's activities as a cover to sabotage our own reactors and destroy Sector 7. Your father assured us these acts were in service to the Neo Midgar project.


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[Assistant] I really love guessing challenges. I think I have a broad knowledge of different ingredients. I'm hoping to do really well because I really want to cook for that second immunity pin.


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[Assistant] I know straight away that this is some type of blossom. I use a lot of flowers in my desserts. Aniseed. Floral.


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[Assistant] I just need to work out what blossom it is. What's your answer?


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[Assistant] First month ride, I'm really happy because I'm hoping it's one of the hard ones in today's guessing competition and it's out of the way early. Khan, you're next. Go Khan.


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[Assistant] Oh wow, numbers are dwindling, aren't they? For today's challenge, we have to compete in two rounds. The first round for guessing competitions to guess what's under each cloche.


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[Assistant] I think everyone's kinda going for Khan over Sashi and I today because I don't think anyone wants Sashi or I to have two pins.


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[Assistant] My heart sings straight away because I definitely know I don't know what it is.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I definitely don't know what this is. I have no idea. Uhm. Take a guess.


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[Assistant] I'm really motoring, but I look over and Jim's still in the pantry and he's already been in there for 10 minutes.


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[Assistant] Jim's gonna add his Vegemite Butter to his Risotto at the end of his cook to enhance the umami flavour. Wow. Excellent. I'm looking forward to tasting this. So basically umami is just a word to describe like a really intense, delicious, savoury flavour.


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[Assistant] There's quite a big danger because if the balance of flavours aren't right, there may not be enough time to fix it.


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[Assistant] I don't know if Jin has enough Vegemite in his risotto. Jin's thrown a lot of ingredients into this risotto. I'm just not quite sure that they all go together. He just really needs to make sure that the Vegemite shines through.


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[Assistant] One of the troubling aspects of any discussion of literature, such as we've been conducting, is that it leaves so much literature out, virtually all of it, if you want to be statistical about it.


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[Assistant] There's a huge pudding and we just pick out a few plums.


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[Assistant] Now, theologians trying to get the idea of eternity across say, imagine a mountain the size of Everest. Every hundred years a bird comes, carries away a grain of dirt. When Everest is as flat as Holland, the first minute of eternity will have passed.


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[Assistant] It's melodramatic, but I sometimes think the student of literature is like that theological bird.


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[Assistant] We customarily justify leaving out 99% and more of literature by a kind of triage, as it's called in medical circles. Most literature we decree, usually without even looking at it, is not worth the time and effort of studying it.


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[Assistant] Life is too short to waste time on anything but the best, we think.


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[Assistant] Nonetheless, much of the raw energy of literature, what keeps it so to speak alive, rather than so many dead exhibits in a museum, originates below. It doesn't trickle down from Parnassus. Now in this lecture,


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[Assistant] We'll be looking at fiction, which is self-consciously popular.


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[Assistant] Primarily to entertain a mass readership.


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[Assistant] Despite the commercial motive, the works we're looking at, classics of popular fiction by Arthur, Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, have lasted as durably as anything by the acknowledged great writers of their time. Better, one might think, than some of their contemporaries, once thought great and now forgotten.


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[Assistant] How many of us, for example, could put hand on heart and say we are familiar with the works of, say, George Meredith, George Moore, or of the poet Alfred Austin who succeeded Tennyson as the nation's laureate?


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[Assistant] But who does not know the man with the magnifying glass and the deerstalker hat?


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[Assistant] Sherlock Holmes, of course, I'm talking about. The market for fiction.


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[Assistant] Received a huge boost and some pressure towards bringing high and low literature closer together from the 1870 Universal Education Act. An important factor in the consideration of 19th century and early 20th century literature.


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[Assistant] What that act meant, essentially, was that all British children had to attend school until they were 14 years old.


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[Assistant] Now a hundred years later it would be computer literacy, which would enfranchise a vast, youthful consumer group. But in the...


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[Assistant] Came into, came on the horizon. These, these new, these new readers, so to call them.


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[Assistant] Some small amount of disposable income, uhm, the wealth of the population generally had increased incrementally decade by decade. And they were hungry for entertaining reading matter. Let's say young people in the 1880s and 1890s right the way through to the First World War in 1914, they desperately wanted


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Reading matter that would, would entertain them. Uhm, they, they liked it to be smart looking, cheap to buy, preferably in installments because they were, they were in a kind of crazy hurry life, they didn't have much time to read, but they wanted to read.