Julia Yost is with us today, our senior editor at first things, who has an entry in a nice series of essays.

I've seen many of them on renowned literary figures that is put out by

Wise Blood Books. This one is entitled Jane Austen's Darkness. That's our topic today. Welcome,

Julia. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me. First question, the darkness in the title. Now, Julie,

I've seen the movies, and isn't it lovely, those dances,

you know, those demure girls and social life at Boff in 1810. Isn't it all light?

Well, it is a very mediogenic period. I will agree with that. But I think there's a lot going on

in Austin that the sort of, you know, the Tea Party reading of her and the, you know, the fancy and BBC adaptation version of her tends to miss.

And I think actually a good way, a good place to start in establishing this is her first completed novel, Northanger Abbey.

I mean, it's her earliest novel, give or take some revisions at the end of her life.

But it contains this one passage that is really central, not just to that book, but I think to Austin's whole vision as a novelist. So Catherine, the heroine of that novel,

has been reading too many gothic novels, and she persuades herself that the patriarch of the family

she's staying with is a gothic tyrant who's murdered his wife. And so when she confesses this

suspicion to the man's son with whom she's

quite smitten, the son is shocked and scolds her in this very striking passage. He says,

remember the country and the age in which we live, remember that we are English, that we are

Christians. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?

Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary

intercourse is on such a footing, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

So this young man is saying, you know, dark things don't happen here.

This is the civilized world.

People speak English.

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