Some of you might know more about Chat GPT than I do, and some might know less. I hadn't paid much attention to the whole AI and Chat GPT thing, but recently, I had the idea of writing an advice column on how to be a good conversationalist, as though written by Mrs. Elton from Emma.
​    I thought about the various points I could put in there, such as "the more you talk about yourself, the sooner people will get to know you, and the better they will like you,"  And, "If you have relatives who live in a very grand way, be sure to work them into the conversation as often as you can."
    Then I thought, I wonder if can Chat GPT do this? So I asked it to "write an advice column as if you were Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's novel Emma, on the topic of being a good conversationalist." Almost immediately, the writing started scrolling across the screen. Here is the result...

    ​As many scholars of Austen have long pointed out, Jane Austen intended to use Sanditon to explore the social and moral consequences of capitalism. Sadly, Austen laid the manuscript aside during her final illness. Interrogating Austen through a critical lens reveals that she was a committed anti-capitalist who was determined to fight back in the only way she could--through her pen.
    I am not referring to Austen's well-known portrayals of the landed gentry and the lesser nobility, but rather, her subtle attacks on the pernicious influence of consumerism. To a startling extent, the buying and selling of things and the rise of the urban bourgeoisie forms a backdrop to her so-called marriage plot novels. Scholar David Daiches called Austen "a Marxist before Marx." 
      It is no exaggeration to say that Austen shows us whether a character is good or bad by their reaction to consumerism. Two of Austen’s heroines never step inside a store--Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price. And, significantly, the heroines who do go shopping always live to regret the experience. It is only the fops and fools who like to shop, as we will see. Austen’s message could not be clearer: Capitalism is the root of all evil. Let’s critically take the novels one by one...

    Mr. Woodhouse's Georgian-era riddle, "Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid," is the subject of my article in the 2022 online edition of Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America. My previous post gives the full text of the Kitty riddle and adds some background info.  One of the points I touch on in the article is that to understand this riddle, you should study it in context by comparing it with other Georgian-era poem-riddles.
     As I discovered, the Georgians loved riddles with witty word play. They could be in prose, but a really clever riddler could give his clues in rhyme, as the author of the Kitty riddle does. Riddles were sometimes called "Enigmas." 
    Many Georgian-era riddles were cleverly risqué but Mr. Elton, when asked to contribute to Harriet's riddle collection, was careful to avoid giving her something that was off-color. He was "most earnestly careful that nothing ungallant, nothing that did not breathe a compliment to the sex should pass his lips. They owed to him their two or three politest puzzles."  The passage acknowledges the changing sensibilities of Regency audiences, compared to the bawdier Georgians.
      Below is a prime example of a naughty-sounding Georgian riddle. I wouldn't share this one with children, even though the allusions are likely to go over their heads...

  The many generous subscribers to Miss M.C. Squire’s first novel, The Beggar and His Benefactor (1809), must have wondered if they got their money’s worth. The book is only 120 pages long; it’s  the barest sketch of a novel grafted onto a travelogue about Plymouth and Cornwall. For a novel of the long 18th century, it's singularly devoid of sentiment or sensation.
    So why is Miss Squire my author of the week?  Well, for one thing, even trite and second-rate novels give me food for thought about the opinions and preoccupations of Austen's era. I'm learning about attitudes toward the class system and relations between the sexes. And for another, I'd like to bring Miss Squire to the attention of scholars because Squire uses people of color to teach a moral lesson in her first novel and her second novel includes a narrative of the slave trade. But first, a bit about the plots of her two novels...