Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth
Paula Byrne, biographer of Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh, joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation ranging from the women behind Hardy’s fiction and Austen’s debt to Georgian farce, through Waugh’s put-on misanthropy, to Byrne’s own experience of a five-year ‘poison pen letter’ campaign and her work as a couples and family therapist.
Key ideas
- Byrne reads Hardy’s fiction as inseparable from his marriages. Hardy’s tragic doublings — pairs of women, pairs of men, mirrored plots — trace back to a man perpetually pursuing ‘the unattainable’, who fell back in love with his first wife, Emma, only after her death and after moving his second wife, Florence, into the house; Byrne treats his obsessive late poems to Emma as both genuine remorse and a working writer’s recognition of good material.
- Austen’s comic timing came from the theatre, not the page. Byrne’s first book argued that Austen’s mastery of dialogue and comic pacing was learned from a childhood steeped in Georgian farce — a debt Byrne thinks is systematically underrated because Austen is remembered as a novelist of manners rather than, first, a comic writer.
- Mansfield Park is a novel about a house corrupted by slave money, not merely a novel with slavery in the background. Byrne reads the Bertram estate itself, not the visiting Crawfords, as the source of the novel’s moral unease, and treats Fanny Price’s question to Sir Thomas about the slave trade — the only character to ask it — as the novel’s most politically charged moment.
- Waugh’s snobbery and misanthropy were performance, not character. Byrne argues, against the popular caricature, that Waugh played the part of the ‘grumpy colonel’ deliberately, while remaining privately generous and loyal — he was, in her account, an intellectual snob about wit and conversation, not a social one.
- All biography is covert autobiography. Byrne states flatly that a biographer’s choice of subject reveals the biographer — her own interest in resourceful working-class women in the Hardy book traces to her Catholic, matriarchal Liverpool upbringing — a claim she extends to explain why no book she has written has left her feeling personally ‘cold’ toward its subject.
Content
Hardy’s women and his marriages
Cowen opens on Virginia Woolf’s visit to Hardy — her surprise at how gentle and ‘mesmerizing’ he was in person, against his reputation for pessimism — before turning to the marriages that Byrne’s new book, Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses, centres on. Byrne locates the personal charge of Jude the Obscure in the collapse of Hardy’s first marriage to Emma: the novel’s recurring question — why can’t an unsatisfactory marriage simply be ended? — reflects a man trapped by class-inflected taboos against divorce. The paradox she keeps returning to is that Hardy fell back in love with Emma only once she was dead, moving on almost immediately to court his second wife, Florence, with maudlin poems to his first — behaviour Byrne calls ‘a little perverse’ and links to a broader pattern in Hardy of desiring only the unattainable, evident in The Well-Beloved. Asked why so many Hardy plots come in doubled pairs of characters and mirrored fates, Byrne, who says she had never consciously noticed the pattern, agrees it is a deliberate and effective plotting technique, tied to his fascination with alternative lives — ‘What would happen if this happens, or what happens if that wife dies?‘
Fatalism, Shakespeare, and the unread Hardy
Byrne traces the primary Shakespearean element in Hardy to a shared sense of fatalism — ‘there’s a divinity that rough-hews our ends’ — the sense that a peevish providence, not free will, governs Tess of the d’Urbervilles much as it governs King Lear. On the neglected corners of Hardy’s output, she recommends the ‘minor’ novels (Two on a Tower, with its telegraph and sense of technological modernity) and, above all, his early poetry, written at 25 and startlingly modern in voice — advice she gives to anyone who thinks they already know Hardy from the handful of novels most commonly taught.
Georgian theatre and Austen’s comic sense
Asked how good late-Georgian theatre actually was, Byrne describes a mixed evening bill — a serious five-act play, a farce, a dance — performed before a noisy, sociable audience that watched each other as much as the stage, in a rare social space where class boundaries blurred. She argues in her first book that Austen’s celebrated comic timing and dialogue-driven plotting (Pride and Prejudice reads, she says, ‘like being at a play’) derive directly from this theatrical diet — farces she attended, watched performed at home, and read aloud — a debt Byrne thinks is ‘undervalued’ because readers remember Austen primarily as a novelist of manners rather than, centrally, a comic writer.
Mansfield Park, slavery, and politics
Byrne calls Mansfield Park — her own favourite Austen novel, against popular opinion — a novel written in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars and, more pointedly, on the proceeds of the slave trade: the Bertram estate is a ‘new house… built on the spoils of the slave trade’, and Byrne reads the moral corruption of the household as intrinsic to the house itself, not imported by the visiting Crawfords. She singles out Fanny Price’s question to Sir Thomas about his Antiguan plantations as the novel’s clearest political moment — the only character who asks about the slave trade at all — and confirms Austen’s own abolitionism, including her fascination with the abolitionist writer Thomas Clarkson. On adaptations, Byrne credits Patricia Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park for engaging directly with the slavery plot, while judging on rewatching that it has dated; her favourite Austen adaptation on any reading is Clueless, for capturing the comedy above all else.
Evelyn Waugh’s performed misanthropy
Discussing her Waugh biography, Mad World, Byrne rejects the standard caricature of Waugh as a genuine snob and misanthrope, arguing ‘everything was a joke’ and that Waugh consciously played the part of the ‘grumpy colonel’ in public while remaining, by the testimony of those who knew him intimately (including his wartime bagman), deeply kind and loyal in private. She allows one qualification: Waugh was an intellectual snob, with little patience for stupidity, but not a social one — he mocks the aristocracy even within Brideshead Revisited. The conversation broadens into a discussion of English ‘fastidiousness’ and the tendency to derive social status from negative rather than positive opinion, which Byrne connects to English reticence, tall poppy syndrome, and — from her separate career as a therapist — the costs of a stiff-upper-lip culture that also suppresses family secrets.
The poison pen letters and biography as autobiography
Byrne recounts a five-year campaign of anonymous ‘poison pen’ letters she received after her husband, Jonathan Bate, was knighted and made provost of an Oxford college — around 20 letters, expensively written and precisely targeted at material she had posted on Twitter, which she eventually traced to a female academic through a deliberate CCTV bluff and pursued to a legal apology. She reads the episode as a case study in English class resentment (‘who does she think she is’) rather than simple malice, and says writing a novel based on the letters was cathartic. Pressed on whether her biographies work through her own history, Byrne agrees without qualification: ‘all biographers are writing autobiographies’ — her interest in resourceful, storytelling working-class women in the Hardy book, she says, traces directly to her own Catholic, matriarchal Liverpool upbringing, where women held the household’s narrative power.
Therapy, class, and Anglo-American contrasts
As a practising couples and family therapist, Byrne describes herself as unusually willing to ‘call bullshit’ on clients wasting their own time and money — a directness she attributes to her Liverpudlian, working-class background. Comparing British and American couples, she finds American relationships markedly warmer and more openly supportive, against a British tendency toward understated cruelty she likens to an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. She reports being alarmed, in her American practice, by the scale of depression and anxiety she now sees in children as young as eleven, which she attributes less to social media alone than to a broader collapse of community and family connection, and closes on Northern England’s post-industrial ‘human capital crisis’, which she has watched partially reverse in Liverpool since its year as European Capital of Culture.
See also
- Paula Byrne — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Hardy Women — Byrne’s group biography, the episode’s occasioning book
- Thomas Hardy · Jane Austen · Evelyn Waugh — the three novelists discussed