In Part 2 of our discussion on Emma , editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow tells us how she first encountered Jane Austen's work, highlights some of her preferred techniques for teaching Emma, gives her hot take on Austen, and reflects on some of the most affecting adaptations of Emma in popular media.
Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and eighteenth-century culture. She is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel. She lives with her family in Jersey City, New Jersey.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Emma, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NLEmma.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Emma: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qxZTcPpCsTpnPyCVAEr3K?si=19817ebce02b465e.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/emma/part2/transcript.
In Part 2 of our discussion on Emma , editor Stephanie Insley Hershinow tells us how she first encountered Jane Austen's work, highlights some of her preferred techniques for teaching Emma, gives her hot take on Austen, and reflects on some of the most affecting adaptations of Emma in popular media.
Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and eighteenth-century culture. She is the author of Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel. She lives with her family in Jersey City, New Jersey.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Emma, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NLEmma.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Emma: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qxZTcPpCsTpnPyCVAEr3K?si=19817ebce02b465e.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/emma/part2/transcript.
[Music]
[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Emma, by Jane Austen, as we interview its editor, Stephanie Insley Hershinow. In part one, we discussed Austen’s life and times, the idea of the marriage plot, as well as some of the important characters that populate the novel, including Emma herself. In this second episode, we learn how Stephanie Insley Hershinow first encountered Austen, her techniques for teaching the novel, we hear her favorite line, she provides a dazzling Emma playlist, and much more. Stephanie Insley Hershinow is associate professor of English at Baruch College CUNY, where she specializes in novel theory and 18th-century culture. She is the author of "Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel.” Stephanie Insley Hershinow, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast!
[Stephanie:] Thanks, Mark! I’m so happy to be back.
[Mark:] So, let’s continue talking about Jane Austen’s Emma. And, do you remember when you first encountered this novel?
[Stephanie:] You know, I don’t actually remember when I first read Emma. But I definitely remember my first encounter with Austen. Um, I came of age in the 90s, which was the golden era for Austen adaptation. So, I really strongly remember watching and re-watching and re-watching the BBC “Pride and Prejudice,” um, Emma Thompson’s adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” and “Clueless,” which was an Emma adaptation that I devoured. So, there were just so many different versions of these novels. The first Austen I read was “Pride and Prejudice.” Uh, I was probably eleven or twelve.
[Mark:] So you were exposed to the movies before you were exposed to the novels themselves.
[Stephanie:] Around the same time, yeah. I – To me, they were just, like, almost just inextricable. Like, it was just a kind of, uh, an obsession. Um, Emma was not my favorite Austen growing up, uh, though it has become my favorite Austen over time, I think because Emma really lends itself to… criticism? Like, it’s something that really unfolds and flowers, you know, under the attention of a good literary critic. And I think that’s something that I’ve just really grown to value, you know, as I started really reading literature seriously as a college student and a graduate student. So, um, Emma is now my favorite Austen, in part because I’ve just read wonderful scholars on Emma, like D. A. Miller, or Frances Ferguson, or, um, William Galperin. You know, there are just some really great readers of Emma who have helped me read it, too.
[Mark:] Your field is, essentially, 19th-century literature. And when did you focus on Austen as someone that you wanted to write about and somebody that you had to make a part of your scholarship?
[Stephanie:] In a way, I’m kind of a belated Austen scholar. I mean, that sounds strange because I just told you that I was obsessed when I was eleven. I was a very good “Janite,” which is what we call kind of obsessed Jane Austen fans, um, and they are legion. Um, I was a very good, um, just casual fan of Austen, but my training is really in 18th-century literature – so some earlier stuff. When I was writing my first book, I remember sitting with a mentor, uh, Deidre Lynch – also a really wonderful reader of Austen – and I was telling her about my project, which was about, um, inexperienced protagonists. Like, young people who don’t know anything about the world. Um, and she said, “Wait, you have to write about Austen, then, right? Like, if you’re going to do this book, you have to end with Austen.” And it had not occurred to me that I was going to write about Austen. Um, and after that, I decided to try to do it, and then – and, of course, this is what happens – that, like, that’s the part of my book that people actually read. [Laughter] Um, so people will tell me, like, “I loved the conclusion to your book!” I’m like, “No one reads the conclusions of books!” [Laughter] Um, but they do if they’re about Jane Austen! So, um, that really kind of, uh, opened something up for me. So, I’d really admired that scholarship, but it’s really just been the last few years that I’ve thought of myself as an Austen person. Gladly! Gladly so.
[Mark:] People have been writing about this novel and the criticism that you're talking about for quite a long time. There's been loads written about it. Do you find that there is a common misreading, either of the novel or of the protagonist?
[Stephanie:] Yeah, I mentioned this earlier. You know, there's definitely a strain – even in published scholarship, but also just in kind of casual responses to this novel – there's a stream that, I think, does make too much of Emma's faults. That really thinks of her as either this kind of rich b***h, or, um, just a really flawed, you know, deeply unlikable character. I think that goes too far, and I think it matters – uh, there's a great line in an article that's been really influential for me by the scholar Frances Ferguson, where she says, um, “the novel is hard on Emma to the extent that it's committed to her.” Um, and I actually find that really moving, right? That the novel is invested in her as someone who is figuring herself out. And that plays out not just in a kind of, uh, moral arc – which a lot of people read into this book. You know, where Emma makes a lot of mistakes and then gets better, right? That kind of, like, bildungsroman arc.
[Mark:] Yeah.
[Stephanie:] That's there, but it's also in the subtlety of the narrative technique. So, Austen, you know, really is playing around with just how closely aligned her narrator is with Emma's psyche. Like, with her way of thinking, with her way of questioning herself. And I think we can only take seriously that attempt to get inside of her mind if we don't find her despicable, right? Like, if we find her despicable, that's a very different move.
[Mark:] That seems to go back to something you said in the first episode about Austen liking the main character, even though she was aware that not everybody else would. That maybe she has a kind of affection for Emma even though other people may find her obnoxious, or mettlesome, or what have you.
[Stephanie:] Yeah, I think that's right. And I think – I think we have to read for that affection. And, you know, maybe we don't share it – I share it – but I think we have to notice the way that the narrative technique is trying to do something quite challenging in threading that needle between revealing all of her failings and understanding that she is someone who is really just trying to figure herself out, and figure out her world, and that that is a really vulnerable and – dare I say – relatable thing, too.
[Mark:] For students and first-time readers of Emma, how do they usually find it? Is it challenging? Is it easygoing? What are the common challenges that readers have when first picking this book up?
[Stephanie:] You know, there are a few. One is – one is precisely that, you know, like, can we, um, move past some of that initial, like, bristling at her? Because some of her earliest statements, I think, are, you know, kind of overbold. She – I mean, she's a snob! Like, she is. Also, she is wealthy and she does not really understand the kind of sensitivity of some of the class dynamics in her world. Students really kind of get their hackles up, and I understand why! Um, the other thing, I mean, the real kind of structural challenge that I run into is that I can only have them read it once in class. [Laughter] And I think that this novel just begs you to reread it.
[Mark:] Why is that?
[Stephanie:] Not just in the way that, you know, good novels are novels we want to reread. But, you know, this is a novel that has a twist ending. Something is revealed – I won't say what. But if we take seriously that ending, it asks us to go back and rethink a lot of things that we did not understand over the course of reading the novel. And, in part, for exactly what I was just talking about, which is that we are so closely aligned with Emma. And I'll just say there is something happening that Emma doesn't understand is happening. Once she's told what has happened, and we also know what has happened, we have to go back and reread the novel trying to pick up on all of these clues that she missed. And I think that is just both a kind of remarkable way of structuring this – it's almost like reading Agatha Christie, where, like, by the time you get to the end you're like, “Oh! I should have known the whole time!” Um, but that, you know, set in this kind of, like, domestic, uh, courtship novel setting. That's tough, because I think we do sometimes – like, we'll have that kind of great rush of the last class of reading it together. But then we always have to move on. So, that's tough.
[Mark:] What about the language. Does Austen's language pose any kind of problem, or are first-time readers usually receptive to that?
[Stephanie:] To me, sometimes Austen is actually more challenging than some of the earlier stuff – and I really teach the range, uh, in my institution – because it can so often seem like you know what she's saying, but we get just the kind of, like, historical infelicities. You know, these little false cognates. So, like, you know, the word “nice” means something different than it means now. The word “mean” means something different than it means now. The word “condescension” means something – You know, all of these different words that that look quite familiar. Um, just to take a quick example. You know, I had said earlier Emma says she doesn't have to get married, but what she says, literally is, “Fortune I do not want.” Right? And she goes on. But, you know, when she says, “I do not want a fortune,” she's not saying “I don't desire it” – which is, I think, how we read that line, right? “I don't desire money.” She's saying “I don't *need* money,” right? “Want” there means “I don't lack it.” So, there are all of these little ways that – you know, I tried to, you know, pick up on some of these in my footnotes, just because these are not things you can very easily just look up, you know? You don't *know* to look it up because it just looks like a normal sentence to a new reader, That can be tricky, especially as we're starting to kind of dig in deeper to the novel. So, I try to at least, you know, call that to my students’ attention or to a new reader's attention. Like, pay attention if something doesn't seem quite like what you expect it to mean.
[Mark:] That's a great example. In the first episode, we talked about the first sentence of the novel, but do you have a favorite line of Emma?
[Stephanie:] I have so many. Uh, I think the one that I will choose, uh, I just think is so cleverly done. It's a line that's actually repeated over two chapters. And, um, anybody listening who's familiar with Austen scholarship will know what I'm talking about. There's this line where Emma says – where the narrator says, “Emma could not forgive her.” Uh, and here's why it's so interesting. So, this comes at the end of a chapter where Emma has been hanging out with Jane Fairfax. Again, her kind of, um, quiet or less, uh, social kind of doppelganger, as I mentioned in the last episode. And Emma just cannot draw her out. Like, she's asking Jane about this, you know, third party – this guy Frank Churchill. She's like, “What's he like?! What's he like?!” And Jane's like, [quietly] “Oh, he's nice.” Um, and Emma just has this, you know, really outsized reaction, but it's one I've certainly had with acquaintances–– [Laughter] ––where she's just like, “UGH, I can't stand this woman. Like, there's no talking to her.” And the narrator tells us, like, “Emma could not forgive her.” Then we turn the page, we go to the next chapter, and the narrator says it again, “Emma could not forgive her.” And I love this line – I love teaching this line – because what it does is it shows us exactly the difference between that kind of narrative technique Austen's using, free indirect discourse, where the first time she says it, she's telling us what Emma is thinking in her head, right? “Emma could not forgive her!” Like, we have to read it in, like, audiobook narrator voice.
[Mark:] Right.
[Stephanie:] Um, the second time, it's the narrator saying it. It's not Emma – It's not Emma's voice, it's not Emma's frustration. And so, it's just this very simple moment. It's a moment that the critic, uh, D. A. Miller writes about for pages and pages and pages and pages. Because it just really captures the subtlety of this thing that Austen's doing, but also the fact that she's flagging it for us. Like, she would not repeat that if she weren't saying to a reader, “Pay attention to the thing that I'm trying to do here.” And that, to me, is – I just, it's thrilling to me to watch that happen in a novel like this.
[Mark:] So, Stephanie, you've talked a little bit about what you do in the classroom with this novel. Do you have other techniques when you bring this book into the classroom?
[Stephanie:] Yeah! I love teaching Austen. I love, um, teaching classes devoted to Austen, where you can really look at all the novels together. I really enjoyed, in the past few years, playing around with some of the writing that I get my students to do about these novels. And one of the things that I think is most fun for me and for them, uh, is I will ask them to translate part of this novel into another medium, or into another kind of genre, or another form. And the idea is just, you know, you're paying attention both to, “okay, what is this narrative style doing, and then how would it have to be different if it were in another form?” Um, but also just making sure that they're, kind of, thinking about the complexity of some of these relationships. So, you know, like, a dating profile, for example, of one of the characters. My very favorite is when I've had students write – I don't know if you guys know those Reddit "Am I the Asshole” posts? Where someone – It's like an advice column, where someone's like, “Okay, here's what I did. Am I the asshole, or are they the asshole?” And it's so clever! You know, I love my students who have done this – you know, who thought of this. Because there are so many of those kind of complex social dynamics that play here, and it really does pick up on, you know, the difficulty sometimes of determining whether, you know, “is this character in the wrong or is that character in the wrong?” And it's something that the comedy of manners is doing all over the place. But then we put that into that, like, hyper modern form, and it just makes it so much more stark.
[Mark:] That's hilarious. Okay, so, Stephanie, now we're going to need you to say something controversial about this novel. The Norton Library Podcast hot take. [Laughter] Let's have it!
[Stephanie:] Ah, I feel like on some level I've shared – I mean, my boldest hot take, I guess, is that Austen is ambivalent about marriage, which I think is no news to a lot of Austen scholars but would certainly, you know, cause some consternation at some meetings – not all! – of the Jane Austen Society.
[Mark:] So, ambivalent personally, or ambivalent as she demonstrates it in this novel? What's the nature of her ambivalence?
[Stephanie:] I think both. So, you know, this is a moment when marriage – just the kind of, like, ideological work of marriage – is really being overhauled. Um, we know marriage is, if we put it in stark terms, moving from being a kind of, um, alliance between families – this kind of economic arrangement – to being something more like what we would, many of us think is modern marriage, that's about, you know, kind of mutual affection. That's about love, right? You marry someone because you love the person. Um, it's somewhere in between at this moment. And I think Austen really captures that. But I think she really wants to, uh, hold marriage up for at least inspection, if not critique – for both of those reasons, right? Like, for both the fact that, you know, if women had more economic independence, we wouldn't need marriages that were purely for, you know, economic reasons, and also, you know, how do we have – how is there even such a thing as, kind of, mutual affection or a kind of equality between partners if women don't have some kind of, like, equitable social standing? So, I think she can really be, uh, kind of co-opted for a very conservative understanding of what, you know, of what marriage can mean. She is often read as just a kind of writer of love stories, but I think she's doing something more complex. And I'm certainly not the first person to say that. A hotter take might be about the ending, but I can't talk about the ending. [Laughter]
[Mark:] Yes, we cannot be specific about the ending.
[Stephanie:] I'm not gonna – I'm not gonna spoil it! But people definitely have some strong reactions to that ending. I mean, I've already said that Emma gets married. I think that is okay, because I think this is just – it's Austen, right? But that's actually one of the things my students bristle at most, because they want her to remain unmarried. They like the idea that she can stay unmarried.
[Mark:] Does her ambivalence towards marriage play differently in a 2023 audience than it would have 200 years ago?
[Stephanie:] I think so. I think so. I think most of Austen's readers at the time would have understood that some women by necessity will remain unmarried, and that that might that be okay, right? But I think the idea that Emma Woodhouse says, “I don't need to get married. I don't particularly want to get married,” would, for most readers, be as provocative as it is to Harriet Smith in the novel. Harriet Smith says, you know, “How odd!” Like, “I've never heard a woman speak so,” right? That's probably a pretty common reaction at the time. I think my students now, and especially my students who are young women, don't find it that provocative–– [Laughter] ––for, uh, female protagonists to say, “I don't particularly want to get married.” And so, I think for them it actually comes as kind of a loss that she does in the end get married. That there's something to be mourned there. And I take that seriously. You know, I don't think that that's just a bad reading of Austen. I think it's something for us to think about.
[Mark:] So, we started this interview for this episode with you talking about being introduced to adaptations of Austen's work. And I want you – if you would start even with the cover of your edition [Laughter] – what are the adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma, movies and other media, that you might recommend? And what other life forms has this novel taken on?
[Stephanie:] Sure! Um, I was joking with you, Mark, uh, before this, that this cover is so striking and bold. Because the brilliant folks at Norton, uh, pulled the color scheme from an old “Clueless” poster from 1994. So, it really does take inspiration, you know – I don't think I mentioned "Clueless” anywhere in the intro or afterword to this––
[Mark:] No. So, it’s pink and yellow, right.
[Stephanie:] ––um, but it's there! It’s there the whole time. So, it's shockingly pink. Um, I think "Clueless” just really is a masterpiece. [Laughter] I do! Um, I will tell you, briefly, this story that I went to a book signing at The Strand for a book about "Clueless.” It's an oral history of "Clueless," and I went not because this, I'm sure, very brilliant woman wrote this book about "Clueless," but because Amy Heckerling, the writer and director of "Clueless," was going to be there. And I was like, “Okay, I have to go because Amy Heckerling is going to be there.” And I dutifully, like, stood in line, and I went to, like, to shake her hand, and I told her, like, “I'm an Austen scholar! And I just am such a huge fan, and so many of us really love that film. And, you know, for us it's just such a brilliant reading of Austen.” And she just looks at me witheringly. And she's very cool – she's so much cooler than me. Um, and she has, like, black-rimmed eyes, and she just looked at me and she's like, “...I *hate* academics.” [Laughter] Like, “No!!” And then I was like, “Well, um––
[Mark:] “All of them??”
[Stephanie:] ––I love you, Amy Heckerling!” [Laughter] Yeah. So, I had this, like, you know, deeply embarrassing Austenian, you know, interaction with this woman, who I do think is just such a sharp reader. So, if you're not familiar, you know, this is – she transposes the whole novel into, you know, 1990s L.A. And Emma becomes this kind of socialite valley girl. Um, but I think she's just so smart on the satire there. So, there are other great adaptations and okay adaptations. There's one with Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, which I think is pretty good casting. But that's the one that I always send new readers to, because I think it's just super smart. And even its real deviations from the book are provocative in ways that help us to think about what the novel's doing, too.
[Mark:] Okay, so you're an advocate of the Gwyneth Paltrow version. You're saying that's a useful adaptation.
[Stephanie:] It’s all right! It's okay. Yeah, Jeremy Northam as Mr. Knightley is pretty great. I think now we have all of these, kind of, cultural associations with Gwyneth Paltrow that actually just kind of work. [Laughter] Um, even her interest in wellness. Like, there's a whole undercurrent in this novel of, like, wellness culture – what we would call “wellness culture.” Um, you know, going on sea-bathing trips for your health, taking different potions and pills. And I think, um, the kind of “Goop” adaptation of Emma is appropriately, uh, calling up some of those references now.
[Mark:] What about music? Can you make an Emma playlist?
[Stephanie:] Shout out to another one of your guests, Jeff Insko, who, like me–– [Mark:] Yes! [Stephanie:] ––can only think in terms of pop music. [Laughter] I was like, “Thank God, he's talking about Carly Rae Jepsen.” Okay, so, I do have some ideas. One is that we would have to put Beyonce's “Single Ladies.” Because I think it, you know, is a celebration of the thing that Austen can't quite celebrate in this novel but is still definitely trying to think of as, like, worth singing about, right? And then the other two I had in mind are a little bit, um, maybe even a little darker. I was thinking about Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” I know that doesn't sound dark, but here's what I mean: it's about kind of wanting to be in love – it doesn't really matter who, right? And I think there's something here in – especially the kinds of, um, romantic fantasies that Emma wants to project onto Harriet, for example – there's this real interest in, like, love “as such” or, like, marriage “as such.” And, you know, being able to dance at the ball, and it doesn't really matter who you dance with, that I think gets captured in that song. Same reason, I was thinking about Queen’s “Somebody to Love.” So, this kind of undercurrent of, you know, just kind of loneliness and, like, wanting to get paired up, I think, uh, is the kind of te the more kind of melancholic, other side of the "Single Ladies” celebration of being alone.
[Mark:] Those are great. Those are those are great choices! I wouldn't have thought of them, but they're excellent. So, Stephanie, your endnotes to this Norton Library volume are so helpful. And there's one I wanted to talk to you about in particular. This is the note to page 109, Chapter 14, and you talk about the phrase “strange insensibility.”
[Stephanie:] Yeah!
[Mark:] And that might have been – that might be an example of one of those moments that you might have to highlight for your students or for new readers. It's like, what does that mean, “strange insensibility”? So, could you just gloss that just a little bit for us?
[Stephanie:] That's great, yeah. I'm actually, um, very much thinking about this question, because I'm just finishing up a Norton Library edition of “Sense and Sensibility,” where this whole language of “sense,” “sensibility,” “insensibility” is shot through that novel as well. Here, it just means Emma's frustrated because she doesn't understand why Mr. Elton is being so strangely insensible toward Harriet, by which she just means, in short, you know, he's not kind of picking up on the clues and expressing a kind of warmth toward her that Emma might expect. But at the same time, Austen's drawing on this whole discourse about sensibility that especially was live in late 18th-century culture, where there was this idea that being sensible meant that you were, kind of, finally attuned emotionally to your world. We might say “emo” now. [Laughter] But it's usually a little bit more complicated than that. So, you're not just being sad, but you have this, like, real perceptiveness about the emotions of other people, or about art that you encounter, maybe even about the natural world. Like, it was a really bodily kind of response. And the idea was that if you were sensible, you were someone who had that kind of acute responsiveness, right? Like, you really could respond in a satisfying way to that kind of stimulus. Now, almost as immediately, it started to get made fun of, critiqued, you know – like, in the 18th century, you can write a novel called "The Man of Feeling” and he's just crying in the whole book! But pretty soon, you know, people were like, “Come on!”–– [Laughter] ––Like, “Pull yourself together!” Uh, so Austen, I think, is – as she always does, I think – she's both kind of gently parodying that kind of ideal, at the same time thinking, you know, maybe it is a good thing to have a kind of sensitivity to your environment. So, you know, it's a great example – I'm glad you pointed that one out – where there's this almost like a, you know, a little Easter egg in Austen, where it's this, like, tossed off reference you might not pay attention to it. You know it's something bad about Mr. Elton, but it does open up this whole world of all of these kinds of cultural references that she has in mind at the same time.
[Mark:] Can we end this episode by summing up, maybe, a reaction of what the contemporary relevance is to Emma? Obviously, the enduring life of this novel is long. It continues to persist in many different ways, people continue to talk about it. So, what is it about our current time that would respond to this novel?
[Stephanie:] You know, I think about that question in at least a couple of ways. Um, the first is that, you know, if the 90s were the Golden Age, we are now, again, in a moment where Austen adaptation and Austen-inspired media are flourishing. So, I do think it's just great that students, for example, who are familiar with something like “Bridgerton” – the kind of mega successful Shonda Rhimes Regency romance series – I would love if everyone who watches “Bridgerton” picks up an Austen novel. I think it's just really rewarding, um, for those readers or viewers, as well. So, there's that kind of urgency, just because it has a kind of, um, real cultural import right now. The other thing I've been thinking about a lot, even just getting, um, ready for this episode, uh, Rebecca Traister, the feminist writer, put out a piece last week that was about, um, what marriage means now in our culture. Um, and her argument was that there is actually a real conservative push to celebrate traditional marriage as a way to cement traditional gender roles, uh, and that there's – we should have a suspicion, a healthy suspicion, for the kind of, you know, tradwife movement. You know, this kind of, like, “traditional womanly, wifely duties” kind of thing that you can pick up on social media. And all I can think about is Austen, right? [Laughter] When I read that kind of piece, because, um, Austen – I think I mentioned this – like, Austen sometimes gets invoked in precisely that kind of, um, conservative mobilizing of marriage as a kind of ideological tool – also a tool for whiteness, right? And this is – back to the “Bridgerton” thing – like, there's a lot to unpack here, but I am of the view that if you actually read Austen, it's very hard to use her toward those kinds of ideological ends. I guess I would just say those – that question of “What is marriage? What should marriage be?” is still, believe it or not, a kind of live question for us.
[Mark:] Stephanie Insley Hershinow, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast and discussing your edition of Jane Austen's Emma. This was great!
[Stephanie:] Thanks, Mark!
[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Emma by Jane Austen, with an introduction by Stephanie Insley Hershinow, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description for this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.
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