Jane Austen is most famous for her swooning romances like Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, but her novels subtly explore the lives of those existing outside societal expectations—spinsters like Emma’s Miss Bates, rebellious teenagers like Lydia Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), and the curiously ambiguous relationships between women throughout her writing. Sophie Gee from the podcast, Secret Life of Books, will be joined by Amanda Hooton to examine how Austen’s nuanced portrayal of non-conforming characters resonates with contemporary discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity. By exploring these often-overlooked figures, we discover an Austen whose social insight extends far beyond conventional romance, offering surprising relevance to today's conversations about queerness, aging, and hormonal transitions in women’s lives. Join us for this anniversary edition, as we acknowledge 250 years since Jane Austen's birth.  

Sophie Gee is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, where she’s engaged in the public value of the humanities. She’s also Professor of English at Princeton University. She’s the author of scholarly monographs about the rise of the novel and the history of waste in the eighteenth century, as well as a historical novel, The Scandal of the Season, rewriting Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” as a comedy of manners, which was widely translated and named as a best book of the year in the Washington Post and the Economist. She’s written regularly for many publications including The New York Times, the TLS, the Washington Post and The Sydney Morning Herald. She’s held fellowships at Yale and UCLA and her new work is on the value and importance of public humanities. Sophie is a co-creator of The Secret Life of Books podcast.

Amanda Hooton is a senior writer with Good Weekend Magazine, with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She is a Walkley and Kennedy Award winner, as well as a British Press Award winner, and a Scottish Press Award winner. She has written for The London Daily Telegraph, the Times, and The New York Times. Her Jane Austen dating guidebook, Finding Mr Darcy, was published in 2012.