Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on ‘Emma’ as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider the ways in which the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Listen to the full episode on the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code EMMA25 when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Are you a professional writer struggling with financial difficulties?
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0:36.6	Visit rlf.org.org.uk to check your eligibility and inquire today.
0:41.2	The Royal Literary Fund.
0:43.0	We believe writers matter because writing matters.
0:46.6	In their close reading series on satire,
0:49.9	Claire Bucknell and Colin Burrow traced the development of satire over more than 400 years
0:54.7	from Erasmus's praise of folly to the novels of Muriel's Spark. Through writers, including
1:00.2	John Dunn, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh, they ask what
1:06.5	satire is, what it does, and why it's been such an enduring literary form. This week, we're
1:13.0	bringing you their episode on Jane Austen, in which they look at Emma as the high point of
1:17.5	Austin's satire of character. You can listen to the full series now and to all our other
1:22.5	close reading series, looking at literature from ancient Greece to the present day, on the
1:26.9	Close Readings podcast,
	...

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