We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily t Henski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fd
R l s T. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts,
and of course to the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot com
as well. We're joined once again today by Faithmore, who has a podcast
out called story Time for Grown Ups with Faithmore. She's the host of the
podcast. You can find out more information about Faith at Faithkmore dot com.
That's more m oo r e. Faith, Welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for having me again. It's so good to be here.
Of course, yes, I hope everybody remembers the PODCA. I guess
read about your book Christmas Carol during the holiday season. Now tell us Faith
about Storytime for grown Ups. Like the basic concept. I think the concept
is super cool, but if people aren't familiar with it, tell us a
little bit about Storytime for Grownups and what you're doing with this podcast. Thanks.
Yeah, So, Storytime for Grown Ups is a podcast designed to help
people learn to read classic literature. So it grew, I think out of
my own frustration, as you know, growing up as a young adult and
a child. I grew up in a very intellectual family, and I was
always being handed the classics to read, you know, like I was.
People were pulling things on off the shelf all the time and handing me like,
you know, here's a Dickens book, here's a Jane Austen whatever.
And I would read the back and I would think, Yeah, this sounds
really great. I love this idea for a story. And I would open
the book and start to read, and I literally couldn't understand what was in
there. And I think that secretly a lot of people are still having that
experience, and so I wanted to create a podcast that would help us not
just hear about the classics and know what they are, but read them.
So the way that it works is every season I choose a classic book.
Season one is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and each episode of the podcast,
I read the book aloud, one chapter per episode, and I pause
from time to time to just offer a little bit of explanatory notes, not
commentary, but just I'll explain a word, or I'll kind of give a
one sentence summary of what just happened if the passage was particularly tricky. And
it's like an audiobook with built in notes. And the idea is that the
more you listen, the easier this language will become to you, and the
more that you will be able to go away and read books like this yourself.
So that's the hope. I also answer questions about each chapter as we
go along, so it's becoming more and more like a kind of book club
where people write in and they ask questions and then I talk about it,
and so we're having a lot of fun reading Jane Ayir for this first season.
Yeah, I was just going to say it feels like a book club.
I was looking at the page for the podcast on Apple, and you
have so many good reviews, like you like really taking off. People seem
to really want this, so Faith, That's another question I have for you,
is you know, why is it that you know you're talking about your
own experience. And of course I like to picture you as being like two
years old struggling with bronte. Your dad just hands you a book when you're
two and says, yeah, you read Janeair it kind of felt like that,
to be honest. But Okay, so why is it that we have
a harder time maybe accessing these works now? Obviously the language is different,
but also, you know, we have shorter attention spans. There are all
kinds of things going on in the modern world that make it difficult. What
do you think some of those factors are. Yeah, I think it's primarily
the language. I mean, obviously, just explaining to people that these books
are important is kind of a big ask in modern society. But I think
if we're talking just about people who actually want to read these books but are
struggling, I think it's the language. There's a lot you know, as
I've been doing this show and kind of reading through, there's just a lot
of kind of expressions that are really outdated that we don't understand, words that
we don't understand, long kind of descriptions of things that we can get lost
in. And so I think when we kind of pick these books up,
even if it sounds great to us the story, we we kind of begin
to read and think, wow, I cannot it's like work, you know,
I can't sit down and read this. This is no fun and so
I think these books are kind of getting thrown aside for things that are maybe
more modern or more easy or easier to digest, and so they're kind of
falling by the wayside. I think there's there isn't a whole bunch of support.
You know, this is what this podcast is supposed to be. It's
supposed to offer support for people to learn how to read these books themselves,
and we don't have that because I think we're hearing from our beloved kind of
public intellectuals who are really important. You know, we're hearing like, oh,
you've got to read You've got to read Shakespeare, you got to read
Dickens, You've got to read all these things. And we're like, yes,
yes, we want to, we really want to, but we don't
know how and we can't. And then I think it's it's embarrassing. I
think there's a level of shame going on as well. People don't want to
admit that they can't do this, that these books are too hard, or
they feel stupid. And I don't want them to feel that way anymore,
because these books are hard and they come from a different time and we don't
live in that time anymore. But these books inform the time that we do
live in, and so we can't let them go. We have to find
a way back in, even though they don't feel as accessible to us now
as they did to the readers who were ingesting them at the time. And
I'm very interested in why you chose Jane Eyre to begin with. Can you
tell us a little bit about that? Yes, So there were two reasons.
The first was, Jane Eyre is my favorite book of all time.
I've read it more times than I would like to admit. It's a great
reason. Yeah, well, I own. Well. The reason was I
thought, well, if nobody listens to this podcast, at least I'll be
reading a book that I enjoy. That was my first reason. But it
turns out that people are listening, which is great. So my second reason
is I wanted to pick something that had a little bit of something for everyone.
I didn't want to pick something that would only appeal to, you know,
readers of a certain genre or a certain age category or something like that.
I wanted to pick something that people could really find something in it to
hold on to. Because that was kind of the idea is this is going
to be tricky, this language is tricky. These books are not things we
normally pick up, So why should I care about this book? And Jane
Are is a book that, of course, yes, at its heart,
it is a romance, and I think mostly it's women that enjoy this book.
When you ask you know, what's your favorite book, it's if it's
Jane Eyre, it's usually a girl. But there's a mystery at the center
of this book. So if you're into mystery, there's that. There's a
there's a lot of Gothic elements in the book, so you know, a
lot of talk about the supernatural and ghosts and scary and things like that.
So if you're into the supernatural, horror, fantasy, that kind of thing,
you're going to like this book. There's a ton of kind of spiritual
theological meditation going on in the book. There's a lot of there's a huge
through line about Christianity and religion and spirit spirituality and what makes a good Christian.
There's all of that. Is there really interesting kind of like phroto feminist
stuff is going on in the book, and that all has you know,
repercussions in today's society. So I felt that it was a book that had
a little bit of something for everyone and that if you didn't like one part,
you could hang on to the other. And so I wanted to pick
something that you know, everyone could potentially like. There's so much there because
as you were just talking about the different themes and the relevance to today,
when you went back and started reading this book again, particularly for this project,
does anything jump out at you as like the big or maybe there are
multiple things. I would imagine there are multiple things like a big maybe lesson
or a way that Bronte kind of weighed in on something happening right now in
ways people might forget. Yeah, so I would say that the religion piece
is a huge one. You know, obviously this is a sort of evergreen
topic, is what makes a good Christian? Or what does it mean to
be spiritual? And you know, Bronte without giving too much away, because
the whole idea of this podcast is that people should read the book with me,
but without giving too much away, you know, Bronde populates the book
with characters who each offer different ideas of what it means to be a Christian.
And because of this, she was criticized at the time for writing a
book that was anti religion or anti Christian, But she was very clear that
this was actually not all her intention, but that she was trying to kind
of highlight the ways in which perhaps, you know, for example, at
the beginning of the book, there's a character named mister Brocklehurst, who is
a kind of hypocritical priest or pastor who you know, who makes the girls
at the orphanage that he runs cut off all their hair and dress very simply.
He doesn't feed them well, and he thinks, you know, he
tells them this is godly, but then of course his own family is living
in the lap of luxury. So she's offering this picture of the kind of
bad, bad vicar, the bad priest. But then you know, you
have other characters like Helen Burns who basically only believe in the spiritual and they
feel that their bodies are somehow they're just corrupt and they can't wait to die
and throw off their bodies and be pure spirit. And I think Bronte is
sort of saying, well, no, that's not right either. So she's
really grappling with this notion that I think that we're still grappling with today.
So that's one kind of huge theme that is relevant in the book. That's
also because it was wasn't Janeair published under a pseudonym, right, it was.
It was published under the name Kerr Bell, which was a sort of
masculine name, and so she was, Yes, she was not outing herself
as Charlotte Bronte at the time. Yeah, that's just really interesting the limitations
of womanhood and the sort of physical world, but sort of also resisting them
in the book itself. While really I say this not sarcastic, like blazing
a trail in a sort of clever way. Yeah. And the other piece
that I think is huge for today is there are all kinds of interesting you
know, as I was sort of saying proto or early feminist ideas in the
book that are all kind of related to this notion that a woman's inner life
is just as rich as a man's inner life. And I think, you
know, we today we kind of all roll our eyes at feminism because now
it's all about girl bosses and you know, not wanting children and going off
and being just like a man. And I think it's interesting to go back
and kind of look at someone like Bronte, who clearly was a feminist in
her time and to see what it was that she actually was advocating for,
which was not that women should behave exactly like men behave. I think she
would have kind of scoffed at that idea, but rather that women should be
acknowledged as having just as much kind of intellectual power as men. And that's
kind of what the story in some ways is about. It's one of the
themes is kind of being seen not for your outward appearance or not for your
kind of not for the ways that you are supposed to confine yourself to the
rules of your sex, but rather for your inner self and your inner life.
And that's kind of one of the lovely and romantic parts of the story
is that Janes is ultimately seen for her in herself and not her outer self.
And I think it's that too. It's kind of interesting to think about
in Pars and pull apart as we think about what it means to be a
woman today. The Watchdout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day
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That is so interesting because when you look back at sort of Victorian conceptions of
womanhood, there's this whole lost history, especially of you. When we think
about Jane Eyre's like a romance novel, but women were writing like incredibly rich
or creating incredibly rich art about womanhood and the advancement of the rights of women.
And this is all happening AT's sort of the same times for post Enlightenment
or during the Enlightenment. And I want to ask more about that faith than
this. Feminists kind of will either claim Jane Air or fight over whether or
not they should claim Jane, but in doing so, there was this there's
this period in the history of uh, you know, call it like the
real first wave the history of feminism where women thought that what needed to be
recognized, as you were just saying, is that the inner life of women
was just as rich as the inner life of men that wasn't being recognized.
Talk to us a little bit more about what we find in Jane Eyre as
it pertains to that question. Yeah, I think that we do Janeair a
disservice if we think of it as just a romance novel, which I think
is kind of the way that it is perceived now. We think of it
as kind of the typical byronic hero meets young ingenu kind of story, and
it certainly is that it has that within it, but I think that is
kind of almost a facade for some of the ideas that Bronte was trying to
put forth about women, about spirituality, and about society. I think so.
I think in terms of womanhood, there are several examples of women,
just as there are several examples of different ways of being a Christian, both
good and bad. There are several examples of womanhood in the book that I
think Bronte is using to kind of explore what it means to be a woman
and what it means to be a woman who is completely seen for all the
facets of herself rather than or the kinds of ways that she might be perceived
by society. You know. For example, Blanche Ingram is a character in
the book who is the kind of typical woman that maybe they would have expected
at the time, very very kind of beautiful, she does her hair,
she's very interested in appearances, but there's really nothing going on at all beyond
below the surface. And then we have Jane, who is not beautiful at
all and very shy and kind of unassuming, but has this intense moral character
and as we were just talking about, has a very very rich inner life.
And then there are a couple of others that I won't spoil who kind
of round out this picture of the different facets of womanhood. And I think
it's just a really interesting picture of someone a woman living in this time,
living in the Victorian era, trying to kind of puzzle out what it means
to be a woman, and also to put forward theory of womanhood that doesn't
completely negate womanhood in the way that modern feminism modern feminism does, but rather
offers a fuller picture of womanhood. And I think that's really interesting. And
when we think about Dickens and other writers of this period. I mean,
this is, if I'm not mistaken, this is like mid nineteenth century,
So you're getting kind of industrial themes and there's this huge industrial effect or influence.
I mean, it really is one of the primary reasons that we start
having these conversations about men and women and they're any separation of labor and all
of that. Is there anything This is not a leading question at all,
but revisiting the book, is there is there anything in there that's dealing with
those themes and things we don't think about as technology now, but we're certainly
advancements back then. It's an interesting question because about this too, because you're
right, it does take place right kind of in the middle or at the
tail end of the Industrial Revolution. The book was published in eighteen forty seven,
I believe. And but what was interesting about the book is that it
takes place completely outside of cities, so it is completely removed from the kind
of epicenter of those ideas and the as you say, the work and the
way that you know women's work was changing because of the onset of factories and
industrialization and all of those things. But this story happens you know. Jane
actually at one point is very clear. Mister Rochester asks her if she's ever
been to the city, and she says, no, I've never been to
a city. You know, she's she's never left, you know, the
different kind of rural environs, and the entire plot takes place in a very
remote and rural place. So that's a kind of interesting. It's an interesting
question because you know, again I'm not a Brounde scholar or or Victorian scholar,
but this book to me seems like it is kind of in some ways
removed from that, but obviously taking place within that Millieau for sure. Why
do you think or how do you think? I mean, it's such a
it's an incredible skill to write in a way that resonates throughout time, and
you know, going back to the ancients, we have examples of this.
What do you think it is not just about Jane Eyre, but what do
you think makes an author successful to resonate with people that are living in completely
different contexts but still you know, capture something and still move people. How
do the most successful authors manage to do that? I think it's about capturing
the essence of human nature because It's true that times change, and situations change,
and ideas change, and society has changed. But people, there is
an essential quality of humanity and essential quality of human nature. And I think
if you're able to capture that, then your story will resonate down the ages,
and there will be no worry that we won't understand it as long as
we can parse the language, you know. I think that's why Shakespeare,
for example, is so profound and has and has stayed with us so long,
is because he was kind of the master of capturing the human experience.
And I think, you know, when you look at yeah, of course,
you know, Jane Eyre has this what we kind of think of now
as a sort of romance novel trope of the kind of dark, brooding man
with a past and you know, the young ingenu But we're still obsessed with
the bad boy today, right, We still are kind of excited by the
guy and his leather jacket who you know has a heart of gold. That's
still true. So I think if you're able to capture something that is true
about the things that light us up and make us who we are, then
it doesn't exactly matter what's going on in your story. It's going to resonate.
I have to ask you about the mystery element of this, because there
are a million different think pieces on the internet right now about what it is
with women and true crime and some great theories. But I think it's more
than true crime. It's sort of mystery in general. Is there something we
can learn from Jane Eyre, Maybe women just loving mystery, women being attracted
to mystery, although of course it sounds to me like Bronte actually wasn't writing
this specifically for female audience, but it's resonated with women, probably more than
men for centuries. Now. Is there is there anything we can take from
that? Or am I stretching here faith? Oh gosh, you know that's
such a good question. And I don't want to reveal too much about the
mystery in Jane Air because I think that's like a huge it's the so we
don't want to reveal the end of the of the mystery, the solution to
the mystery. I wonder. I don't know, and I've never thought about
this because I myself am not a particularly true crime officionado. I don't quite
understand what is happening, but I agree that it is happening. We are
in a time when people are so obsessed with this, But I wonder if
it has something to do with what Grande was talking about and what we were
just talking about about a woman's inner life, the way that you know,
most of us are not going to go off and solve a mystery. Most
of us are not unless we are police officers or detectives. Most of us
are not going to kind of even even ferret out the different kind of emotional
backlog of our friends' issues. You know, we're not going to do that.
But we do have this kind of rich and intense inner live life that
does often for women, a circle around emotions and people and the ways that
people interact with each other and their relationships and all of those things. And
that makes us really really good at kind of solving solving mysteries that I don't
Know's that's all I've got, No, it's it's extremely interesting. I think
there's probably a lot of truth to that. Is there going to be a
great millennial novelist faith? Because Bronte was fairly young when writing this? Am
I wrong about that? She was? Yes, I don't know her actual
exact age, but she was fairly young and died fairly young, right,
Okay, so I mean I don't mean to just say millennial, but that
was another one of those questions that a million different think pieces of dressed will,
would there ever be a great millennial writer? And you know what we
got was, what was that awful Irish novelist? Maybe you like the book,
probably not they made it into a movie. Anyway, it was bad.
It was like the writing was so stilted and you know, taken clearly
from a world of text messages and email and social media. It just felt
like that. And maybe that's a controversial. It's called something with friends,
I think anyway, I think it sounds like it was a good thing.
But you know, the when you read the pros of Bronte, uh,
you read the pros of Dickens, as we talked about before, there's a
richness to it that it seems difficult to Uh. I have a hard time
imagining anybody who lives in the modern world and not you know, full unibomber
and a cabin by themselves, sitting down with you know, their their keyboard
or pen and writing that way. Do have thoughts faith on whether you know,
there's really something being lost that as an industry, publishing is going to
have a hard time recapturing. Well, I think that the one perhaps silver
lining or positive thing that we can say about this is that the novels of
the past have the benefit of time. We have the benefit of having now
these books that have the other books have been weeded out. You know,
like there was a lot of bad literature going on at the time too.
You know, there's a lot of bad Victorian literature. There's a lot of
bad literature going on in Shakespeare's time. There's a lot of bad literature all
the time. And yet you know, because of because of time and the
sort of quality of winnowing things out, and the fact that these books really
are great, we get to keep these books and then we think of them
as Victorian literature. But I mean, there was there was a lot of
garbage going on back then too, just like there is a lot of garbage
going on right now. And I think the question is are there little gems
in the garbage that eventually will rise to the surface, or however, we
want to complete this metaphor and you know, be the texts that people one
hundred years from now, we're member or is it going to be like our
text messages and our emails, and it's just going to be, you know,
horrible, horrible nonsense. I I really don't know. It's certainly true
that we are in a moment where fiction and stories are really devalued. People
I think today often don't really understand the point of stories. They don't they
want to read the news, they want facts, they want to know what's
going on in politics, and all of those things are important. But stories
are the underpinning of life. They're the underpinning of society. The things that
happen in these old books that seem sort of dusty and unimportant to us now
are the things that inform our current thinking. I mean that example I just
used of kind of we still love the Bad Boy is kind of a flip
example, but it does kind of show this through line of like we are
still thinking this way. We wouldn't we wouldn't know about the bad Boy trope.
If you know, there hadn't been Lord Byron and then after him,
people like Charlotte Bronte, who wrote these characters, we wouldn't know about that.
We wouldn't have that trope at all. So I think it's possible that
there is nothing today that parallels the books of the past, but I also
think it's possible that there is, and that those things will kind of get
shaken out in time. I you know, there are authors that I really
do love today. One of them is a woman named Curtis Sittenfeld, whose
politics I completely disagree with, but her books are fantastic because of the way
that she writes, and because, as I was just talking about about these
authors of the past, she really understands people like the human experience, and
the way that she writes, you just get very wrapped up in who these
people are. And so you know, if her books were to kind of
stand the test of time, that wouldn't surprise me. So I'm hopeful.
But it is a little it's a little dicey. I think I have been
watching the hilarious videos of people with their new Apple goggles on through New York
City and Los Angeles all weekend. So your optimism is just a breath of
fresh Well, if I had been watching those videos, I think I would
probably be a lot less optimistic. That's scary, that's really frightening to me.
The book I was thinking of is called Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney.
It was like massively yes, right, right, right, okay,
Yes, I didn't read it, but I did. I have heard of
it. Yeah, don't thank you loved it though, you know. Another
book that I didn't like was Daisy Jones in the six Did you read that
one? I didn't read that. I you know, to be honest,
a lot of these books I can just sort of tell from looking at them,
no thank you books. The popularity of books is really no comment on
their actual value and whether they're could. You know. I just think sometimes
things grab the zeitgeist and run with it, but in the end they're not
very good. Well, and I think, but knowing what's popular in books
now, because books are like, actually buying books is sort of a niche
slice population. People don't buy books, so it's a really easily manipulated market,
Like the charts are very responsive to people with disproportionately huge platforms, and
man, and I have no I'm you know, I don't read a lot
of novels. I have a hard time writing novels. I like nonfiction,
but when I do I'll go to the charts, usually because I just want
something easy that I'll get my brain out of like an Internet pattern. I
just want to sort of look at a page virtual and it's just it's hard.
Now I'm not I don't have a problem with like, you know,
super super popular and you know, mid level written for the lowest common denominator
stuff, But Daisy Jones and the six which is massively popular. Conversations with
friends, it's massively popular. I've just found the writing to be so bad
that I can't get through it even with people who I trust. But it's
just it's really hard to respect the pros. It's distractingly bad. I agree,
I have a really hard time reading bad writing. I really struggle to
get into a plot if the writing is bad. But I think what you
just said a minute ago about, you know, having more to do with
the popularity of either the author or the person who's promoting the book is huge.
You know, publishing has really changed a lot. You Know, it
used to be that Bronte could publish this book under the name Courbella and no
one would know who she was. Right the book would come out and people
would just think, oh, it's by some guy, mister bell you know,
and nobody asked. But now the author is part of the package,
you know, which I of course learned when I published my novel. Or
the author is part of the package, and the author is expected to be
someone that people can look at and say, not so much. Oh am
I interested in this story? But am I interested in this person? And
then I'm willing to give this person my money, my time, my attention.
And if that's the case, then it sometimes doesn't matter what's actually in
the book, if what you're going for is more, you know, a
relationship with the person who wrote it. And it's an interesting shift that's going
on that I've been kind of watching for the last few months or so.
How do you feel about reading a kindle? This is such a specific question,
but I'm just going with it because this conversation is really interesting to me.
So this is really controversial. This is a really controversial topic because I'm
going to throw in audio books also, who you just poured gasoline all over
the fire? I really did? I really did. Because I feel like
the question now is what does it mean to read rite quote unquote read?
Are you reading if you are on a kindle? Are you reading if you
are listening to the book, or do you have to be holding a physical
book. So I am a physical book person. I really feel like I
don't get the full experience of the story unless I am holding the book in
my hands. I can feel with my thumb how many pages are left.
I don't like on the kindle that I you know, of course tells you
what percent, But what do I know about what percent? You know,
I want to feel with my thumb, this is how many pages are left.
I want to turn the page and kind of experience that. That's part
of my experience of reading. On the other hand, a kindle is really
really useful, and you know, you can just throw it in your backpack
and your purse or whatever and go and if it makes it so that you
read more, then I think there's nothing wrong with the kindle. I used
a kindle for a long time when my kids were small, and I was
like feeding them or doing something with one hand. You know that I could
like look at the kindle with the other. So I just kind of transitioned
back to books because I decided I didn't want to be a kindle person.
But I have nothing against kindles or kindle people. It does. It's the
screen, you know, if you feel like, oh, I don't want
the light in my face or whatever. There's that, and then you know,
listening. I have never gotten into audiobooks. I can't. I don't
experience them the same way as I do when I'm reading. It's not my
voice that's coming into my head. It's someone else's voice. So I think
this is where people are going to. You know, please don't write me
angry letters. But I think that if you're listening to a book instead of
reading it, you have the book in your mind just as much as I
have the book in my mind. So we can have a conversation about the
book at exactly the same level as if you had read it. But I
think they're two very different experiences. I think you've done something different than I
have done, not necessarily worse. Although for me, I prefer to read
the book. I'll just leave it there. No, No, it's a
really worthwhile conversation. I think I love the Kindle, but I prefer books.
Yeah. The Kindle, yeah, exactly, like you said, it
has so many uses. It's so easy. You don't have to wait a
few days to get a book. You can just exactly then where your interests
go. You can get Kindle unlimited and all of that. You really can
broaden your horizons and hop around between different books, almost like you're in a
library. Yeah, no, it's great. I mean I'm always like requesting
things from my library and then waiting several weeks because like somebody else has it
on hold, and then I have to actually go physically to the library and
get the book, whereas yeah, the Kindle, it's just right there,
right there, and you know, then your interest, doesn't you wane or
whatever in any given topic. Although this is mostly applies to nonfiction from my
perspective. Sure, but my friend Snager swears that if you listen to the
audiobook, it's the exact same thing as having read the book. I'm also
not in audiobooks. I've been trying really slowly to get through Neil Ferguson's Empire
on audiobook, which is so I mean, it's taking me forever because I
have to keep pausing to absorb the information in a way that when you're reading
you can take notes in the margin, or it just you feel like it's
absorbing. Maybe it's just me, but you feel like it's absorbing into your
brain in a way that if you're listening while you so you're multitasking. It
doesn't quite sink in. Yeah, I mean, I think it's true that
people learn differently. So there are kind of people who take in information auditorially,
but there are other people who take in information visually through reading. So
I think that, like, you know, my experience, because I have
the same experience. If I listen to an audiobook, like my brain just
goes somewhere else. I have to stop and go back because I missed everything
because I was thinking about something else, versus if I'm actually reading, I'm
much more engaged with the text. But I think other people are the other
way around. You know, when they try to read a physical book,
their mind wanders, but then somehow when they're listening, their mind is much
more engaged. So I think it's there is probably something to be said about
sort of just the different ways that people ingest information. But I do think
that it's not true to say that experiencing an audiobook is reading. I think
that's not what reading is. Agree totally agree. It's amazing what they do
with audiobooks with the voice acting and something like Harry. I've heard those like
mystery novels Oh yeah, I'll get into it. It's a different experience,
you know. I mean, I'm sort of realizing this with this podcast,
because in essence, what I'm doing is an audiobook of Jane Eyra. But
I'm just kind of offering a few notes. So it's an interesting thing where
I'll get to something and be like, oh, well, wait, how
does this person talk? You know, I hear their voice in my mind,
but I can't I can't make that happen, right, So, I
mean that's kind of what is so interesting to me is that all of these
characters, I mean, take Jane Air again, but all of these characters
when I read the book have very specific voices in my head, you know.
And but now I'm one person. I'm a woman, So then there
are male characters. What do I do about that? And so I think
when we're experiencing these books via someone else reading them, we have to deal
with the limitations of their acting ability, of their voice quality, of the
fact that they're a man or a woman, and different characters are different genders,
et cetera. And it makes for a totally different experience, more of
a theatric experience than a sort of internal reading experience. Yeah, it's like
the old time radio shows exactly. Yeah, which I sat podcasts that do
that too. What is it like breaking down that Victorian rhetoric as you're trying
to, you know, help people find these texts more accessible and approachable?
What is it? What is it like as you're kind of parsing the pros
from Bronte and and you know, wading through it to help people find it
to be more accessible. What are the challenges or maybe even the pleasures of
doing that. It's been fascinating because I've read this book so many times,
but there are still things where I'll stop and say, I don't know what
that means. I don't have to go away and look it up. And
then there's the question of well, how much do you need to know in
order to understand the book? I could explain so much more than I am,
but then it would just be me talking instead of the book, and
I think people would hate that. So for me, it really is a
question of, okay, how what are the absolutely essential things for you to
know that might not be clear to a modern reader, And I will explain
those. And then that's why the kind of question and answer section of the
show is so great because then people write in and say other things that they
want me to explain. You know, today's episode has a whole conversation about
the expression gall and wormwood, what it means to have ball in wormwood in
your speech, and the person that wrote in related that to wormwood from the
Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis and wanted to know if those things
were related. So you can do these really really deep dives and go into
these crazy rabbit holes, and I love to do it, but I'm always
also very very careful to not do it in the actual chapter portion because I
think you don't need that. And that's kind of the problem actually with modern
lectures or English classes. You know. I was an English major in college,
and I remember I took a class on Wordsworth and we had one day
where we spent the entire class on like two words in a Wordsworth poem,
and I walked away feeling like that's terrible. No one should do that.
You shouldn't do that if unless you are an actual Wordsworth scholar who spends their
entire day thinking about Wordsworth, you know, because when we do that to
people, we make them think that that's the level at which they should be
reading these stories. They should understand every single little reference, every single little
phrase. And the truth is these are good stories. There are good stories
in the same way that a modern novel is a good story, and you
can read them without having to analyze them or parse every little thing. We
think because they're old and because they're classics, we have to analyze them,
we have to really delve deeply in to them. We can, and it's
super fun to do. But also we should just be able to read them
and enjoy the story and the characters, these people and what's going on with
them, because it's really exciting and engaging to do that. So for me,
it's been about that balance. You know, how do we balance the
level of understanding that we need in order to get the story in order for
the story to kind of come into our minds and paint itself there without bogging
ourselves down. And you know, like, what is the significance of you
know, the red room in chapter three? You know, we don't we
don't want to do that unless that's what we want to do, and then
we can we can go down those those deep dives because I do I do
enjoy them, I must confess, but they're not. You don't need them
in order to understand the story. I love that. Have you seen the
episode of Friends? Do you know where I'm going with us? Where?
No? I mean I have, because I've seen all the Friends. But
there's a Janare episode of Friends. Yes, and it's fantastic. It's really
the best sort of subplots. Yeah, it's a be storyline where Phoebe and
Rachel sign up for like a community college class on classic literature, and Rachel
doesn't do the reading. And this is now ringing a very very distant bell.
It's Jane Eyre and Rachel Phoebe there. They're stealing these like really esoteric
readings of Jane although they're coming. It's so good. It's so good.
But I was curious, Faith, if you had seen that, because it's
a the fact that they chose Jane Eyre for these two kind of thirty something
women in New York City the book where you can have that kind of intellectual
takeaway. And one of the I forget whether it's Phoebe realizes that Rachel has
been cribbing from her. So one of them tells the other that the book
is like actually about robots because they hadn't read She says it in front of
this like sweater vest wearing profess than she likes the robots, right right,
They're great. The robots are great. We're going to get to that in
the podcast. Yeah, those robots. Okay, So keep listening to storing
time for grown ups to hear about the robots and Jane Air exactly. Yes,
and you know, and write to me about them when you when you
notice them, because they're subtle. Can people pick up the podcast right now,
jump in and you know, maybe catch up on the previous episodes.
Yeah. So the best thing to do is if you have never read Janeair
at all, the best thing to do is go back back and started episode
one, because we are reading the book in its entirety, So start with
one. If you have read Jane Air, but you're just interested in hearing
the kind of notes and the comments and listening to the questions and the analysis,
then you can jump right in. So Jane Air Complete movies should start
with episode one, but people who have some familiarity with the story can jump
right in. Where we are. I love it all right. Well,
the podcast once again is called story Time for grown ups with Faith Moore.
You can find out more information about Faith in her work at Faith Kate Moore
m o o r e dot com. Faith thank you so much for coming
back on the show. Thanks so much for having me. This was lots
of fun. Of course, you have been listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. A Memily Dratchenski, culture editor Cure at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for
the fray her and the fav ser reason. And then it faded away.