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The Worm Hole Podcast Episode 107: Jessica Bull (Miss Austen Investigates)

Charlie and Jessica Bull (Miss Austen Investigates) discuss Jane Austen! The mysteries in her books, what and how she read, her likely views on slavery, her forgotten brother, the proposals of marriage she received (there were many!), and her life in her birthplace of Steventon.

General references:
Charlie said she’d find info on the yew tree, here’s Jessica Bull’s Instagram reel on St Nicholas’ Church

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries Of Udolpho
Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote
Claire Tomalin: Jane Austen: A Life
Daniel Livesay: Children Of Uncertain Fortune
Deirdre Le Faye (ed.) Jane Austen’s Letters
Frances Burney: Camilla
Frances Burney: Cecelia
James Edward Austen-Leigh: A Memoir Of Jane Austen
Jane Austen: Sense And Sensibility
Jane Austen: Pride And Prejudice
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen: Sanditon
Jessica Bull: Miss Austen Investigates (The Hapless Milliner)
Jessica Bull: Miss Austen Investigates: A Fortune Most Fatal
Lucy Worsley: Jane Austen At Home
Henry James: Tom Jones
Margaret Edgeworth: Belinda
Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk
PD James: Death Comes To Pemberley

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 29th April 2024; published 14th October 2024

Where to find Jessica online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:35 Jessica’s love of and study of Jane Austen
05:30 Expanding on Jessica’s statement that a lot of Austen involves mystery
10:45 Were you ever worried about how people might view your Jane Austen, her silliness?
17:15 The importance of including, in the novel, what Jane Austen was reading
21:11 Where Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet, comes into it, and we begin to discuss Austen’s views of slavery and abolition, and Jessica’s response to such
27:04 The price of books in those days!
28:51 We discuss a ton about Steventon, Austen’s birth place – Jessica’s recreation of the house and our own visits to the location
32:57 Talking about the other family members, including Anna and, particularly, George and what we know about him
39:34 About the people Jessica had to cut from the book and how she’s going to go forward in terms of including people later in the series
41:52 All about Jessica’s fictional letters and the allusions to the real ones
45:22 What Jessica believes about Austen and Tom Lefroy’s relationship and Austen’s love live in general
49:53 Changing real events to suit the novel, as well as Austen’s agency, and locations
53:20 Jessica’s time in Hampshire, seeing Chawton and how it inspired her
54:57 About book 2, A Fortune Most Fatal, and the fraudster Princess Caraboo
58:04 Brief notes on how many books may be in the series

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 107. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Jessica Bull to talk about her frankly awesome, almost fictional study of Jane Austen’s life and works, with crime. It’s called Miss Austen Investigates, which in the US has ‘The Hapless Milliner’ added to its title. Jane Austen lives in Steventon, Hampshire. She’s happily working on some novels, enjoying life with her family and friends, and has the start of a romance going with one Tom Lefroy. But one day, on returning to the ball after having spent time with Tom, she finds the company in silence – a woman has been murdered. The magistrate starts his work but Jane feels he’s completely missing some obvious clues and she goes about trying to solve the crime herself. She’s got many people to investigate, a sister to keep up a correspondence with, and she’s still awaiting a proposal from Tom. She’s convincing few, embarrassing many, but she knows that she can do the job. Hello Jessica!

Jessica: Hello Charlie! And thank you for the most amazing intro. That was awesome.

Charlie: You are very welcome [Jessica chuckles]. It’s probably obvious I absolutely loved your book.

Jessica: Oh, it’s so wonderful to hear.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s going to be one of my favourites, I think. I’m really looking forward to the rest of them. I’ll ask you about that later! So, yeah, I want to ask you about the very, very start of this book, the very first inspiration, if you will?

Jessica: Such a hard question! So, obviously, I’m a huge Jane Austen fan, and that’s going back all the way to 1995. Bit of starstruck moment there when Colin Firth walked out of the lake [Charlie chuckles] in the 1995 Pride And Prejudice, set me up for a life of studying classic literature, and it went on from there. But then I think the seed for this book really was sown in 2020. So, like a lot of people, I found the pandemic really difficult and I needed to turn to something for comfort. And my comfort has always been Jane Austen. Like a lot of people, I just find so much joy in her work and it really helps me in times of difficulty. But in 2020, I started doing something different than just enjoying her work and watching the adaptations – I started really studying her life. And it was realising how hard she’d fought to write her novels that made me start writing fiction again myself. And looking at the various portrayals of her – and I’m thinking about the two big films in particular – I just really felt that I hadn’t seen Jane Austen as I knew her represented, so I really enjoyed them, but I felt like neither of them really captured the witty, irreverent woman that I felt that she was. So then I had the terrible thought of, ‘you’re a writer, Jess, why don’t you try and capture her?’ [Charlie chuckles.] So I sat on that for a little while, thinking about how I would do it, because to tell her life in a straight biographical way, I think it would be quite tempting to lean on the tragic side of it, and I didn’t want that, I wanted her resilience and her joy to shine through. And then I basically had the realisation to tie it with my other love, which is crime fiction – so I’m a huge crime fiction fan – and I thought about the fact that all of Jane Austen’s works are essentially mysteries in which the heroine has to discover the true characters of everyone around her, especially the hero. So they work in a very similar way to a murder mystery. Yeah. So then I thought, well, how about I marry them together? Is that a ridiculous idea? Can I use the murder mystery format to stand as an allegory for all the challenges that Jane overcame to write her books? And I did think it was a bit silly to begin with, but it just wouldn’t leave me alone. She wouldn’t leave me alone. Once I had the idea for that first scene at the ball, I just had my Jane’s voice in my ear, egging me on to go deeper, work harder, and try and find a way that I could make it work.

Charlie: I know you’ve got lots of novels in the drawer as such, but certainly this feels like the book that is you, effectively, you as a writer. Yeah, it’s really well done. And actually, you said something about how a lot of Jane Austen involves mystery, which I find fascinating to hear you say that. I mean, can you expand on this a bit more? [Jessica: Yes!] The fact that she’s got mysteries to solve?

Jessica: Absolutely. So Northanger Abbey was the first Jane Austen that I ever read. So after I watched that 1995, Pride And Prejudice, I went to school the next day and started badgering my English teacher as to why aren’t we studying this? And he sent me off to the library to read Northanger Abbey, to borrow Northanger Abbey. And if you think about Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland is obsessed with the gothic, and the gothic are the true crime of the regency, really, they’re a way that women could explore the darker side of life and the terrible things that might happen to them in a safe way. And Catherine gets so carried away with that principle that she accuses General Tilney of murdering his wife. She’s on to something – he is a monster. I mean, only a monster could throw young Catherine out of his house at very little notice, with no money, just because she’s not as rich as he made the mistake of thinking she was. So her heart’s in the right place, her intuition is really working. And so she goes around looking for clues in exactly the same way that an amateur sleuth does. So you think about, she wanders the halls of Northanger Abbey, she breaks into Mr Tilney’s mum’s room, and she goes looking in that chest for the evidence that my prove that General Tilney is a murderer. And all she can find is a laundry list, because it’s wonderful Jane at her best, where she sets us up for this horrible discovery and then comes up with something as prosaic as a laundry list. So there’s that sleuthing element. And then you also compare that to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride And Prejudice, where she’s got two very different accounts of Mr Darcy. So she’s got the one for Mr Wickham, who’s making himself the victim, and she’s got Mr Darcy’s account of himself when he writes her that letter. And she’s constantly trying to judge and look for the veracity in each of their statements. And she even, again, goes off on a sleuthing journey where she consults the witnesses who saw these two men grow up together, who might know. So think about her at Pemberley questioning the housekeeper. And that’s when her opinion of Mr Darcy really changes, because she gets his good character verified by what she believes is an expert witness. Because who knows more about the upper class than their servants? They see them. They see them in all their warts and all. So, yeah, there is that mystery there. And I think it’s not just me who’s led to look at that side of Jane Austen, because there’s a psychological aspects of her characters always questioning people, but there’s also the law playing a huge part of all of her novels. I think she’s really interested in the way that the law systematically disadvantages women. And the other big book that had a huge impression on me was PD James’ Death Comes To Pemberley. I remember being really excited when that book came out, because PD James was a crime writer at the top of her game, and overnight she legitimised Austen-adjacent fiction with the publication of that novel, to say, you can write in this tradition and have it taken seriously as a piece of fiction in its own right.

Charlie: Well, it’s been really fascinating to hear you talking about this. I mean, I think when I next read Pride And Prejudice – I keep meaning to reread it – I’m going to have to think about it through what you’re saying, and think about it through that interpretation, because, yeah, it’s just something that hasn’t really occurred to me. I know that people have written crime about, like you said, about Death Comes To Pemberley, but thinking about it in the way that you’ve been telling us is very interesting.

Jessica: Well, I think Pride And Prejudice in particular, the whole plot of that novel turns on the fact that the Bennet women can’t inherit Pemberley. So Mr Collins is going to inherit it, and he’s such a wonderful, satirical, awful character. I mean, she’s going out of her way to show us that he has no more right to Longbourne, he’s not going to be a better master, he is no more deserving, than even the silliest of Mr Bennet’s daughters. So, yeah, that way that the law is disadvantaged them, and then also, when you think about the crimes in that novel, that we would consider crimes today that weren’t crimes of the time – so you think about Wickham effectively grooming and abducting 15-year-old Lydia, we would consider that a sex crime today. But obviously, in the Georgian era, the law is all based around property and around protecting a man’s right to property. And women are property, really, in law. So the only way that you can prosecute a man for abducting a 15-year-old woman would be if she was an heiress, because it’s the money that matters, not necessarily the woman. And I think Austen herself is really, really interested in that. So, I mean, I enjoy the romance, I enjoy the glamour of the Hollywood productions, but I can’t help being drawn to the darker side of what she’s trying to show us.

Charlie: Well, you said romance – I’m definitely going to ask about your addition of… well, not addition in literally, you’ve based it on fact, but that’s something that really drew me to your book, so I am going to be asking about that later. Pride And Prejudice and Northanger Abbey are my favourites, definitely. And I do absolutely love Northanger Abbey, so that aspect of it – and I know you’ve got, like you were saying about Catherine Morland’s accusation earlier, and you’ve got something that comes close to that in your book from Jane, [Jessica laughs] which was great, I love the comparisons, effectively, in that. But I suppose, on that, were you ever worried that people might think badly of your creation of Jane Austen in the way that she goes about things, in the way that she’s more like Catherine Morland, than maybe some people might think otherwise?

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, I knew at the time – it took me a long time to develop the courage to do it. So I sat on the idea for a couple of years, and the first attempt at this, I wrote a historical novel where I had based the character on Jane Austen, but I hadn’t come out and said that, and I showed it to my writing group, and they’d say things like, ‘oh, she’s very Lizzie Bennet, isn’t she?’ [Charlie laughs.] So I knew it was working, and then I decided, ‘okay, I’m really gonna have to go all in and make this her’. So, yeah, I was worried, because I’m a massive Jane Austen fan myself, and I know that anybody who reads Jane Austen, she speaks to your heart, so you’ll have your own perception of what you think she is and is not. And even though I’ve enjoyed other portrayals of her, as I’ve said, they haven’t quite felt like my Jane. But I think what I really wanted to do was to move away from representing her as the omniscient fairy godmother – wise, mature, dry, spinsterish, lonely, sad, Jane – and try and figure out what she might have been like as a young woman. So looking particularly at who comes across to me when I read her Juvenilia, and to look at her as human, as fallible, to be able to confront her with all the questions that I wanted to ask her and all the criticisms that people have thrown at her over the years and to see how she would react to those, and also to put her in the same setting as one of her heroines. So the book isn’t a retelling, but each of these stories will look at the same themes as Austen’s own books. And this is very much my tribute to Northanger Abbey. So she is very much inspired by Catherine in this book and the faults that Catherine has in her readiness to make accusations, but also in her instincts being actually quite on the money- she knows when people are hiding things from her, and she’s so committed to finding out the truth that she doesn’t mind facing a few mortifications along the way.

Charlie: You said something interesting there, your questions that you had for Jane Austen, your book is in part a response to that, which is a fascinating thing to think about, yeah.

Jessica: Yeah. I went and did English at uni after that, English A level, and I never got the chance to study Jane Austen. I think maybe that worked out well for me because I never got her out of my system. So I would always gravitate towards articles about her work, I think because that itch that never got scratched. And I think particularly for me, I come from a very normal working class family in London, and for a long, long time I worried about whether Jane Austen was really for me. Because I remember that part in Pride And Prejudice where Lady Catherine and Elizabeth are having this argument about if she’s good enough for Darcy. And Elizabeth’s great response is, ‘he’s a gentleman and I’m a gentleman’s daughter. So far we are equals’. And I just thought, ‘but what if I’m not? [Chuckles] What if I’m not a gentleman’s daughter in the language of Jane Austen? Does that mean I don’t deserve Darcy? I mean, like, fine, I’ll have Robert Martin [both laugh]. But what are you saying there, Jane? Your classism is showing’. Because she’s so ahead of her time, that we sometimes put her on a pedestal and make her a saint and expect her to be perfect, but she is a woman of her time. So that whole class thing really confused me for a while, I didn’t know if I was allowed to claim her. But then I’ve had my own experiences with class: so I got a bursary to go to private school, I went to Bristol University, which was full of lots of very, very privileged people, and it left me quite sensitive and fascinated, and a little bit obsessed with class. But who else could that describe, really? [Laughs.] That’s probably part of why I love Jane Austen so much. So, yeah, I wanted to hit her over the head with, ‘why didn’t you write about the servants, Jane?’ And the more sensitive things now that come across to us as quite glib, so, for example, in Emma, when she compares the business of being a governess to the slave trade, she’s so great at writing about people who feel excluded and oppressed by the society around them, that I think that anybody who’s ever felt that way can find a home in Jane Austen. But I did want to prod her with all those things of, ‘where are the servants’ inner lives, Jane? And is that comparison appropriate? And why didn’t you write about the war, Jane?’ And yada, yada, yada. So, yeah, it was a great excuse for me to spend time with my heroine.

Charlie: Well, while I was reading this, I was thinking Jane Austen would have loved this.

Jessica: I do sometimes have nightmares about what Jane Austen would think about this [both laugh].

Charlie: No, I mean, I don’t know anywhere… I know that I don’t know anywhere near as much as you do, for example, I haven’t had read the biographies, and I know you have – I’ve got her book of letters, which I love, but yeah, I don’t know much. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that, yeah, she would absolutely love your book.

Jessica: Well, my guiding principle was that she wrote Northanger Abbey as an homage to the gothic authors who she really, really admired. So that was her love letter to the gothic and a way of joining in with a tradition, but making something completely her own. So that was what I was trying to do. So it’s not a pastiche, I’m not trying to fool you into thinking you’re reading Jane Austen, I’m not trying to do the same thing as her. I’m not trying to be her because that would be foolish. But it’s my tribute to her, it’s my homage to Austen.

Charlie: Yeah. You’ve written a love letter slash parody of a love letter slash parody [Jessica laughs]. It’s brilliant, it’s great.

Jessica: It’s very meta [both laugh].

Charlie: So, yeah. Gosh, where do I go here? Actually, I would like to ask more about, Northanger and the gothic novels because something that I personally love, I love finding out about what Austen read herself.

Jessica: Yeah.

Charlie: And you’ve got this in spades, particularly with the circulating library. You’ve got her going in and talking about the books and also she does this throughout the book anyway, because she’s a reader and she loves reading, but you’ve got her individual books; I think I’ve noted down you included books that inspired Northanger. She talks about The Mysteries Of Udolphu [Jessica: yeah] – I don’t know if I pronounced that right, I’ve never said that before [Jessica chuckles] – and The Monk. I was waiting for a mention of The Female Quixote, but [laughs; Jessica says ‘oh!’ and laughs too]. But no, it’s absolutely wonderful. So I suppose I just want to ask you about including Jane Austen’s reading, if that’s okay, and the importance to that, to the book and to you?

Jessica: Yeah. Well, the big inspiration for this book, when I was trying to get into her inner life and to catch her at her most unguarded was looking at her juvenilia that I’ve already mentioned, and also her letters to Cassandra. So we estimate that she wrote about 3000 letters during her lifetime, but Cassandra burnt most of them in order to protect her reputation, so we’ve only got about 161. So I really went deep into those letters. There’s a fantastic edition by Deirdre Le Faye. It’s full of footnotes, and you can go off on the footnotes and really understand what they’re talking about when they’re talking to each other. And a lot of the things that she talks about to Cassandra are books, are the books that they’re reading. She makes jokes and they’re veiled references to the books. So the first time that she meets Tom Lefroy, for example, she jokes about his terrible white coat. And that is a reference to Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, which is the big novel that plays a big part throughout this novel, where Jane and Tom are basically flirting with each other using this novel. One of the many things that is remarkable about her is that she overcame not having much of a formal education, so she was finished with all her formal schooling by the time she was eleven or twelve. But she made up for that by reading widely. So you’ve already mentioned the circulating libraries; so she had her father’s collection of about 500 books. And when the family moved out of Steventon and those books were sold, that’s one of the things that comes through in the letters that she’s devastated to be leaving her home, and a big symbol of that is she’s devastated that her father’s library has been broken up and sold off. And she makes up for that for the rest of her life by joining the circulating libraries and book societies wherever she goes. So what she read played such a part in how she lived her life. And telling Cassandra that she’s joking about Tom Jones with Tom Lefroy is basically a way of saying to Cassandra, ‘I like him because he gets this joke, he’s in on my, imaginary world’. And also, Tom Jones is quite a raunchy novel, so for a young lady to be joking about it with a young man, she’s saying, ‘this is how close we are’. So, yeah, the books that she read played such an enormous part in her imagination, and I think she’s such a generous writer as well. So in Northanger Abbey in particular, she gives a great role call of all the women writers that she admired, which is not something that women writers did at the time they tended to – even ones that she admired, like Frances Burney – if they mentioned other writers at all, they’d mention male writers because they wanted to claim that legitimacy. That’s just another reason, the way I fell in love with Jane Austen was that she was so proud of her genre and of her sisterhood of female writers.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s very cool. And I suppose the way to say it is your book is full of Easter eggs, I think, definitely for Jane Austen fans [Jessica chuckles]. I could have annotated your book, like, so much [Jessica laughs]. I don’t want to. I don’t want to write on it and spoil it, because I think I’m probably going to reread it at some point, yeah, I need to keep it nice. Two more things, on this particular subject. It seemed to me – correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s just something I’d like to hear how you went about it – you have your fictional victim of the crime, she is reading, I believe it’s pronounced ‘Cooper’, written, ‘Cowper’.

Jessica: Yes [laughs].

Charlie: Was this your interpretation or look at how Jane Austen may have found her a favourite poet?

Jessica: Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Because Cowper’s her favourite poet and she quotes him, I think, in four of the six novels, he’s quoted. And he’s a really interesting poet for her to choose to quote because he was quite radical for the day. So he was a very loud and proud abolitionist, so he wrote poems that really challenge the status quo and, that called for the abolition of slavery. And so by including him in her novels, I think that Austen is really nailing her colours to the mast there in her disapproval and call for the abolition of the slave trade. So, yeah, I was trying to answer those questions, as I said, that I felt I would love to ask her about. And Cowper is one of those things that critics would love to ask her about. And they argue did she just like his poetry or is it a political statement? And that was my way of saying ‘yes, it was a conscious choice’. Douglas, one of the characters in the novel, who is the son of a plantation owner, he reads that poem out as a way to express his sentiments about that. And that’s what I felt Jane Austen is doing in her books, being as bold as she possibly can be at that time.

Charlie: That’s very interesting. And actually, I mean, not that you need to explain why you’ve a got mixed race character in your books at all, but was this why you included Douglas, to aid that look at Austen’s view of slavery?

Jessica: Well, I think that all the wealth and the privilege of the Georgian era was built directly off of the exploitation and enslavement of millions of African people. So to write a book that explores and celebrates that time without making some reference to that, I feel for me, as a white woman, would be incredibly callous and glib. So I think it is really important to reference and balance that story with, ‘yeah, it’s lovely, the fashions are lovely, but also there’s real suffering’. And this experience of the high life of the regency was limited to a top 1% of people, and most people living in that time wouldn’t have recognised that existence. So, yeah, I think if you’re going to tell that story, it’s really important to represent both sides of it. Because the time that this novel is set, two of Jane’s brothers, Frank and Charles, who are in the navy, are in the Caribbean, fighting. And then Cassandra’s fiancé, Tom, is also on his way to the Caribbean fighting. We think about England being diverse as a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s not at all. I mean, the colonial Britain was so linked to Africa and the Caribbean that people were coming and going all the time. And wherever British men went, they had relationships and they had children. They would leave some of those children property. So there’s a history book that I read that looked really closely at Douglas’s circumstances, I think it’s Daniel Livesay, and it’s called Children Of Uncertain Fortune, but it basically traced the family relationships in the Caribbean at this time by looking at the wills in Jamaica and something like 10 to 15% of wills in Jamaica from white British men who would go over there and earn lots of money, would leave something to a mixed race child. And also Jane Austen included that in her novel. So Sanditon – she’s got her character of Miss Lamb, who’s the wealthiest woman in Sanditon, who is the daughter of somebody who’s made their money in the Caribbean, out of those plantations. So it felt entirely in keeping for me and felt like something that I really needed to do in order to be honest about the time and show it in its glory and the harsh, horrible realities of the exploitation that enabled that wealth and fortune.

Charlie: You’ve just said Sanditon, while you were talking, I was thinking, obviously, we don’t have tonnes of novels from Austen because she died young [Jessica: yeah], and you always think what else could she have written? [Jessica: yeah!] But given what you said, there about Sanditon – we’ve no idea what she could have written and she could have written something… I mean, I know, and I think it’s in Northanger Abbey, she’s got that line, what is it? Where Catherine’s saying about amazing books, it’s something like ‘Camilla, Cecilia and Belinda’.

Jessica: Yes.

Charlie: And I know that Belinda – the censored version I know, that I read, doesn’t include it so much because obviously it’s censored, ‘oh, my goodness! Not a topic to talk about’ – but the original one, which I’m guessing is the one that Jane Austen read, had a romance between a black person, I think, and a white person, or… I think it was a mixed race relationship. So that also gives across her views.

Jessica: Yeah. Those relationships and diverse characters were so predominant in regency Britain that it was a trope. Like, it wasn’t unusual to find a black person in a regency novel. So, thinking of all that as ‘new’ or ‘woke’ is rubbish [laughs]. It was all there, it’s all been done before [chuckles].

Charlie: Yeah. I have to agree with you, I think it’s wonderful that we’re getting all this history back.

Jessica: Yeah.

Charlie: There was something that you said, and I’ll ask you quickly and then we’ll move on. You said something like, in regards to Mr Austen’s library being sold because it had to because they moved to, Bath, I think it was.

Jessica: Yeah.

Charlie: Books were the equivalent of 300 American dollars in those days?

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve read that up to $500. Yeah. So they weren’t something that was achievable for most people to have. So for him to have 500 books, that’s a real solid investment. Yeah. Which is why the circulating libraries – the name is really confusing because it’s the books that circulate, not the library itself. It’s not a mobile library. The books circulate as opposed to a private library, where all the books stay in place. And then the book societies where basically groups of people who would club together and buy something, and buy some books and then share them amongst themselves. Buying novels wasn’t achievable for most people, so people read other kinds of literature that was more achievable, like the chapbooks. So the little pamphlets that you could buy on the streets. And people would write literature particularly for the working classes, that was put into that format, but then it often would have, like, a really preachy tone to it. So chapbooks that basically taught you how to lead a subservient life and accept your circumstances, ‘don’t try and expect anything better and be a good Christian and be a good woman, be dutiful’, yadda, yadda, yadda. So, yeah, I think that was what she was writing against. And it was a real privilege to be able to borrow books and read books.

Charlie: I know that many people didn’t read, didn’t have the books, but, yeah, finding out that cost was, yeah, quite something.

Jessica: Yeah. Just shows you how important libraries are.

Charlie: Yeah! Definitely. Something that I really liked and I think maybe the first thing that I liked about your book as I was reading it was your recreation of Steventon, particularly the rectory, because I saw your Instagram on it, and for some reason I had got it in my head that Steventon was in Kent, and I thought, ‘oh, well, I’ll go and see it one day’ and I found out from your Instagram that it’s just down the road from me. So I went and saw it [both laugh]. So, yes, thanks to your Instagram, I now know the place myself [Jessica chuckles]. But, yeah, Steventon rectory doesn’t exist itself. There’s just a field now. But if I read correctly, something like, there was some… an archaeological dig or something [Jessica: yes] in 2011. I just wanted to ask you, how you came to create the house yourself, if you were informed by the archaeology, et cetera?

Jessica: Yeah. So Jane Austen does have really strong ties to Kent, so you’re not totally wrong there. So her family are from Kent, and Neddy the wealthy brother went to live in Kent. So I looked at a lot of different biographies of Jane Austen. So the big ones are like Lucy Worsley, Claire Tomalin, Deirdre Le Faye, who I’ve already mentioned. A long while after Jane Austen died, her nephew, who was her elder brother James’s son, realised that there was this enormous interest in her – it wasn’t going away – in the Victorian era. And so he went around the family and asked everyone to try and put their memories of Austen down on paper and to give him all of the letters that they had left over. So her niece, Anna – Anna, who’s the baby in my novel – she drew a picture of the rectory as she remembered it as a child. So I have that to go on, and I have a few descriptions to go on. Mr Austen was very good at recording all of his purchases. So I have descriptions of that in terms of, like, what prints they had, the curtains, the bed sheets, the type of furniture. So, yeah, it was a bit of detective work in itself, really; all of those sources and try and build up what I thought their home might have been like. And obviously, it’s much more modest than you might assume after watching a glossy Hollywood adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, because the characters that she wrote about were always slightly above, slightly wealthier than her in real life.

Charlie: You’re collecting enough information for your own biography of Jane Austen at this point. My goodness.

Jessica: Yeah [chuckles]. But you can go to – the one place that you can go to, did you go to it? Up to the church at the top of the [Charlie: St. Nicholas’?] field at Steventon? St Nicholas, yeah.

Charlie: Yep.

Jessica: So you can go to the church and there’s a scene in the novel where Jane Austen hides – where my Jane – hides under a tree in order to watch the victim’s funeral because she can’t go to it, because women didn’t go to funerals in those days. And that was very much inspired by Cassandra’s letter where she describes not being able to go to Jane’s funeral. Her last ever sight of her sister is watching her brothers take her away in a coffin along the street in Winchester to be buried. And that always really struck me. Cassandra was devoted to her. They lived a little bit like man and wife, really, in that Cassandra took on all the household duties to enable Jane to write and was the closest person to her and her confidant and her co-creator in lots of ways, and even so, she couldn’t go to her funeral because that’s simply what women didn’t do, that thing. I was thinking about how restrained my Jane would have been in investigating this crime and even to the fact that she couldn’t go to the funeral to see who the mourners were and question them. So instead she hides under a tree, a big yew tree that’s outside St Nicholas Church. And that yew tree was real, I’d read about it, because her father used to hide the key in the yew tree. And when I went to Steventon, I found it and I climbed in the tree to see if it would check out. So I got under the branches of the tree and I could see the cemetery, I could see the graveyard, and it all checked out. And I was so excited that I could do that.

Charlie: I’m going to go and have to look for this tree myself now. Is it in front of the church?

Jessica: Yeah, it’s just in front to the left [Charlie: yeah], you can’t miss it. Enormous.

Charlie: I think I know which one you mean. I’ll find a picture or something for you listeners and then you can see as well [Jessica chuckles]. With location – it was also, for me, location and family, definitely. I mean, I love how you’ve written. I mean, you said Anna. I mean, Anna – I don’t think she has a word to say, ’cause she’s a baby and she’s great [Jessica laughs]. You’ve got Mrs Austin and Anna, and they’re a great little team for your book.

Jessica: I deliberately made Anna younger, actually, for two reasons. So she would have been about three or four, but I made her about 18 months for two reasons. One, because I’ve got really strong memories of my own daughters at that age. They were just so adorable at that age. And two, because I couldn’t be bothered to give her any lines [both laugh]. So I didn’t want her to be. I didn’t want her to be able to speak.

Charlie: That’s quite something to say, okay! [Both laugh.]

Jessica: Children are really hard to write. I’ve got some children in the second one, but, yeah, they’re not really going to as much the plot. So I thought I’ll just make it just before she can speak and then she can be all cute and mean a lot to Jane, but I won’t have to bother with any dialogue [both laugh].

Charlie: Well, I mean, yeah, on, family and location, I think let’s pick one because we can’t talk about everybody, but I think one of the most important aspects and people in this book in general, and I think to you, it seems obvious to me it’s important to you. It’s George. George Austen.

Jessica: Yeah.

Charlie: And I noticed when I was doing some research on Wikipedia, and there is a link to all of the different children except George, which I thought said a lot in itself. How much do we know about George? How much could you find out? Etcetera.

Jessica: So George Austen is Jane Austen’s second eldest brother, isn’t he? There’s James, George, Edward, Frank, Cassandra, Jane, Charles. I think I’ve got that right. And as you say, all of them lived really interesting lives and are really well documented. And the one who we know the least about is George, and that is because he suffered from epilepsy and he also had learning difficulties. And sometimes the traditional narrative has been that she didn’t have a relationship with him and that he was very much excluded from the family. But when I was going through the research, I didn’t think that the primal resources backed up that fact. And because he’d been so unfairly relegated, it was really important to me to make him the absolute beating heart of this novel, to write him back into the story. So a lot of her first biographies, as I say, were written by her family. So there was another one that looked at her two brothers. By… think like a great nephew or a cousin or something, and that biography goes as far as to claim that she was one of seven children rather than eight, which I just feel like is a real stab through the heart. So the facts are that he, like all of the Austen children, was fostered by a dry nurse in the village, and then, rather than coming home to the rectory, he was then taken care of by a foster family all of his life, alongside his uncle. So, Mrs Austen’s brother suffered from a similar complaint, so they both lived together with a local family in a village only a few miles away, where James was a curate. So there was a family connection to the family who looked after him and the village at a time when lots of people were relegated to institutions, to asylums. They paid for him to be cared for by a local family and after the parents died, the brothers took that financial responsibility, so he had that continuity of care his whole life. And on his death certificate, he’s listed as a gentleman. He’s not mentioned in Austen’s letters, although there’s these strange anomalies, like the fact that she knew sign language, and there are surviving letters from his mother where she’s fretting over his fits. So worrying, like talking about when his last one was and talking about she hopes they’re going to decline, but they seem to be getting more frequent. And there’s a letter from his father where he is thinking about his son’s condition and how they’re going to manage it, and he says, we have this consolation: he cannot be a bad or a wicked child. The Austens were Georgians; so the Georgians had a very different notion of his family than we do. Childrearing was something that could be farmed out to professionals. All of the Austen children, as I said, went away. They went away when they were very young, to be looked after by the dry nurse until they were about two or three, because Jane’s parents had a farm and a school and her father was the reverend of the village, so they were really busy, they were always trying to earn money, earn enough to survive, so they farmed out that early years childcare, and then all of the children, when they were older, left home quite young as well. So James and Henry went to university as teenagers, Edward was adopted when he was about fourteen, but he started going on long trips with adoptive parents at eleven, Frank and Charles went off to Naval College at eleven, and Jane and Cassandra went to boarding school at seven and nine, so they didn’t have that sentimental of ‘in order for us to love you, you must live with us’. So I think he was loved, and I think he lived a quiet, dignified life with his family. He was with his uncle. And I felt that writing him out in those horrible, callous Wikipedia articles was really heartless. So I wanted to bring him back in, but bring him back in in a way that wasn’t overly sentimental and that didn’t pretend to anything that wasn’t as it was in real life. So in my level, he still doesn’t live with the Austens and he’s a part of them, but he’s not a part of them as well. So there’s all the complexity of Jane’s feelings about him, but at the end of the day, he’s her brother and she loves him and should do anything for him.

Charlie: It’s definitely ‘Miss Austen’ investigates, but you have got so much about George, and I’m loving hearing your interpretations, where you’ve worked with the evidence and the conclusions you’ve come to. Yeah, it’s just really, really interesting hearing this!

Jessica: The Worm Hole is like the perfect podcast for me to come on [Charlie laughs] because this whole book is one big series of wormholes that I’ve fallen down and tried to make sense of!

Charlie: I’m really, really excited about that [Jessica laughs]. I mean, I had a feeling before I read your book that this was going to be a series, but when I was just completely immersed in your book, in the midst of it, I was just thinking, god, I could just read this again [both laugh]. I could read more of this. So, I’m aware that Austen’s got six… yep, six novels [Jessica: uh huh], and she’s maybe got some juvenilia you can write about; I don’t know if six is going to be enough. I’m definitely hoping you go through all six – I’ll ask you about that later. I’ve heard you’ve cut characters from various drafts of this book, which makes complete sense, but is there any particular person you wish you would have included that might be interesting for us to hear about?

Jessica: Oh, there’s so many! I mean, the problem with writing a book is that you have to cut all the nice people [chuckles] because they’re just really nice and supportive and they don’t really do much to drive the plot forward. So all of the characters came from big families, so the first draft, they were all duplicated in a way, so they all had a brother or a sister. Cassandra was hanging around for the first draft, even, and Martha Lloyd, who was Jane Austen’s best friend, who is Mary’s sister. So both of those had to go when I tried to ration the characters down. I think that worked out for the best with Cassandra because so much of the story comes across in her writing to her sister – when we read Cassandra in the gaps. But, yeah, I had to cut a lot of people, but you mentioned it’s a series and part of making it a series and designing it as a series from the off, for me, was so that I didn’t have to worry about all those characters that I couldn’t cram and all those stories that I couldn’t cram into this very first instalment. So her relationships were really important to me because what I was writing against was this image of Jane Austen as this lonely, bitter old spinster, when I feel from reading her letters, her life was full of love, her relationships with her brothers and sisters and her family and her friends. And I wanted to really explore each of those, but I knew that I couldn’t do it all in one book. So what I did was thought about, ‘okay, if I’ve got the room to do it over six books, who would I look at in each of those books?’ So, yeah, hopefully, even though I’ve cut them, I’ve left myself room to go back to the other really, really important characters, mainly Cassandra, and really delve into that relationship. All of her brothers and sisters, really, in the books to come.

Charlie: Awesome. So Cassandra returns.

Jessica: Yes. Yes. You can’t have a Jane without a Cassandra!

Charlie: Yes [both chuckle]. Or makes her first appearance, I suppose I should say, away from the letters [Jessica: yeah]. I’m gonna have to stick on this subject of Cassandra. Sorry, Martha Lloyd, we’ll talk about you another day [laughs].

Jessica: Sorry, Martha, but you’re just too nice! [Laughs.]

Charlie: You include letters. I suppose I want to ask you why you include letters, as weird as that sounds, if you could just expand on your whys of the letters?

Jessica: I think because the book was born out of the letters, so the letters were always a really, really important part. So after that first draft, when I realised I was going to have to cut back on my cast of characters, I knew that Jane’s relationship with Cassandra was always going to be central. In life, when Jane was writing her earliest stories as a child, she often worked with Cassandra – so Jane would write them and Cassandra would paint them – and then as she got older, she would read the first draft to Cassandra and gauge Cassandra’s reaction. It’s not to say that Cassandra wasn’t editing her but she was a really, really powerful force in Jane’s life. So I knew that if in reality, anything like this ever happened, Jane would be desperate for Cassandra’s advice and to tell her this and to get her opinion on what was going on, so there had to be the letters to Cassandra. But the first draft, I think because I was so intimidated in trying to write in the style of Jane Austen, I didn’t put those letters in right to the end, they were the last thing I wrote. I’d been through the novel several times with my agent and she was like, ‘it’s nearly there, it’s nearly there, it’s nearly there. It’s almost ready to send out to publishers.’ And I’d reference the letters, so I would end the chapter by saying, ‘and I’m just going to go and write a letter to Cassandra now’. And then my agent said, ‘I think you’re really, really going to have to include these letters’. And I was so terrified, but also absolutely loved losing myself in her tone and writing these parody letters, really, from Jane to Cassandra, that I just sat down over two days and wrote them all. Because most of it’s written in the third person, they were my just really allowing myself to really relax in her voice and sum up what was happening, and really try and catch her humour and the warmth of that relationship between her and Cassandra. And also the joke in that we don’t know what happened to Jane Austen’s letters or why Cassandra burnt them, and being able to answer that question myself of the million silly things that might have happened to Jane Austen’s letters and why they were so shocking and so unreadable that they had to go.

Charlie: Yeah. It definitely makes you wonder, given that Cassandra got rid of them, what on earth was in there? Certainly [Jessica chuckles]. Yeah, I love that bit, there’s something like, ‘oh, please line the canary’s’… I’m gonna say pen – it’s not – [Jessica at the same time: yep, cage] a cage…’cage with my letter’, or something, ‘and use it to clean this, that and the other’. Yeah, it was very good. Allow me a pointed, specific question, I suppose you could say. It struck me, you’ve got numbers for the letters.

Jessica: Yes!

Charlie: And ‘To Cassandra Austen’. It looks very much like Deirdre Le Faye’s book. Was that important?

Jessica: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that was what I was… yeah. It was an exercise in forgery. [Both laugh.] How close could I make them look and feel like Jane Austen’s letters. When we published them with Penguin, I showed them Deirdre Le Faye’s book and was like, ‘look, can we just have a little play here at making them look as if they might have been taken directly from the pages’.

Charlie: They are the missing letters. Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah [both chuckle].

Charlie: I’m going to move on to Tom Lefroy. I think that was the thing that interested me most before I was reading your book, that was what really drew me to it. So, yeah, I wanted to ask you, what do you believe about Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy? Was it real love or just, as I think Tom said in later life, he said, ‘oh, it was just a boyish love’. What’s your belief, regards to what you’ve found out?

Jessica: I think that… I mean, they met, they were really, really young. They were both nineteen, she’d just turned twenty. I think there was a real spark there. It was a real, real spark, like an understanding of minds. He was incredibly shy from everything I’ve read, she was quite shy as well. I think that they had a lot in common and that there could have really been something there. And then I think that before anything could really happen, his family stepped in and removed him from the situation. And I think Jane Austen was quite heartbroken over that. But then I think that she got over it, really. She got over it. It was always a bit of a wound, but she moved on, she met lots of other men, she received many different proposals, and if she’d have wanted to marry, she could have married. I think he probably was always the one that got away, but I don’t think she spent her life miserable and sad and lonely because of that. I just think he was someone that meant a lot to her, but it didn’t work out. And I know, obviously, there’s something that happens at the end of the book, which very definitely did not happen in real life, because obviously, his family stepped in and removed him from the situation. But this book was a way for me to try and give Austen a bit of agency in her story. And even though that particular thing didn’t happen, it’s an allegory for the way that she lived out the rest of her life – she decided to put herself and her work above romantic relationships and the comforts of marriage.

Charlie: Well, she did have a proposal, I believe, that she accepted. And then later she said, ‘actually, no’, didn’t she?

Jessica: Oh, yeah, the most awkward anecdote in literary history [both chuckle]. Yeah, Harris Bigg-Wither, yeah! So, Alethea, who’s in the novel, her little brother, who’s got this big fancy house, proposed to Austen, and she accepted. And this was on a trip back to Hampshire when she was living her nomadic life. So you can just imagine, it would have been like, ‘yeah, great, I can have this big house and we can come back to Hampshire,’ and then I think when the champagne wore off overnight, ‘she thought, oh, God, what have I done?’ And then woke up early the next morning and had to hot foot it, and had to call in James, apparently, to drive her back to Bath. So, yeah, one of the many failed romances. And there were other men who I think she was quite tempted by. And one of those I’ll explore in the next book; so, the next book’s in Kent and it’s about her relationship with Neddy and Neddy’s wife’s family. So Mr Bridges – he was a serious contender, I think, she mentions him quite a few times in her letters and she makes this reference to not being able to accept his invitation, which sounds like code for declining his proposal. So, yeah, he’s one of many, Tom Lefroy, but he was the first, and there’s something cuts quite deep, isn’t there, about your first teenage crush?

Charlie: I didn’t know that she’d gone all the way to Bath to reject that proposal, in the end, I literally just knew that she had said yes and then she’d said, ‘no’ [Jessica, laughing: yeah, to get out of Hampshire]. Yeah, that’s quite a decision and quite, ‘Oh, dear, I made the wrong decision, quick!’ Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah.

Charlie: I am delighted to hear that you’re going to explore another one of these proposals and in another book, so that’s very, very exciting. Definitely, you giving her that agency of saying no to Tom herself, I mean, totally fits in with her character, doesn’t it? So, yeah.

Jessica: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, almost every single Austen book has a heroine declining a proposal, doesn’t it? I think they all do, don’t they? Maybe Northanger Abbey, I don’t think she comes straight out and says no to John Thorpe, but, yeah, she’s a big believer in women being able to say no, Jane Austen, and change their minds. So it’s entirely in keeping.

Charlie: I agree with you, yeah, I didn’t have all that much knowledge and, yeah, again, you’ve given me so much knowledge, it’s really interesting. One other thing I’d like to ask, before I ask you to talk about your book 2: Did you have to change anything or align any events to fit around what we know about Austen? In particular, the letters. Did you have to switch things around or was everything open for you to write about?

Jessica: So, the game that I played with myself was, how can I keep it as true as possible, but just make the murder happen and then allow her to investigate all of it. So the circumstances of her family, so where everyone is, is very, very much true to life. There were only a very few things that I changed, and one of thse was making Anna younger, as I’ve talked about already. But the rest of it is pretty much as it was at the time. I changed small things – Dean House, where the murder happens, is a real place, and the Harwoods live there, rather than the Harcourts, who are in my story. But the Harcourts were characters from her own juvenilia. And it’s actually a Georgian estate, but I made it gothic to make it something that Catherine Morland, etcetera, might like. And I remember getting this really funny note from my copy editor, who had gone through the novel and really looked at the historical detail. And the first thing that she said was, ‘it’s probably too late to change this now, but Dean House is actually Georgian rather than gothic. So if you’re going to say it’s gothic, make sure that you tell people that you’ve done that on purpose, in case they think you just haven’t done the research’. But I thought it was so funny because obviously, I’ve got Jane Austen running off to snog Tom Lefroy at every opportunity in this novel, and even though I do believe there was a romance between them, I don’t believe she would have had quite that much liberty or been quite so scandalous in her secret assignations with Tom Lefroy. But, yeah, it was just funny that people might object to the architecture rather than my very flirty Jane Austen.

Charlie: Your very flirty Jane Austen I think it fits the novel and everything anyway, so, yeah. It’s also fun that she’s always got that in the background: ‘Oh, yeah, and Tom. Always think about Tom. Is he gonna propose now? Is he gonna propose now? You’ve got Ashe Rectory – is that the one that still exists? I’m trying to remember…

Jessica: Yeah, Ashe. Ashe is still there [Charlie: yes]. Oh, and that’s the other thing I did change, Mary Lloyd’s, Jane’s Frenemy, I like to call her, who was her friend and then became her sister-in-law, and then relations between them slightly soured – she wouldn’t have been in that village at that time. So, yeah, I had to temporarily decamp Mary to Dean and then pretend that Dean Church and Rectory didn’t exist at all, just so that people could be in the same place at the same time. Because Hampshire in those days would have been quite difficult for everyone to get around and see each other, that would have been quite cumbersome plot-wise – so Jane’s in a carriage again for two days [both laugh]. So you had to bring everybody in, make it so that they could just pop round and see each other.

Charlie: I mean, it’s not too far away, is it? [Jessica: No.] You haven’t transported her somewhere completely and utterly elsewhere [Jessica laughs]. I remember going there recently and just seeing just how far they had to walk to get the post.

Jessica: Oh, yeah, yeah [laughs].

Charlie: That inn is quite far from Steventon. I did it in the car and I was thinking, ‘my goodness, it takes ages!’

Jessica: Yeah, it is quite remote. So my story with Hampshire really played into my novel as well. So, as I said, I grew up in London, but I took a few months out of university and I wanted to make those months count, so I took a job at a school for disabled children in Hampshire. And this is at the end of the nineties. I didn’t have a car and it was before the Internet had really taken off and I didn’t even have a TV because they’d changed the law on TV licencing so you had to have one per person rather than one per TV. So all I could do was read, and there was only one bus, and the one bus went to Alton, where I could walk to Chawton, where Jane Austen’s house, is the one that she lived in in later life, which is still there, or I could go to Winchester where she was buried. And it was the first time that I’d really had a sense of the countryside in its beauty and watching the seasons change and observing nature, but also feeling so incredibly remote and stranded and cut off from the world. That memory really came back to me during the pandemic, because wherever you lived, you were cut off and remote and stranded from the world. So it really made me remember that time. So I wanted to get a sense of her struggle in being so remote into the novel.

Charlie: Yeah, they have to get a carriage to everywhere, don’t they? [Jessica: yeah] Basingstoke, I mean, quite a trek and it would leave you isolated.

Jessica: But even just walking down to The Wheatsheaf to get the post or walking over to Dean. And she is a great walker, she loves walking, but when it’s raining and the roads are boggy and dirty and everything’s so much more of a faff and it means that she’s so much more reliant on the male members of her family in order to get anywhere or do anything that she wants to do.

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, I want to know more about this book 2.

Jessica: Okay.

Charlie: Can you tell us more about it?

Jessica: I can. So book two is set in Kent and it explores Jane’s relationship with her wealthy brother Neddy, who was adopted by his very wealthy cousins, the Knights, and taken off to live in a place called Godmersham Park, which you can have a look at on your ten pound note. So if you have a look at your ten pound note, there’s a massive house in the background – it’s Godmersham Park, and Neddy’s estate was worth around £15,000 a year. So if you can imagine, he’s one and a half times Mr Darcy [Charlie laughs]. But the book is set before he’s inherited that grand wealth; so he’s the heir of Mrs Knight. And Jane goes down there, ostensibly to look after the children for the summer, because Cassandra’s just received the news that her fiancé has died and is devastated. So Jane steps in to look after these children. But when she gets down to Kent, she finds out that Mrs Knight has taken in a mysterious young woman who’s claiming to be a shipwrecked foreign princess. And she realises that her time would be much better spent getting to the bottom of who this woman really is before she steals the much anticipated fortune that all of the Austens have come to rely on.

Charlie: That bit at the end, definitely, I really like that [Jessica laughs]. That’s a really interesting idea for the story, yeah.

Jessica: Yes. It’s partly inspired by the story of Princess Caraboo. Have you ever heard of Princess Caraboo?

Charlie: No, I haven’t.

Jessica: Okay, so she was a young woman called Mary Wilcox or Mary Baker – I can’t remember to which she was born and which one was her married name. So she was a servant in the West Country and one day she grew tired of her life, of being a servant and she arrived in this village of Almondsbury in the guise of a foreign princess. So she made up her own language, she made up her own traditional costume, and she pretended she didn’t know what money was or what beds were, and she managed to trick a local magistrate’s wife into taking her in. And they did all these funny tests on her to see if she was faking it, and she managed to get away with this ruse for a good couple of months. But it’s not a straight retelling because I never do a straight retelling, but I’ve always been really fascinated about this young woman who was obviously so clever and so bright and so creative in managing to fool everybody around her because she did things like she wrote her own alphabet and they had scholars come and test her and they were like, ‘yeah, it totally stacks up. It’s a proper alphabet system. We can translate it. We know exactly what she’s doing.’ So you’re always really fascinated in how she managed to get away with that ruse and somebody like that, if she’d had the upbringing that Jane Austen had had, with this really supportive family, who were able to give her this education, maybe we’d remember her as another Jane Austen. But instead, she took the chances that life afforded her. And it’s remembered for being one of the greatest fraudsters of all time.

Charlie: Well, I look forward to researching her and seeing how you do that, definitely. That’s really, really interesting. That’s something I haven’t heard before at all [Jessica chuckles]. I just want to ask you more about this series. You’re going to write a book per novel, you’re saying, in a different theme?

Jessica: I like to. Yeah, I’d really love to. So the next one is very much inspired by Sense And Sensibility, with Jane really trying to keep everything together while Cassandra’s falling apart back in Steventon.

Charlie: Okay. All right. Are these going to just be the completed novels, I suppose?

Jessica: It depends if people like them, if people read them, if there’s a call for them! As long as I’m allowed to write, I’ll write, I think.

Charlie: Brilliant. Brilliant. Everyone go get some copies, come on, let’s do this [both laugh]. Jessica, this has been amazing having you, and I’m so glad I’ve read your book. Thank you for being here today.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Charlie.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you. The Worm Hole Podcast, episode 107, was recorded on the 29th April and published on the 14th October 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Photo credit: Cassie Burac

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