Jason on tropes, book boyfriends, the grand gesture, and our trip to England.
At Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, there’s a little table where she wrote. I knew it would be small.
It is tiny.
Room for a couple of pages and a spare pencil, and that’s about it.
A few days later we walked through Chatsworth, which played Pemberley in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Room after room of gilded everything. One room has walls of carved leather. Jason looked around and asked whether they really needed to show their wealth like this.
The tiny table and the leather walls turn out to run through this whole conversation.
Once a season, Jason comes on the show. This year, he invited himself. He has watched almost two years of my romance reading from the other end of the sofa, and he has learned a thing or two, like naming the tropes when we watch TV.
So a year into the podcast, almost two years of being deep into romance reading and he has thoughts.
On the grand gesture that skips the apology. On declarations of love so generic she could be anyone. On book boyfriends, and why getting jealous of one is “kind of like getting mad at somebody because they were mean to you in your dream.” So he says.
We talk about what all this reading has changed in our house, what he’d say to other husbands about the benefits of romance, and he shared his thoughts on Mr. Darcy too. Plus, Jason has a theory about what kind of DJ Darcy would be.
Grab a cuppa and have a listen.
A note on the book
In Pride and Prejudice, when Lydia runs off with Wickham, it’s Darcy who tracks them down, pays Wickham’s debts, and makes the marriage happen. He asks that it be kept quiet. Elizabeth only finds out because Lydia lets slip that Darcy was at the wedding. Jason got the main idea right - no parade required - but got the plot a little mixed up. What matters for me is that he is open to watching and talking about it.
We named our trope on the episode: grumpy sunshine.
We didn’t settle who’s who.
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