Hello, you're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we're revisiting

some of the highlights of this year's Close Reading series, which you can find by searching

for LRB Close Readings in whatever podcast app you use. Later in the episode, we'll be hearing

Judith Butler talking to Adam Schatz about Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, from their series

Human Conditions,

and from Emily Wilson and me, Thomas Jones, on Herodotus from the second series of Among the Ancients. But first, here are Claire Bucknell and Colin Burrow discussing Jane Austen

from their series on satire, which is looking at the development of satire from the 16th century

to the present day through such

writers as John Dunn, Alexander Pope, Oscar Wilde, Evil in War and Muriel Spark. This extract

is from their latest episode on Austin's Emma. Their next episode will be on Byron's Don Jewen.

I suppose at this point we should move on to the climax of the novel.

When most of the cast of characters go for a picnic at Box Hill, one hot summer's day,

always very dangerous to be out in the heat, I find.

The Box Hill episode is a moment when what everyone thinks is happening and what is actually happening rub up against each other in a dangerous kind of friction, potentially explosive kind of friction, actually.

Yeah.

So let's have a brief spoilery explanation of where we are.

So everyone, apart from the increasingly suspicious Mr Knightley, believes that Emma and Frank Churchill are a thing,

but actually, though this has only hinted to us, we don't know this either,

just the very day before Frank and Jane Fairfax, who actually are together, have had a terrible row.

So there's all sorts of little secrets below the surface,

and the trip is all sort of smiles and picnicky delights on top of this heat

in this misery and these kind of lowering secrets. Yeah and enigmas, yeah. And thrown into the

...