Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City St George’s, University of London

The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has made it clear that taxes will go up, and more cuts to welfare spending are on the horizon. The moves will be deeply unpopular and controversial – but in an extraordinary press conference ahead of the UK budget on November 26, Reeves made it clear that she believes both will be necessary.

In a highly unusual move, the chancellor used the press conference to set out her priorities for balancing the books while growing the economy. Notably, she did not mention the pledge in Labour’s manifesto not to raise taxes on working people or increase national insurance, VAT or income tax.

Instead, she said her focus was on lowering the burden of excessive government borrowing and debt, improving public services and tackling the cost of living.

Reeves gave particular importance to sticking with her “iron-clad” fiscal rules. These, she argued, were essential for showing she is being responsible with the nation’s finances and preventing a further rise in the cost of borrowing (the interest the government pays on its debt).

At more than £100 billion per year, this already makes up 10% of all government spending. The government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), projects the total to rise to £111 billion by the next financial year.

Read more:
David Blunkett: the world has changed since Liz Truss’s mini budget, so what is Labour still so scared of?

She also emphasised the importance of measures to boost UK productivity. Productivity forecasts are expected to be downgraded by the OBR, heaping yet more pressure on the chancellor’s budget choices. Reeves questioned whether the forecast would accurately predict the future – but has accepted that she will have to work within the OBR’s constraints in this year’s budget.

The chancellor is right that there is a pressing need to boost productivity. But it is by no means certain that planned investment in things like housing, nuclear and a third runway at Heathrow will yield big gains, at least in the near term.

At the same time, she made it clear that to meet her budget target there will need to be cuts to public spending. Some cuts will come from more “efficiency” savings by government departments (that perennial option that all chancellors reach for).

But they will also come from tackling the UK’s rapidly rising welfare budget, focusing on the large number of young people who are not in education, employment or training but depend on state benefits (so-called “Neets”).

Any cuts to the welfare budget, as well as a failure to abolish the two-child benefit limit (although she is under pressure from colleagues to bite the bullet and axe it), will cause dismay within the parliamentary Labour party as well as many party activists.

As ever, the budget choices will be political as well as economic. Both the Conservatives and Reform UK will accuse Labour of breaking its manifesto promises. They will also claim Labour is undermining any chance of growth by raising taxes by a larger amount than any UK government has done in the last 50 years.

At the same time, it will become even more difficult for Labour to manage its large but fractious parliamentary majority. Earlier this year, backbenchers forced the government to restore the winter fuel payment for some pensioners and abandon plans to cut personal independence payments for disabled claimants.

Local government elections, as well as elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, are looming next May. Reeves risks further alienating Labour’s grassroot supporters and pushing them towards smaller left-wing parties such as the Greens. They already seem to be pulling ahead of Labour among younger voters.

The stakes could not be higher. A bad result could even lead to questions about the future of both the chancellor and the prime minister Keir Starmer.

Finally, the chancellor’s goal to cut the cost of living for working people does not seem particularly ambitious. Her suggested approach involves cutting energy costs by investing more in electricity generation, and reducing the cost of food by changing the business rates system to help small businesses.

Even if effective, these changes will take some time to work through and may not be enough to convince voters that Labour is on their side – particularly if inflation is not brought under control.

Reeves’ appeal to the public to back her long-term approach to sorting out the British economy may be admirable. But the political risks to her personally – and Labour more broadly – remain considerable.

Steve Schifferes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tax rises and benefit cuts are on the horizon as Reeves prepares the UK for a bad-news budget – https://theconversation.com/tax-rises-and-benefit-cuts-are-on-the-horizon-as-reeves-prepares-the-uk-for-a-bad-news-budget-269008

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Lorch, Professor of Science Communication and Chemistry, University of Hull

If you’ve sat in a nail salon recently, you may well have encountered TPO or trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide to give it its full chemical name. You won’t have seen the name on the bottle. But if you’ve had your gelled fingers under a blue-violet lamp, TPO could well have been part of the process.

TPO is what chemists call a photoinitiator – basically, a chemical that reacts when it’s hit with UV light. When your nails go under the lamp, TPO breaks apart and helps link tiny liquid molecules together, turning the polish into that solid, shiny, long-lasting gel layer.

It’s smart chemistry, and it’s one reason gel manicures last so much longer than normal nail polish. But recently, the EU banned TPO because research suggests it might increase the risk of cancer and could be harmful to the reproductive system.

Meanwhile, alternatives such as benzophenone and other common photoinitiators come with concerns of their own.

Benzophenone, for instance, is listed as a possible endocrine disruptor, meaning it may interfere with hormones. Another common substitute for TPO, called TPO-L is harmful to aquatic life and may cause skin allergies. None of this is hidden. The European Chemicals Agency maintains a public database where anyone can look up chemicals and find their hazard classifications and environmental data.

The point is not that nail varnish is dangerous. It is that even everyday products involve chemistry that is more complex than we might assume and that decisions about what is “safe enough” involve weighing risks, benefits and available alternatives.

The same pattern has played out recently with two much wider-reaching chemicals: Pfas, so-called “forever chemicals”, and glyphosate, a herbicide used in agriculture.

Recently, the European Commission announced new restrictions on Pfas in firefighting foam. It did this because Pfas don’t break down in the environment and can build up in living things over time, which can be harmful. Meanwhile, the use of glyphosate has been under review, with the EU approving its continued use and the UK due to make a decision in the next year or so.

None of these decisions happen instantly or automatically. Here is how chemical safety is regulated.

What Reach does

Pharmaceuticals are tightly controlled globally, but chemicals aren’t always regulated as strictly. However, in the EU and UK, chemicals are managed under a system called Reach that is often described as one of the most comprehensive chemical regulations in the world.

The basic difference in how we treat medicines versus chemicals comes down to how we think about risk. Chemicals are expected to be safe when used properly. Medicines, on the other hand, are allowed to have some risks if the benefits outweigh the risks.

That’s why harsh cancer treatments, which can have serious side-effects, are still considered acceptable – because they can save lives. And it’s also why very dangerous chemicals can still be made and used, as long as there are strong safety measures in place.

Under Reach, companies must register their chemicals and provide detailed information on a chemical’s properties, hazards and safe handling. The principle here is: “no data, no market”.

Regulators then evaluate that information – and can request more if needed. Such substances may then be authorised, meaning they can only be used if companies can demonstrate that risks are controlled or that societal benefits outweigh them while safer options are developed.

If a substance poses an unacceptable risk that cannot otherwise be managed, regulators can restrict or ban specific uses of chemicals. Later if evidence emerges that suggests a chemical can cause cancer, harm reproduction, persist in the environment, accumulate in living things, or otherwise be hazardous, it might be added to a list of “substances of very high concern”.

Reach is a strict, step-by-step system that requires companies to prove their chemicals can be used safely. But in reality, we often only learn the full effects of a chemical over time, once it is being used outside the lab and in everyday life. That’s why decisions about chemicals such as TPO, Pfas and glyphosate can change slowly and sometimes take many years to fully settle.

Safe and sustainable by design

As a result of cases such as these, many feel that despite Reach being one of the most comprehensive chemical regulations in the world, it isn’t enough. This has led to a philosophy known as safe and sustainable by design, where, instead of making a chemical and then proving it is safe, a material is designed with safety and disposal or recycling in mind.

In this area, artificial intelligence may well prove to have a major role. AI is increasingly being used to predict toxicity of chemicals and so allow them to be flagged before they are manufactured.

Chemistry has built the modern world, given us durable coatings on the ends of our fingers, high-yield crops, non-stick pans, waterproof jackets and thousands of other unnoticed conveniences. It has also given us chemicals that travel too far, last too long and accumulate where they were never intended.

The challenge is not to stop using chemistry. It is to use it wisely. Whether we are talking about manicures, farmland, or emergency foam, the principle should be the same: use chemistry that does the job, without leaving a legacy. The more we can predict that, the fewer surprises we’ll find later.

Mark Lorch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. From nail bars to firefighting foams: how chemicals are deemed safe enough or too harmful – https://theconversation.com/from-nail-bars-to-firefighting-foams-how-chemicals-are-deemed-safe-enough-or-too-harmful-268830

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dhritiraj Sengupta, Visiting Researcher, University of Southampton

The coastlines I trace resemble logos and luxury icons: palms, crescents, pixelated grids, surreal ornaments etched into shallow seas. The cartography is striking. The environmental consequences are very concerning.

There is an urgent need to evaluate the negative effects and risks associated with these artificial structures around the world, especially as climate change makes sea-level rise more extreme.

For ten years, I have been tracking changing coastlines and trying to map the spread of artificial coastal developments. But this is difficult for two reasons.

First, it’s tricky to define what counts as reclamation and what doesn’t. Does a polder (a piece of low-lying land reclaimed from the sea) belong in the same category as a luxury island? Do sea walls belong in the same category as “dredge-and-fill peninsulas” (land created by digging sand from a seabed or river banks that is used to fill an area of water).

Second, at a global scale, constantly updating maps with rapidly changing unnatural boundary designs is a never-ending task, which involves extracting data from satellite images.

The geometry of reclaimed sites and artificial shorelines can seem bizarre – ranging from the leafed fronds of Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China, to perfect crescents in Durrat Al Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, and straight-edged lattices in Lagos, Nigeria. In most cases, they are designed to look appealing without much consideration of ocean health or storm resilience.

Sharp angles interrupt longshore drift. Features such as headlands, jetties or bends in the coastline block or redirect the flow of sand moved by waves. This causes sand to build up in some areas while leaving other beaches with less sand, leading to erosion.

With artificial coastlines, these effects are amplified – a particular problem in places without the financial means to manage their beaches.

Grid-like canals slice tidal flats into disjointed basins. On maps, the lines are neat – but in reality, they produce messy hydrodynamics and fragmented ecosystems.

Such misplaced “neatness” can have far-reaching consequences. Reclamation destroys mangroves, muddy tidal flats and seagrass meadows – ecosystems which act both as valuable stores of atmospheric carbon and fish nurseries.

Dredging also stirs up sediment which clouds the water downstream, making it harder for coral reefs to survive. This compounds climate stress, acting as a threat multiplier. Most of the artificial coastlines aren’t as resilient to extreme weather as they could be.

Read more:
New islands are being built at sea – but they won’t help millions made homeless by sea-level rise

Human-made coastal changes disturb natural water flow, often leading to poor water quality, floods and erosion. Coastal communities can lose their fishing grounds and safe landing beaches. Without protective natural ecosystems acting as a buffer against extreme weather, often the poorest coastal communities bear the greatest impacts from coastal erosion and sea-level rise.

There’s also a carbon cost to this type of coastal development. Dredgers, quarrying, cement and machinery all stack up emissions. Add in the lost carbon storage from destroyed wetlands, and reclamation becomes a climate double blow.

How maps become bridges to action

Maps reveal where, when and how much development is occurring. They can become bridges to action if this research into shoreline change is combined with biodiversity surveys (to assess marine life), hydrodynamic modelling (changes to currents) and social impact assessments (how coastal communities are affected).

In my view, environmental impact assessments should look beyond short-term, single-project effects, and consider how multiple projects collectively affect ecosystems over time. Construction approvals should depend not only on each project’s immediate footprint, but on how it will perform across its entire lifetime – for example, how much flood risk it creates and how much carbon it emits or saves.

Using a mix of tools to engage diverse groups – including local communities, policymakers, scientists and educators – can strengthen understanding and action on coastal change. Examples include holding workshops on the interpretation of satellite-derived data and visualisations, creating interactive StoryMaps (digital storybooks using maps, pictures and text to explain a topic), as well as community-driven mapping.

Many coastal and fishing communities located around reclamation sites – who previously had direct access to the coast – are now calling to halt further reclamation. By documenting lost ecosystems, tracing flood pathways and highlighting human stories behind coastal change, we can better understand how vulnerable coastal communities are to land reclamation.

Some damage is irreversible. Natural coastlines are not just scenic – they are self-maintaining, shock-absorbing, carbon-storing infrastructure. A moratorium on new reclamation throughout the world is needed – and a pivot to restoration by rebuilding lost mangroves, protecting tidal creeks and removing “hard edges” where possible.

Mapping alone will not stop coastal development. But it can catalyse coalitions, inform policy, expose hidden costs and redirect finance. It can turn a line on a screen into a line in the sand.

I began my research by trying to define reclamation precisely enough to classify it. But it has revealed a more urgent task: to defend what remains of the natural coastline, and restore what we still can.

The coastline is not a canvas for our extravagant signatures. When protected, it is nature’s living margin which sustains us.

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Dhritiraj Sengupta receives funding from the Chinese Government Scholarship (CSC , 2016-2020) and from Leverhulme Trust Funding for the project on “Unnatural dynamics of flood deposits in built environments”, plus volunteers for International Geographical Union (https://igu-coast.org/steering-committee/) and is a fellow of the Future Earth Coast (https://www.futureearthcoasts.org/biography/dr-dhritiraj-sengupta/).

– ref. Maps reveal the greater risk to the world’s artificial coastlines from sea-level rise – https://theconversation.com/maps-reveal-the-greater-risk-to-the-worlds-artificial-coastlines-from-sea-level-rise-250299

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexandra Fanghanel, Associate Professor in Criminology, University of Greenwich

Rape, as a crime, is widely deplored. Society and media condemn rapists, and rape and other sexually-related crimes carry potentially heavy prison sentences when perpetrators are convicted. So why, given this apparent intolerance for rape, do criminologists like me (and many others) still say that we live in a “rape culture”?

Rape culture is a term used to describe societies that accept rape and sexual violence. It is defined as a “set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and support violence against women”. It is a society where violence against women is often seen as sexy and therefore ignored, accepted or dismissed as a joke.

In the UK, this manifests in several ways. We see rape culture in the normalisation of sexual violence in schools, in suggestions that victims “must share some of the blame” for their own rape, and in violence against women dismissed as “pranks” in family courts. It is also expressed in rape myths (such as “men can’t be raped”) and in victim-blaming (“she was asking for it because of how she was dressed”).

Rape culture normalises acts of sexual violence (against all genders) by allowing these acts to continue unchallenged. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2024, the police recorded 71,227 complaints of rape in England and Wales. Of these, 2.7% were charged, of which about half resulted in conviction.

In part, these low figures are because, in England and Wales, the Crown Prosecution Service will only prosecute an offender if they believe a case has a “realistic prospect of conviction”. Rape culture undermines that realistic prospect, because it influences how society and courts think about and respond to victims of rape.

Myths about how a victim “should” behave, whether they have any interest in unconventional sexual practices or are promiscuous, their age or what a perpetrator looks like, all inform these low conviction rates. And claims of how false rape accusations ruin lives mean there is a reluctance to label a man a rapist or sex offender, especially if he is popular or successful.

Rape culture is bad for everyone. It means victims of sexual violence of any gender are not taken seriously, and it denigrates people based on their sexuality. That is why it is necessary to challenge it wherever we can. Here are three ways you can fight rape culture in your own life:

1. Be an active bystander

Intervening in assault or harassment does not require you to be a vigilante, nor to go head-to-head with a perpetrator of sexual violence, which can be dangerous. Organisations like Right to Be have developed bystander programmes which help people intervene in sexist, bullying or abusive conduct in different ways.

Their “5 Ds” of intervention are:

• distract the victim with an unrelated conversation to interrupt the encounter;

• delegate: get someone (possibly someone with authority in the space, like a train guard) to help;

• document: film what is happening, if it is safe to do so;

• delay: seek the victim out afterwards to offer help or check in with them;

• direct: if it feels safe and you feel able to, intervene directly and tell the perpetrator what they are doing is not OK. Keep this short and, once you have intervened, turn your attention to the victim and their needs.

2. Make sex unexceptional

My research explores how the shame around sex in general is much of what sustains rape culture. Sex crimes, because of their association with shame and taboo, are sensationalised and more morally charged than other crimes.

In my forthcoming book, I suggest that taking some of the stigma away from sex, and approaching it as ordinary, could help undo some of the rape culture we live in.

When we moralise about sex, it leads to expectations and preconceptions about how sex crimes happen. We create or believe myths about what “real” rape looks like and how “real” victims and perpetrators behave.

We need a better, broader understanding of what sex is and how people have it, so we are better at telling the difference between consensual and non-consensual encounters. Sexual exceptionalism nurtures rape myths. For example, a victim with a history of sex work, or who has rape fantasies, or who is friends with their attacker, can still be raped. Taking the salaciousness out of sex helps us to think about scenarios like these more clearly.

Instead of being squeamish about sex or treating it as something sordid, we need to talk more about sex without shame. Sex crimes are dreadful, but unburdening them from this baggage will help tackle rape culture.

3. Educate without stigma

Studies of university-aged students show that many have a poor understanding of the complexity of consent. Many do not know that rape can take place within a partner relationship, or that “stealthing” (removing a condom during penetrative sex without letting the other person know) is a crime, or that men can be sexually assaulted.

Whether you are a teacher, parent or friend, it is important to have candid, non-sensational conversations about sex and sexual violence. Through sharing unstigmatised knowledge about sexual conduct, people can learn to identify rape myths, to understand why actions like staring or lewd comments are problems, to name sexual violence if it happens, and to express their feelings about it.

Rape culture is not about weak women and predatory men. It is not about “cultures who rape” and the rest of us who don’t. Calling out rape culture is about challenging our preconceived notions, confronting our sexual squeamishness, and fighting for sexual justice for everyone.

Alexandra Fanghanel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rape culture is a problem for everyone – here are three ways to tackle it – https://theconversation.com/rape-culture-is-a-problem-for-everyone-here-are-three-ways-to-tackle-it-263152

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures, Nottingham Trent University

Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories urgently recollects his literary legacy. It’s as though time is increasingly uncertain so the need to tell stories is great.

Its title, The Eleventh Hour, says as much, and the book succeeds Knife (2024), written about his attack on stage in 2022. The central story portrays students and writers in the libraries of English literary history. Two stories set in India consider the entangled states of faith and doubt. The final two tales are set in America, employing stylistic innovation to address grand questions about authenticity, censorship and fraud.

The story In the South, first published in US magazine The New Yorker, questions the logic of death and ageing. Written after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami estimated to have killed 250,000 people, it introduces two elderly neighbours and their encounters with relatives and neighbours.

Typically Rushdie in structural and narrative prowess, it portrays the astounding everyday. Recalling stories in his earlier collection East, West (1995), it is a close character study interrogating the minute but asking huge questions.

Nicknamed Junior and Senior, the neighbours’ only similarity beyond their interdependence is a shared (undisclosed) first name. While Junior is hopeful and serene, Senior is melancholy and cynical. And though Senior has a vast, attentive, unwanted family, Junior is alone.

A phrase in this story gives the collection its title, and alerts us to the book’s preoccupation with older age. The story comes to terms with death, however unfathomable, by understanding it as an “adjacent verandah” to life.

Where to start with the collection

For readers new to Rushdie, The Musician of Kahani is the story to read first. Ranging over several decades, its young female protagonist possesses magical talents comparable with the protagonist of Midnight’s Children (2008), Saleem Sinai. This was the book that cemented Rushdie as a globally significant author.

The Musician of Kahani indulges in renaming – one of Rushdie’s preoccupations. Mumbai becomes Kahani (meaning story) and its streets are renamed, enjoyably, after literature: William Shakespeare Bunder, Dahl Market, Petit Prince Parade. Events pivotal to the plot are handled out of sequence, presented like delightful gossip and we understand plot is incidental: storytelling is what matters.

The third story in the collection, Late, is set in an Oxbridge college. Simon Merlyn (S.M.) Arthur is the “late” protagonist of the title. The honorary college fellow and renowned novelist of a single book, he wakes to find himself unexpectedly dead at 61. Unmoved, he ponders the nature of the mind and body, life, death and the afterlife.

The story assembles cliches of England: Oxbridge, the second world war, contingent multiculturalism, colonialism’s falsely genteel face and the weather. However, it is also about English literature, myth and legend, and rejuvenation. Set “50-something” years ago, it reveals an author prevented from achieving his potential.

Rosa, an undergraduate from India entrusted to organise S.M’s papers, can communicate with his ghost, and uncovers sadness and betrayal. Rosa is a version of Rushdie, perhaps: the story is peppered with anecdotes from his life, including advertising slogans (Rushdie was an advertising copywriter famous for “Naughty But Nice”). Rosa also stumbles upon transformative archival materials. In Rushdie’s own experience, these materials inspired his novel The Satanic Verses (1988).

The two final stories, Oklahoma and The Old Man in the Piazza, are set in the US and both are experimental, particularly Oklahoma.

Oklahoma is an unedited posthumous autofictional manuscript and a literary conversation between author M.A. and an acclaimed writer affectionately named Uncle K. What begins as an adventure in literary benefaction descends into uncertainty, deception and obsession.

M.A. is encouraged to complete the story of Kafka’s Karl Rossmann in Amerika (1927), who never attained fulfilment since he failed to reach Oklahoma. Instead, he presents manuscripts of uncertain authorship, including an 1819 tale of murals depicting anguish and despair in response to corruption, violence and ignorance sanctioned by controlling storytelling. These paintings also target old age, represented as death, rage, insanity, jealousy and hate.

The experimental story ponders obsession, incompleteness and falsehood as more of Rushdie’s preoccupations emerge: The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, disappearance, global relocation.

While In the South makes peace with death as a facet of life, and Late shakes off the torment of life’s regrets, secrets and betrayals for a fruitful afterlife, Oklahoma is bleaker. Here, life is incoherent, and truth is only achieved by death.

The collection begins and ends with old men whose bodies are frail and inflexible. The Old Man in the Piazza is the final story, beginning with an elderly man who sits watching impassioned and aggressive conversations around him. In this fable about the folly of repression, the beauty and poetry of language is forgotten in favour of thumbs-up or down moralising.

The stories in The Eleventh Hour tell Rushdie’s life story in metaphorical glimpses. This may be better received than his memoir, Joseph Anton (2012), which was described by reviewers as too long and too focused on celebrity. These stories convey Rushdie’s literary life, and through them we are reminded of what has been termed “his brilliant early phase”, a phase that, as these stories show, is rarely disturbed.

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Jenni Ramone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie writes like he’s running out of time – https://theconversation.com/in-the-eleventh-hour-salman-rushdie-writes-like-hes-running-out-of-time-268828

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Walker, Senior Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading Austen researchers. Along the way we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in.

As well as a sharp eye and an even sharper wit, Jane Austen was also, at times, in possession of a sharp tongue.

The burning of most of Austen’s letters by her sister Cassandra after her death has long been considered an unforgiveable act of literary vandalism. We know from her novels and the letters that did survive, that Austen did not suffer fools. She mercilessly exposed idiots, sycophants and narcissists to most enjoyable and satisfying effect. These letters probably contained evidence of Austen at her most shocking, for even the loftiest minds cannot fail to be entertained by a delicious piece of neighbourly tittle-tattle.

At a time when women were still considered chattels with very little agency, two pastimes could provide great relief from the interminable boredom that threatened to thwart an agile young mind: walking and gossip. Preferably at the same time. Or at the very least over a nice cup of tea sipped daintily from bone china in the presence of buns as large as one’s face.

Gossip in the world of Jane Austen served several important functions: entertainment, intel, communication, miscommunication and control. As reputations were fiercely guarded, one piece of misdirected or unfounded gossip could leave a young woman’s honour in tatters. Deployed strategically, that was often precisely the point.

Gossip is a subject which Austen explores in all these forms in her first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Published in 1811, it follows the lives of two very different sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they navigate the vagaries of love and romance in reduced circumstances after the death of their father.

In the first episode of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, Jane Wright visits Sally Lunn’s tearoom in Bath – where Austen herself often took tea – with Andrew McInnes of Edge Hill University, whose work examines the notion of the “Romantic ridiculous”.

Over plates of large brioche buns smothered with cinnamon butter, McInnes is here to help us understand Austen’s relationship with gossip. “Taking tea was one of the main ways women could get together and talk privately,” he explains. “And though Jane had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, she probably came here most with [her sister] Cassandra.”

In Sense and Sensibility, there’s a sense that Austen both despised and enjoyed gossip. “There is undoubtedly a double edge to Jane’s writing,” says McInnes, “in that she does say some of these gossiping characters are ridiculous, silly and pathetic. But a lot of the fun and amusement and comedy comes from those same characters gossiping and spreading the news and driving the plot forward.”

Later on in the episode, Anna Walker take a deeper dive into the subject of gossip in Sense and Sensibility with two more Austen experts. Lucy Thompson is a lecturer in 19th-century literature at Aberystwyth University, whose work examines how surveillance played out during the Austen period. Joining her around the table is Katie Halsey, professor of English studies at the University of Stirling, where she researches Jane Austen and the history of reading.

As Halsey explains, there are “lots of different roles for gossip in the book … Sometimes Jane uses it to suggest that a character a bad person. Sometimes it’s used to carry the plot. Sometimes it’s used to misdirect and point us in the wrong direction. It’s very often used for comic effect.”

But Halsey also sees an undeniable “dark edge” to the gossip in the novel. Being the subject of gossip, as Austen well knew, could “damage your marital prospects and also leave you ostracised from society,” Thompson explains.

Listen to episode 1 of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re craving more Austen, check out our Jane Austen 250 page for more expert articles celebrating the anniversary.

Disclosure statement: Andrew McInnes, Lucy Thompson and Katie Halsey do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

– ref. Jane Austen’s world ran on gossip – and she revelled in it – https://theconversation.com/jane-austens-world-ran-on-gossip-and-she-revelled-in-it-268510