Episode 137: How Inger Brodey Applies Public Humanities to Jane Austen Scholarship and SCiLL
November 14, 2024 | Ruby Wang
Inger Brodey (FFP ’11, ’24) shares details about her new publication, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, and her upcoming Jane Austen research she worked on as a recent Faculty Fellow. In addition to book projects, she discusses her public humanities service with UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, the Jane Austen Summer Program, and more.
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Transcript
Kristen Chavez: Welcome to the Institute, a podcast on the lives and works of fellows and friends of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m your host, Kristen Chavez.
Inger Brodey is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is an expert in the history of the novel and internationally known as a Jane Austen scholar, as well as a scholar of 18th and 19th century intellectual history. Inger is also an inaugural faculty member in the School of Civic Life and Leadership and its Associate Dean for curriculum and faculty development. She was a Faculty Fellow here at the IAH in 2011 and then again in 2024. During her most recent fellowship, she worked on a project that explores adaptations of Austen and Asia, often in post-colonial settings that paradoxically celebrate the former colonizer, which focuses on the North Atlantic reception of Austen.
Inger, welcome to the podcast.
Inger Brodey: Thank you, Kristen. It’s great to be here.
KC: I’m glad to be able to talk to you about this. And as I mentioned, you recently published this book on Jane Austen. Congratulations on this publication, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, recently published with Johns Hopkins University Press. It’s been featured in Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, Sunday Times. More. I think we could probably list a lot of outlets here, but can you tell us a little bit about this book and the research that went into it?
IB: Sure, yeah, it’s actually, it was fun to write because it felt very fresh in one sense. I had given a talk on it, on the topic of Jane Austen’s strange endings, maybe 20 years ago, a long, long time ago, and then always been interested in the question of why she has these strange clustering of narrative techniques and rushes her endings away from dialog and so forth.
And I had also, as a teenager reading Austin, I had some pretty strong reactions to these endings. So my interest in it goes way, way back. I remember being really angry when I finished Mansfield Park, I stormed into my brother’s room and said, you know, “What happened? Why did she do this?” You know, it’s so much detail. We know about hedgerows and we know about what stars she looked at, but we have to rush through the ending? And so I thought she had died and that mid-writing Mansfield Park, and that was the reason.
Yeah, so long term interest, but I hadn’t really written much directly on the subject, and there was no book, there hasn’t been any other book on the subject of her endings. So, it seemed like a nice, kind of focused project, and it was a real pleasure to write. It was only after writing it that I realized that it was kind of a biography of Austen through her endings. Partly because that’s the way I think I like to teach Austen; through the chronology of how she wrote and why, and trying to think about why she made the choices she made.
KC: Interesting. And what has that kind of reception to that been like, especially, and we’ll talk about it a little bit more. You know, you enter, interact and intersect with a lot of Jane Austen fans and scholars. So, what is that reception like or thoughts about it?
IB: So, that was fun because I purposely shopped it around. There were several presses interested in the book, and I wanted it low priced, and I wrote it very specifically for a crossover audience, and Johns Hopkins was open to marketing it that way. Basically, I wrote it as though I was speaking to this kind of public facing Austen audience that I know so well from my various public humanities programs and talking to them felt very natural. So, it’s a huge difference from my previous book, and I’m really enjoying writing in this new kind of voice.
KC: Nice. So, you know, we’ve had, I guess, a bit of progression with some books, and now you’re working on a new project that you focused on during your most recent Faculty Fellowship, still really related to Jane Austen in this way. But can you expand on that project and maybe a little bit about what your experience was like as a faculty fellow?
IB: Yeah! Oh, I had a wonderful time. It was such a generous group, and we’re still in contact, supporting each other and our projects. I’m really grateful for the opportunity. Yeah, I’m writing two books on Austen right now, and the Austen’s Asian adaptations book is, again, it’s kind of a perplexing question of my own and my students’ that I’m trying to answer in that one, which is, why is Austen has had such a following, such a presence in adaptations in Asia? You know, the more I work on it, I’m not done with that book yet, but each of the countries I’m looking at has a very different reason and a very different showing of Austen.
You know, I was born in Japan, and I’m from Denmark originally, so I think I was the first to write about Austin’s adaptations in Japan and in English. So I have a lot of background in that area, but newer to me was the question of India. And some of the most creative adaptations of Austen have been either in Indian or co-Indian production. So Pride and Prejudice, Aisha, and a really, fascinating Tamil version of Sense and Sensibility called Kandukondain Kandukondain or I Have Found It. They’re very interesting, all three, especially like the last one, but the question of why, and you already said this in your intro a little bit, but why India would be so contemporary, popular India would be so interested in Jane Austen.
And Pakistan too, for that matter, when, when it’s the the colonial past in a way that they’re celebrating or adopting for their own adoption for their own purposes, would be a better way to say it. So, you know, Austen was, at one point, required reading in India, with the English colonial education system. So is it, you know, why is this younger generation who didn’t have that requirement so interested in her? So, that’s what, that’s one of the questions I’m trying to answer in the in the book.
KC: That’s interesting. I remember, in being familiar with you, with the past Jane Austen Summer Program. The speakers there, I think they were all themed around, like Indian or Pakistani adaptations. And I remember reading one of them and hearing the author talk about just the interesting ways they almost translated to the contemporary experience in Pakistan too, that I thought was really cool.
IB: Yeah, was that Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable? Is that the one you read that? Was it? Yeah, I haven’t yet decided how much I’m going to include novels, because there are so many and so many wonderful ones, especially the Asian American diaspora. And North American, I should say, but yeah, and I love those people, and I’ve interviewed those people, and I really enjoy the adaptations. But there’s, I have to, somehow, I have to narrow down this project a little bit.
KC: Yeah, I can imagine. So, as you kind of just mentioned, too, you know, we’ve mentioned the Jane Austen summer program. You also host your own series, the Jane Austen and Company, and then there’s Jane Austen’s desk. Can you tell us a little bit about all of these different projects and nonprofits and the way that you’re able to explore the scholarship into Jane Austen a variety of different ways?
IB: Yeah, you know, Austen isn’t the only thing I’ve studied and written on so… but I have turned so much towards her in the past 10 or 15 years. I guess. It’s such an opportunity, because she has a huge following. You know, the Jane Austen Society of North America alone is has maybe 5000 members. And Austen readers are kind of an ideal audience for public humanities work, I find, because they’re often really interested in reading very deeply and learning about the history and the material culture and and also history of criticism in Austen. They have a low tolerance for empty jargon, but they’re also really receptive to people from all sorts of different perspectives. And I just think they’re a fantastic group. And I’ve been talking to them for decades, you know, around the world, since there are Jane Austen societies in so many other countries as well. In fact, I think my first talk on the endings was actually in Wollongong, Australia, at an event there ages ago.
KC: That’s cool. So, as you mentioned, of course, your work isn’t limited to Jane Austen, but you also have this very global and international lens. You mentioned that you were born in Japan, grew up in Denmark. You’ve studied in Tokyo and in Germany. You’ve given talks in Australia and all around the world. What’s the significance of having this international lens within your scholarship, and I guess how its significance to you and your life?
IB: Yeah, well, I originally came to UNC for the Comparative Literature program, and they particularly wanted someone who could do east west kind of Asia and Europe in particular connections. So it’s given me opportunities in that way. So I’m very glad to be here. I think someone who used to work here, Lillian Furst, very famous comparatist, said that “comparatists aren’t made, they’re born.” And I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, but there is an aspect where people who have had international backgrounds don’t fit in entirely in any one culture. They’re often attracted to comparative studies.
So personally, I think that’s been part of my journey. I loved languages from way, way back as I you know, I speak six different languages, but they get they get rusty and so forth. But one way to keep those cultures alive and that interest alive is through the literature, even when other opportunities are less often, like I don’t get to go to those countries very often anymore.
KC: That’s great. So, as I mentioned the intro too, you’ve also joined the inaugural faculty for UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership in the College of Arts and Sciences here, and you’re also leading, co-leading a pilot program aimed at teaching first year students about debate and dialog. Can you share a little bit more about your work with the school and this program?
IB: One of the things I love most about Carolina is how dedicated Carolina is to public service. You just, I think you feel that in all aspects of Carolina. You really, you know, the areas of medicine that UNC tends to be most highly rated in tend to be areas that face, you know, rural populations or public health, just to give one example. But I think it’s throughout the college people and the students just really care about serving the public. And, of course, as the first, you know, public university in the country as well.
So I think all my Jane Austen related public humanities work has also been inspired by the desire to serve the public, communicate with the public, to avoid the ivory tower, to show respect to the general public and and never, ever to talk down to to the public. So, I think that is partly what inspired my interest in some of the programs of the School of Civic Life and Leadership.
The pilot we did was really interesting. So, it involved 130 students from Cobb Hall earlier this year who I didn’t realize when we were planning it–some of them had just moved in, so, it might not have been the ideal timing, but they were told a little bit about the history of civic discourse and debate and free expression on UNC campus. And then there were some little exercises where there would be a statement like one of them, one that I wrote was, is agreeing or disagreeing a greater sign of respect and friendship. So that was one of the ones that they had to then, first they had to take a stand on and they would debate, and then they could revise their stand if they wanted after debating and or qualify the terms, or however, however they want to do it. So that kind of exercise was most of the time was spent on.
But then the survey results, because I made a survey for it to see you know how they liked it. Was really interesting because they said, first of all, they liked it, and they thought all students, the majority thought that all students should have this experience, but they also said that they were pretty unlikely to express their true feelings to either classmates or friends or roommates. And at the same time, they said how, how very essential to the university experience was being able to do those things. So, there was a discrepancy between what they thought was important, what they felt like they could do, and I think I’m excited to help them gain some of those skills to combat polarization, and, I don’t know, build intellectual, positive community at the university. So that’s part of it, part of the interest.
KC: That’s cool and definitely interesting, I think, within the framing of, you know, like you said, students just moving in and potentially not knowing their roommates, and this is your first kind of introduction, and, you know, trying to figure out, how are we going to get… I hope we make it through the year!
IB: Exactly! In fact, some of the housing people were kind of worried about it at first, when I was talking with them about doing this, they said, you know, that they call that the initial couple of months the honeymoon phase, where people are, and the way that she just–this person from housing–described it was that this is the period where they’re all trying to find what they agree about. And it’s all like, “Same! Me too, same.” And that’s the way to bond. But that’s what made me think about that question, because is that really a more of a sign of friendship than sharing the ways in which you’re different? I actually think it was kind of good timing to maybe encourage them to form deeper friendships by not only looking for similarity. And we made sure to separate the roommates.
KC: Okay, that makes sense. That’s great. Is there anything else that you’re working on, or anything that you’d like to talk about?
IB: So I feel like I didn’t give a good answer to the various Jane Austen public humanities programs, because I mentioned how big those societies and how welcoming and eager for discussion those societies and that those populations are but I think that with the summer program, we’ve really been able to build an ideal kind of town and gown community. And it’s been, what, 12 years or something now 13, and even when we had to go online, one summer for Covid, people came back and said, you know, I don’t know what I would have done without this event. They said, you know, this is the community I love most. And they said, a lot of people said it was the best professional education they’ve, you know, seminar they’ve ever had, kind of thing. Continuing education, not professional education, I think.
So, I don’t know, you, Kristen, you’ve been to and you’ve seen the kind of community it is, but I will always deeply, deeply appreciate the opportunity to be part of it and to have helped shape that community.
KC: That’s great. Perhaps it’s too early to think of now, but is there anything people can look forward to for the next session?
IB: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have. It’s not been announced yet, but it will be shortly that we are most likely doing the next JASP in Newbern. And we have both for 2025 and 2026 we’re doing special transatlantic JASP events because of 2025 as a 250th anniversary of her birth, and 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the declaration. The connections between Austen and the new American Republic are very strong, and much stronger than I think people realize. And she was very aware of these colonies and country during her life, even though she only mentions them a couple of times in her writing.
And that’s my actually, my other book project that I’m working on right now is related to that transatlantic Austen. And I’m writing about, it’s called “Jane Austen’s Wars,” and it’s about her connections to the American Revolution, French Revolution, Napoleonic wars, War of 1812 and the way that those things show up in her novels kind of surreptitiously, that I think in ways I think people haven’t really seen interesting. And so I’m excited about that one.
And in researching that one, I had a great experience of going to some of the naval archives in England. And I actually read through all of her two naval brothers. I read through all their letters. And there I found the ship’s logs and the various… there are various accounts that they write of all their different events. And like one of her brothers, was in China and had to negotiate these very difficult arrangements with when a Cantonese person was killed, and one of the crew members was accused of doing so. Very complicated. And that made me learn a lot about not only what she was hearing vicariously from all these experiences, but also the kind of diplomatic service that the Navy was involved with, you know, with very little, in a way, very little training in diplomatic areas to then suddenly be bartering peace between two countries was the kind of and we know, with communication being so slowed, with the with England, for example, for her brother, he had to make a lot of decisions on his own. So that was fascinating to me. I felt like I got to know them a little bit.
KC: That’s cool. That’s interesting. Yeah, everything that’s part of her, her world in various aspects.
IB: Yeah, so Jane Austen’s desk. Have you seen it yet? Have I shown you the…
KC: I think I’ve seen maybe an early concept of it. I can’t remember.
IB: Okay, I can show you. I can give you a link to the beta version. And we’re going to be presenting it at the next Jane Austen Annual General Meeting in North America, and then also at the MLA so people can play around with it and…
KC: And this you received in any two…
IB: Two NEH grants and we’re applying for a third right now. I don’t think the full, it won’t be really fully released until probably early 2027, is my guess. Okay, but the beta version will be completely available to people who are interested. It just won’t be… it’ll have samples of all the types of products, types of links and sections we’re going to have, but it won’t be as fully fleshed out as we would like it to be.
But it the concept is, it’s her workspace and kind of mind related in a physical way, the at the certain time. So March 30, 1813, and this is a moment when she’s published Pride and Prejudice very recently. She’s thinking about that. She’s excited. She’s just getting reviews and responses writing a lot of those down. And she’s writing Mansfield Park, which is such a deviation from Pride and Prejudice. What she celebrates in the way of charm, for example, in Pride and Prejudice, she suddenly decides to make a dangerous temptation in in the next novel. So it’s an interesting moment of time in a variety of ways, War of 1812, all sorts of things.
What we’ve done is we’ve gathered… we’re figuring out what she read, what we know she read, and we’re scanning those books we found, you know, library catalogs of what she bought, might have borrowed, we have letters we’ve got. We have really cool plans for what to do with our actual texts, but we also have made a map–a globe that you can navigate, which will at any point, populate where her siblings are on the map. And you can see how she moves this teensy little bit, and her brothers are circumnavigating the globe, but she’s vicariously traveling. And she has a sister in law too, who did a great deal of traveling.
So the idea is to trace her vicarious travels, what she read, and just find there are other other things too, other material culture and archives that we’re using, but the whole idea is just to kind of recreate what her influences might have been at that moment, to counter the idea that she is somehow uneducated or sheltered because she didn’t travel.
You know, there’s been ridiculous portrayals of her in that way, like, for example, the Becoming Jane. John Spence wrote the book, but the film was even more tending to portray her as being extremely sheltered. So he reads passages, this guy, reads passages of–it’s the Tom Lefroy character–reads passages of Tom Jones to her, and oh! The Austen there is so shocked and surprised by how raunchy it is. And, my goodness, there’s in so many ways that’s wrong.
And so, it’s to counter that at the same time, though, by showing her domestic life, you realize what she was balancing as a woman, as an unmarried woman, in order to try to find time for her writing. It’s astonishing. Two of her brothers had 11 children. The spinster, the so-called spinster sisters were expected to look after them, and so they frequently in this small house had piles of children arriving and needing to be taken care of, and Austen’s trying to eek out time to write these novels and very aware of her own ambitions. So that’s another kind of myth busting thing that we’re after.
KC: That’s cool. Definitely keep us updated as it moves along and as it goes live, both beta version and then full.
IB: Thank you.
KC: That’s great. So, we’re recording this kind of at the early start of the semester. What are you kind of looking forward to? Or what do you have coming up for you for this year?
IB: Well, I took on, as you mentioned in the introduction, I took on one of the two Associate Dean positions for SCiLL, and it is for curriculum and faculty development. So, I have a hand in the exciting work of looking at minor and majors and study, you know, study programs and like there’s SCiLL in DC, plan afoot. And anyway, it’s a creative stage that I enjoy.
I think I was drawn to it partly, again, this because of this public centered mission that I like very much and accord with. But then also, there’s a great books kind of component that is attractive to me since I did my PhD, also in a in a great books type of program and have a background in political philosophy as well as literature. And then for the faculty development, I’m hoping to develop some faculty mentoring systems, but yeah, that administrative work is time consuming, but also very energizing.
KC: So, as we start to wrap up, I’ll ask a question that we’ve asked all of our guests, is there a book that has changed your life, or some other piece of work, or creative piece that you think has really made an impact on you.
IB: Okay, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go out on a limb. And instead of talking about literature, which is, you know, extremely important to me, the Ryoanji temple garden in Japan. I don’t know if you know it, but it’s the one where you have 13 stones, I think it’s 13, but you can never see them all from any angle at once. And the idea is that truth can never be complete, or any one person’s access to it is limited, and I love that. And I have… there is an aspect of the of a traditional Japanese aesthetic, that of celebrating incompletion that I think has profoundly influenced me.
So for example, if you look at the Zen School of ink paintings, they’ll always be a huge white, often not always, but they’ll often be a huge, empty seeming space, but in a way that’s kind of the most important, because it’s sort of pregnant with meaning and with beauty in a way that the expressed part can’t reach. So, I wrote my dissertation was actually on the “rhetoric of silence” I called it, but I think it was inspired by this Japanese appreciation of what is unspoken.
So, for example, the nearly full moon is more significant in Japan than the full moon, whereas we celebrate kind of, oh, wow, it’s completely full. But in Japan, the lack of fullness is more expressive. So, if you get a letter from a friend, and it’s jam packed, you know, like Austen wrote diagonally, and if you get a letter that’s completely full, where someone’s used every space, and you think, you probably think, I don’t know, what would you think? Would that be a good sign? A bad sign?
KC: Yeah, I think I would be… yeah, a little daunted, I think, when I first opened it like, “Oh, dear, what has happened?”
IB: But you’d also think that the person had a lot to say to you, right? It’s like, oh, either there’s an emergency or they’re really excited to talk to me. But this is full. This couldn’t have been…
But that’s actually kind of rude, from other perspective, from another perspective. So, this is like, this is kind of going back to traditional aesthetic in Japan, but if you fill a page, it’s polite to start a new page and just write a little bit at the top, because the emptiness signals. Well, first, you weren’t just you weren’t entirely ruled by frugality, which is what causes Austen’s fullness, but it also means that it signifies everything that you wanted to say but didn’t have time or effort to say so as a kind of generosity in that, in that silence, that particular aesthetic, cultural aesthetic, I think notices and appreciates. I can give you lots of other examples, but this is but I like, I just like that concept. I’m not entirely sure why it’s so meaningful to me, but it always has been.
KC: That’s really cool. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I’ll have to look this up. Yeah, I’m really curious about seeing this garden too.
IB: Yeah, it’s gorgeous.
KC: That’s great. Thank you so much for being able to join us on the podcast.
IB: Thank you, Kristen, and thanks for always being such a supporter of this Austen fangirl experience.
KC: I do. I do love fangirling.
This has been The Institute, a podcast by UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This episode was hosted by Kristen Chavez and edited by Ruby Wang. Listen to other and upcoming episodes of The Institute by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
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