Jane Austen: Riddle Books and Family Charades

Early in Jane Austen’s Emma, Harriet Smith begins to collect and transcribe 'all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper, made up by her friend'. Her friend is the titular heroine, Emma Woodhouse. Together, these young ladies begin to compile all the riddles they can find into a bound volume for personal use.

Collecting excerpts and riddles was a popular practice in the first decades of the 19th century and there are examples of similar riddle books belonging to the Austen family. This lecture analyses these riddle books (real and fictional) as representations of the relationships between the collectors.

Francesca Kavanagh is a Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. Her current research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century women’s reading and writing practices with a particular interest in material culture.