‘Don't change books to be more PC – that's like cutting Jane Austen's buggery joke'
'I always think of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen with this view,' says Dr Paula Byrne, looking through the window at a jumble of green and gently wooded hills. 'I feel like I'm Marianne Dashwood when the rain comes lashing down, I'm out there and I want Willoughby to come up and rescue me.'
Byrne, arguably Britain's leading authority on Jane Austen, as well as a novelist, biographer, teacher and family counsellor, is standing in an airy converted barn outside Oxford, rather than Wessex or Devonshire, and the space is bathed in warm spring sunshine rather than a storm, but you can see what she means. It is a romantic view.
Besides, she can be forgiven for having both authors on her mind, especially this year. As the more glamorous half of arguably Britain's pre-eminent literary-criticism power couple – her husband is Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, an expert in Shakespeare and the Romantics – Byrne has moved frequently for his work, most notably to Arizona, where Sir Jonathan has been a professor of humanities since 2019.
This year, however, it is Byrne's turn to reclaim the spotlight – 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth and Byrne will be central to the festivities. Sir Jonathan, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship last month, has taken a sabbatical to research a book about the history of gardens. The couple have moved back to the UK in anticipation of Byrne's bumper year.
'It's going to be one of those things that rolls and rolls,' she says. First up is a three-part BBC documentary-drama starting on Monday, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. Byrne is one of the expert talking heads; other contributors include Greg Wise, Samuel West, Tamsin Greig and Helen Fielding. This summer she will publish Six Weeks by the Sea, a novel imagining the first time the young Jane fell in love. It is her first fictional treatment of Austen, after three acclaimed non-fiction books including 2013's The Real Jane Austen: A life in Small Things. In October she will give the plenary lecture at JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, where they dress up in 'bonnets and stuff' and 'really know their stuff'.
'One of my emphases is how funny [Austen] is, because it gets overlooked,' Byrne says. 'She's not a romantic writer. She's an anti-romantic. She's always puncturing romance and satirising it. But irony is difficult for some people to get. You can read her for whatever reason you want, but she's hilariously funny, which tends to get a little bit lost. Or Mrs Bennet can become a caricature, which is a shame. Jane Austen's too subtle for caricatures.'
It is one of many aspects of Austen she says most of the countless screen adaptations get wrong. 'They do the big houses and play up the smocks and frocks element,' she says. 'She doesn't write about the aristocracy, she writes about the gentry. Pemberley is a big house, but most of the time in the other novels the houses aren't that big.' She admires the 'dirty hems and pigs' of Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice, but her favourite Austen adaptation is Clueless (1995), the knowing, hilarious Hollywood adaptation of Emma set in 1990s Beverly Hills: ' Clueless so gets what Emma's about. Who's in, who's out, the class nuances. And there's not a line of Jane Austen in it.'
Austen's 250th year will see all manner of other celebrations. As well as the projects Byrne is involved in, there are two new Pride and Prejudice adaptations in the works, one six-part series for Netflix written by best-selling author Dolly Alderton, and starring Olivia Colman, Jack Lowden and Emma Corrin, another a BBC spin-off focusing on Mary Bennet, The Other Bennet Sister. In October Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is buried, will unveil a new statue. What would Jane have made of the Austen industrial complex?
'There's a lot of snobbishness around Jane Austen,' Byrne says. 'But there's nothing wrong with having fun with it and dressing up. 'Janeites' is the derisory term. But they're having the best time. And they know their stuff. I'm terrified of giving a talk to Janeites.'
Austen was a war novelist, she points out; her fiction has long been a comfort to the terrified. 'During the First World War there was a special edition of her novels published for soldiers in the trenches. There's something very moving about soldiers reading about what they're fighting for, in a sense: villages and countryside and the English way of life.
'She was also one of the first writers to write about heroine-centred stories, and that should be celebrated,' she adds. 'When I first came to Austen people said 'oh it's just about marriage and stuff'. But money does matter when you don't work yourself. Status matters when you are poor. Many 18th-century novels are unreadable now. She was doing something very different.
'It saddens me that she never knew how famous she'd be. By the end of her life people weren't really buying her books. For many years after her death (in 1817) she was out of print. It must be hard writing for an audience you don't think you're going to get.'
At 58, in jeans and knee-high boots, with a Merseyside accent unaffected by years spent living in London, Oxford and Arizona, Byrne is a refreshing figure by the standards of literary biography. She grew up in a working class family in Birkenhead, on the Wirral, the third of five girls – 'just like the Bennets' – out of seven children in total. Her father was a lorry driver, now retired, her mother a housewife. Byrne was identified as the bookish child early on and enthusiastically encouraged. 'My siblings say I just read so I didn't have to do any housework, which is kind of true,' she recalls.
'I didn't have parents who read to me as a child, they read but weren't big readers, but I was just obsessed with books,' she says. 'I always think if I won the lottery I would give the money to Birkenhead library because it saved my life. My mum would say 'spend as much time as you want in there'.'
She developed her taste early, too. 'I always loved the classics,' she says. 'I remember [American novelist] Judy Blume coming; I hated it.' Contemporary fiction still leaves her 'a bit cold'. In a recent column for Prospect magazine Byrne called Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You 'wretchedly unreadable and dull'.
'She's venerated and Americans love her,' Byrne says. 'Some of my friends really like it and I'm like, 'do you really like it? Am I missing something?' But the lack of grammar and the no chapters, it all feels a bit pretentious. I accept she's a good writer but no, not for me.''
Academic career
Byrne's critical apparatus offered a route into a different kind of life. She did her teacher training in Chichester and taught in a boys' grammar school and a college of education, before going back to university, this time in Liverpool, for an MA and PhD on Austen, work that formed the basis of her first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002 when Byrne was 24.
Byrne met Sir Jonathan in 1994 at Liverpool University. Both had been married before. When she met him, she was a masters student and he was a professor. 'People get upset when you say it,' she says. 'But I wasn't 18, I was 26, and we've been married for 30 years.' They have three children: Tom, 26, Ellie, 24, and Harry, 18. In 2016 the couple founded The ReLit Foundation, a charity devoted to treating 'stress, anxiety and other conditions through slow reading of great literature, especially poetry'. The charity's website lists all three children as team members.
'Jane Austen changed my life, no question,' Byrne says. 'I am passionate about education and reading because if you are working class it is your only route into a different life.' Having seen how her children were taught in the US, she worries that Britain is slipping 'backwards a bit' on education.
'My youngest went to a school that was taught Socratically. They read John Locke, Pride and Prejudice. It is fantastic and they don't dumb down. The worst thing you can do is dumb down. Of Mice and Men? Come on, do me a favour. When I taught 11-year-old boys I begged to teach Henry V because they would love it. The head said no, you've got to start with Romeo and Juliet, but eventually he let me. Afterwards the boys were all rushing around the playground screaming 'once more unto the breach'.
'Don't patronise kids, don't patronise working-class people. They can do big words. It's fine. If we give them stupid texts, we'll get stupid people.' That said, a university degree is 'not for everyone'.
'Everyone should have access [to university], of course, but also I've taught people who were sold a bit of a lie and got into a lot of debt and it didn't really do them any good. It's so difficult.'
America was also liberating because the people around her did not make an instant judgment based on her accent. 'I always found that very liberating,' she says. 'I wasn't judged in the same way. In England you're so judged by your accent. I don't think I had a chip on my shoulder, but I did a literary festival once and the minute I started speaking people got up and walked out. I was talking about Jane Austen, and obviously I didn't have the right voice for it. Americans have their own class system, too, it's just [about] money.'
Publishing itself has experienced dramatic changes in the time Byrne has been working. In early 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation into Roald Dahl revealing the extent of the changes his publishers were making to the original texts to suit modern standards of political correctness. Subsequent investigations found similar alterations in Enid Blyton, Ian Fleming and many others.
'It's ridiculous, isn't it,' she says. 'Messing around with anyone's books is not OK. Jane Austen makes a very rude joke about buggery in the navy in Mansfield Park. It would be like taking that out. It's patronising, it's wrong. I don't approve of that. Don't treat people like they're stupid. If it's not for you, put it down, there's plenty of other books. Don't change a book just because it's not PC anymore. I can't bear it.'
Character assassination
Byrne has experienced first hand the destructive power of language. In 2015, a letter dropped through the family letterbox in Oxford, addressed to Sir Jonathan, who was provost of Worcester College from 2011-2019. 'Please, please do something about your wife,' it began, going on – as Byrne wrote in an article about the ordeal three years later – 'to assassinate my character, my looks, my dress sense, my grammar, my mothering skills, my work as a writer'. It was the first in a series of poison pen letters over the next few years.
These were not the ramblings of a stranger but someone who knew Byrne's family and her work. She and Sir Jonathan started to suspect people around them. Byrne even wondered if her first husband might even have nursed a grudge for more than 20 years. The stress brought on a heart attack. After 14 letters, when the writer attacked ReLit, Byrne decided to go public, eventually putting the letters in a novel, Look to Your Wife, published in 2018.
'It was a very tough time,' she says. 'I knew it was an Oxford don [writing the letters] because the letters were hilarious and so well written. I'm not meant to talk about this case because I've settled out of court. But I thought 'I'm going to put these letters in a novel to flush this person out'. I did and it worked.
'It sort of changed my life because I never thought I had a novel in me,' she adds. 'So some good came out of it. But it gave me a heart attack. It was stress-induced. There's no [heart trouble] in my family. When the surgeon went in he said you can measure [the stress]. At the time I didn't realise how stressful it was.' As they were able to catch the heart trouble early, and she had a stent fitted, she has had no lasting effects.
The letters were the most extreme manifestation of an Oxford environment Byrne found oppressive, rife with bitchy academics. 'These communities, like the priesthood, where it's quite a closed world, you're sleeping and eating together. The famous thing about Oxford is that the fights are so vicious, because the stakes are so low. It's true. You think 'Why does this stuff matter to people so much? Why are people upset about whether I wear a gown or not? I've got real things to worry about, I have children to raise.' That was not a great part of my life.'
Working with teenagers
This experience, along with the financial realities of being a professional writer, led Byrne to retrain as a counsellor when they moved to the US. 'I was very interested in the relationship between stress and mental and physical illness,' she says. 'I also just couldn't make money [as a writer]. In the past 10 years it has become a hobby. I defy anybody, unless you are Alan Hollinghurst, it's so hard to make a living. You are working for nothing. I'm so poorly paid it's ridiculous. Part of me retraining was I want to keep working, I feel I have things to offer, what could I do that would be challenging and fulfilling.
'People to me are endlessly fascinating in themselves and their family dynamics. The more you can get into a room you think 'oh my god, look at the dynamics'. Everyone has a different story.' Jane Austen would probably agree. As a counsellor, her favourite groups have been teenagers and couples. 'I didn't like doing children, because I found it too upsetting,' she says. 'But I loved couples and adolescents. I'm a bit Polyannaish about it but teenagers are a great group because they're so hilarious and amenable and easy to change.
'Couples therapy is fascinating too, because you have two people in a room and you're trying to make the relationship better. It can be so rewarding.'
As for her own relationship, she says she and Sir Jonathan are 'really, really competitive'. Along with his academic positions and knighthood, he has published books including The Genius of Shakespeare and Radical Wordsworth, considered classics of criticism.
'But we get each other as writers. We can work in the same room. I'm his first reader, he's my first reader. I love that we share that.' Not dissuaded by the precariousness of the field, their own children are 'in the business of books', too. Their eldest is doing a masters at creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin. 'He wants to be the next Michael Ondaatje,' Byrne says. Their daughter Ellie works for Penguin Books and is going to Harvard to do a masters in the autumn. The youngest, Harry, is going to Durham to do classics. 'Three kids at uni, it's a disaster,' she jokes. 'I'm like 'can you please get a job'.'
With a daughter and two sons, Byrne has witnessed the change in education in recent decades, which has seen girls supersede boys at all levels of schooling.
'Girls are overtaking boys at everything,' she says. 'Part of me thinks great, because they've been put down for long enough and it's their turn. But I'm the mother of two boys and I can see the other side, where boys feel like their voices don't matter anymore and there's nothing that they have to say of interest, because they're a privileged boy. But they can't help their privilege.'
Young working class boys are being increasingly pushed out. 'I was very aware of that in Birkenhead,' she says. 'With the closure of the shipbuilding I could see it on the ground level, that white working-class males who weren't educated were being marginalised.'
What's to be done?
'Read,' she replies. 'Read Jane Austen!' If Austen were around today she might, as Byrne says, be surprised at the scale of her reputation. But she would be delighted to have Paula Byrne in her corner.
'Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius' is on BBC iPlayer and BBC Two from Monday May 26, 9pm
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