It's Austen Chat's third anniversary! To mark the milestone, we're delighted to share "Jane Austen: Material Girl"—a conversation between authors Paula Byrne and Hilary Davidson recorded at JASNA’s 2025 Annual General Meeting.

Both have written extensively about the significance of material objects in Austen's life and work. Tune in for their lively discussion of ordinary things—toothpick cases, lace cards, muslin shawls, flannel waistcoats, and more—and their extraordinary importance.

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Paula Byrne is a best-selling biographer, literary critic, and novelist. She is the author of The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, which explores her life through the objects around her; The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood; and the novel Six Weeks by the Sea, which blends fact and fiction to imagine Austen’s visit to the seaside in 1801. As an Austen expert, she has also frequently appeared on television, broadcast on radio, and consulted on period dramas. Beyond her Austen scholarship, Paula has written best-selling biographies about Dido Elizabeth Belle, Mary Robinson, Barbara Pym, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Hardy.

Hilary Davidson is a dress, textile, and fashion historian and curator, and Chair and Associate Professor in the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She has curated exhibitions, lectured widely, and published extensively. Her books include Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion, Jane Austen’s Wardrobe, and A Guide to Regency Dress.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep36

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"Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." —Jane Austen, 1796, letter to Cassandra on arriving in London

Jane Austen was very aware of life’s darker side, and beneath the genteel polish and decorum of her novels lurks a world of adultery, theft, seduction, dueling, poaching, smuggling, and more. In this episode, guest Susannah Fullerton, president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, guides us through the sordid underbelly of Georgian and Regency society and explores how Austen uses various crimes and wrongdoing to advance her plots, shape her characters, and add color to her narrative landscapes.

Susannah Fullerton, a literary historian and author, has been president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA) since 1996. She has lectured extensively on Jane Austen’s life and novels, and her books include Jane Austen and Crime, A Dance with Jane Austen, Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jane & I: A Tale of Austen Addiction, and Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them, among others. Fullerton holds the Order of Australia Medal and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. She is also Patron of the Kipling Society of Australia, a founding member of the NSW Dickens Society and of the Australian Brontë Association, and a Lady Patroness of the International Heyer Society.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep35

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Email: podcast@jasna.org

Jane Austen's novels feature a number of characters we might describe as "hypochondriacs" today: Mr. Woodhouse, Mary Musgrove, and Mrs. Churchill, to name a few. Although she never used the word herself, Austen was adept at exploring how the worries and complaints of individuals preoccupied with their health affected the people around them.

Professor Sarah Marsh joins us in this episode to discuss health and medicine in the Regency era, the parallels between the health of individuals and the health of the British nation in Sanditon, and Austen's reflections on her own declining health during the final months of her life.

Sarah Marsh is an associate professor of English at Seton Hill University and director of the Jane Austen Summer Program. She has presented and published extensively on Austen, literature, and medicine, including the article “‘All the Egotism of an Invalid’: Hypochondria as Form in Jane Austen’s Sanditon.” Her forthcoming book, Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688–1818, will be published by Oxford University Press.

For an edited transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep34

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Visit our website: www.jasna.org
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook
Subscribe to the podcast on our YouTube channel
Email: podcast@jasna.org