#nohopereadio

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I think people know about cuckoo chicks pushing the other eggs out of the nest they're born in, but do people know about honeyguide chicks which have these sick fangs:

Which they use to kill their nest mates, not by tearing the flesh but to gain enough grip to grab and shake them to death:

Claire Spottiswoode watched as the honeyguide chick used its sharp beak to grasp a young bee-eater, and, like a pitbull terrier, simply shake it to death. If the host chick is tough, it can take several sessions, between which the honeyguide chick pauses to catch its breath before starting again. Because its eyes are not yet open, and it's dark inside the bee-eater nest cavity, the honeyguide chick presumably uses both movement (touch) and temperature to tell it whether more shaking is necessary.

From Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead.

I think with the cuckoo chick pushing eggs out of the nest you can kind of imagine it doesn't really know what it's doing, it's just instinctively trying to make more room for itself or something, but there's something way more unsettling about a baby bird shaking another baby to death and checking whether the body's cold to see if it needs to keep going.

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Basically everything I know about this general area comes from reading one single book (The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka), and I obviously don't have the requisite expertise to properly evaluate that book beyond googling just now to see if there's any big "debunking" review out there that will make me look like an idiot (can't find one, although I did find out that someone reviewed it as an ACX book review contest entry which I apparently missed at the time). Having said that, my feeling is that if you were to look closely at the behaviour of (at least some) insects, the intuition you describe would quickly get a lot weaker.

Bees definitely seem to have these traits: creative problem solving; making plans with future outcomes in mind, and changing those plans when circumstances change; forming internal "maps" of one's environment and using recognizable landmarks to orient oneself therein; communicating information about the environment to one another (and not in like a "releasing pheromones" way, google "waggle dance"); forming preferences based on learning rather than just instinct; fear and (non-trivial) pain behaviour; concept-formation that looks like it involves doing things like basic counting and having abstract ideas although this is very very hard to do rigourous experiments about; being aware of the dimensions of one's own body and taking this into account when navigating tight spaces (note that individual bees vary in size a lot); and, for whatever this is worth to you, varying a lot from individual to individual in terms of preferences, dispositions, foraging strategies, intelligence etc (i.e. they have "personalities", a horribly loaded word I know, but I tried to keep the rest of this list objective so indulge me a bit of blatant gushing pro-bee propaganda at the end here).

The point is it's surprisingly hard to come up with a concrete example of a consciousness-indicating-behaviour that's clearly present in, say, dogs, and clearly not present in bees (without gerrymandering). Bees have less complex minds than dogs for sure, but whether they're enough less complex to deserve to be placed many tiers lower on the great chain of being is a way harder question to answer than it looks! And since bees are the only insect whose psychology I've looked into even a little bit I would tentatively guess this is also true of a lot of other kinds of insects and bugs and stuff.

(Fwiw, I do to some extent share the intuition you're describing on a gut level, but I feel like (at least in my own case, on introspection) it comes partly from a just-world-fallacy-adjacent place. Insects are tiny and all over the place, you can step on one and not know anything about it! Surely nature wouldn't be so cruel as to create a cute little guy who can just get stepped on like that?)

i really dont understand vegan's concern for bug suffering honestly. like i can get that you see a cow and, given the size of its brain and what not, there might be a conciousness there worth protecting. but bugs??? if there is any creature in creation im willing to bet my life on them just being purely biological mechanisms with zero self awareness it would be bugs, surely

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That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

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I'm assuming a bunch of you have heard of this before but while I'm Austenposting I'm gonna put it here because I still find it quite funny: the current Bank of England £10 note features a portrait of Jane Austen on one side with a quote from her underneath, "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!":

Which presumably came from someone on the design team googling "jane austen quotes" and picking one that sounded suitable and not digging deep enough to notice that this is actually a line of dialogue from Pride and Prejudice spoken by a character who finds reading boring but is pretending to like it to impress Mr Darcy:

Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy's progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, "How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"

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Book I'm reading mentions as a cool fact about kiwis (the bird) that they can smell a worm through 15cm of soil, and whenever I hear about this genre of fact I think yeah, it is impressive that the kiwi can do that, but I'm more blown away by the fact that the worm's scent is capable of traveling through 15cm of soil in the first place while still being recognizably what it is. The thing that's really surprising here is that the information itself is being broadcast to a much wider range than you'd naively expect!

The fact that there's a creature with sensitive enough receptors to pick up the signal is cool in its own right, but that's downstream of the truly amazing fact that the signal makes it through that whole obstacle course at all, and it almost feels like a minor metaphysical error is being made when we're encouraged to direct all our wonder at the bird itself with no acknowledgement of the physics of the situation?

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God I remember downloading a pdf of The Joy of Gay Sex as a teenager and it's SO disappointing. Like from what I gather the original Joy of Sex is a book of practical sex advice with a focus on fine-grained discussion of technique, the gay one advertises itself as that but is almost entirely a book-length glossary of terminology relating to gay culture, with the entries providing mostly sociological information and full of dumb in-jokey humour that I found more alienating than anything else.

I've just found it online to see if my memory is accurate and it totally is! Like they have an entry for "blow job" which is less than one page long, and most of that word count is wasted on shit like "Cleopatra of Egypt, for instance, is reputed to have sucked off one hundred Roman noblemen in Rome in one night, and a thousand Roman soldiers back home, but this is probably exaggerated" wow thanks guys!!! Fuck off!! A ton of page-space is also taken up by lots of pencil illustrations of sex scenes that are so unappealingly rendered as to be positively WikiHowvian.

The only good part is the preface which goes into detail about an obscenity lawsuit that tried to challenge the book's publication, there's a fun quote from the Judge's decision in response to complaints about the book's descriptions of anal sex: "To write about homosexual practices without dealing with anal intercourse would be equivalent to writing a history of music and omitting Mozart". But damn what a waste of a good obscenity trial.

The Joy of Gay / Lesbian Sex, 1977

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I like Jane Austen a lot. I'm gonna attempt to say a few things about why:

It's very refreshing to read good fiction that takes seriously the importance of doing good by other people, and takes it seriously on lots of different scales: like there's big interpersonal conflict and moral dilemmas and stuff, but there's also like, spending an hour talking to your dad about cheerful things because you know he's likely to sit stewing in anxiety over something if you don't, even though you're kind of depressed at the moment and would rather be alone with your thoughts. That's a situation too!

Seriously it feels like not long after Austen fiction writers collectively agreed that all the interesting material was in the parts of the human mind that are normally hidden or repressed, or in people trying to forge some individual authentic path that's in conflict with the world or something, idk, maybe it's good that the thing I'm gesturing at happened. But I'm very glad we have at least one great novelist whose characters are primarily concerned with matters like "how can I best be a good friend to the people I care about?" and similarly-shaped questions.

I think part of this is just that like, there is no part of her that believes goodness is boring, she fundamentally takes for granted that people who are trying to be good are more interesting and complex and deep than people who aren't, and it's very hard not to agree with this when you're reading her.

Something about the very particular tone of her comedy is connected to all this, she's mocking, near-scathing about all her characters including the ones she likes, but it's from a place of like... the most important thing in life is to hold your principles sacred, but also it's a guarantee that you and the people around you will fall short of those principles many many times, but also the correct attitude to take towards these human limitations is laughter instead of despair, but also the most important thing in life is to hold your principles sacred. She really makes it feel like "people are ridiculous" and "people are important" are two sides of the same coin, idk this is more abstract than I want it to be, but something like that is the vibe.

It's frustratingly difficult to say anything general about her fiction that doesn't make it sound boring... anyway I love her is the point.

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The post feels like a very natural unit of literary production to me: one to three shortish paragraphs expressing an idea, generally in quite a casual style, without necessarily any claim to profundity (there are other types of post but hopefully the vague genre I'm talking about is recognizable. This post is a post if you need an example). It feels well-suited to the shape and size of everyday garden variety thoughts. Bigger and clumsier than an aphorism, smaller and looser than an essay. Just some thoughts being recorded with minimal polish beyond what's needed to make them coherent to someone else.

It feels like, if you gave an intelligent species the gift of writing when they didn't have it before, this would be one of the first and most obvious genres they'd invent. But I'm not actually sure what outlets there were for post-like writing prior to the posting era; most things that got published had to be higher-effort than this, right? Or feigning to be high-effort at least. When publication requires non-trivial resources the bar for what gets published... well, exists. I would guess the writing we would recognize as post-like would mostly have happened in more private media like letters and diaries?

Actually now that I've described it, the pre-internet writing I've read that most closely matches the spirit of posting is... the books of Nietzsche?? Specifically the ones that are like The Gay Science where it's largely self-contained numbered sections that are each about half a page on average (but can be longer or shorter), and which vary quite a bit in style, subject, degree of seriousness and degree of "personalness", in a way that feels quite bloggy? I mean they're obviously better written than most of your dash, I'm not trying to play that annoying game where you claim that this highly revered impressive thing is actually no better than this other low-status minor thing. But purely in terms of form, I think there's more isomorphism between us and him than between us and most other historical antecedents I can think of.

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It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not “blowing.” It was scraping, scourging. It was so cruel. So unbecoming. Not merely did it bleach faces and raise red spots on noses; it tweaked up skirts; showed stout legs; made trousers reveal skeleton shins. There was no roundness, no fruit in it. Rather it was like the curve of a scythe which cuts, not corn, usefully; but destroys, revelling in sheer sterility. With one blast it blew out colour–even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone. Had it any breeding place it was in the Isle of Dogs among tin cans lying beside a workhouse drab on the banks of a polluted city. It tossed up rotten leaves, gave them another span of degraded existence; scorned, derided them, yet had nothing to put in the place of the scorned, the derided. Down they fell. Uncreative, unproductive, yelling its joy in destruction, its power to peel off the bark, the bloom, and show the bare bone, it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack against a dust cart standing outside the Army and Navy Stores, scattered along the pavement a litter of old envelopes; twists of hair; papers already blood smeared, yellow smeared, smudged with print and sent them scudding to plaster legs, lamp posts, pillar boxes, and fold themselves frantically against area railings.

This is from Virginia Woolf's The Years. Imagine sitting down to write about a windy day in London and you just have this available to give, what does it feel like to have this paragraph among the possible acts of your mind

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Ahaha I suspected Hart as soon as your second sentence. I'm curious what you end up thinking of him over the course of a book, I tried and couldn't finish The Experience of God despite finding the actual arguments really interesting because he can literally keep up this exact level of snark for hundreds of pages and man! It was entertaining for a while but the sheer quantity of sustained contempt became almost physically exhausting after a while. I genuinely felt like part of his motivation was to prove that Dawkins et al don't have a monopoly on being condescending and obnoxious in debate and that theists can do it even better if they want. The thing you're reading seems less aimed against atheism than what I read so it might be less like that?

(Also if you've never read @nostalgebraist's review of The Experience of God it's a real classic, or a classic to me anyhow.)

i decided to read some theology & omg i kind of love this writer already

he spends the entire "preface to the paperback edition" yelling "WHY ARE YOU BOOING ME? I'M RIGHT" at all his haters (emphasis mine):

"I have to confess, however, that since this book first appeared—not quite a year ago, as I write—I have discovered dimensions of religious psychology of which I had formerly been blithely ignorant, or at most only obscurely conscious [... Nothing] quite prepared me for the passion and, in many instances, vehemence that this text has provoked, at least from its detractors [...] The topic of this text, apparently, touches deeper springs of disquiet. It has in some cases inspired polemic so shrill, intellectually diffuse, and rhetorically abandoned as to suggest unhealthy psychological sensitivities. As yet, though, it has elicited not a single cogent, interesting, or even vaguely accurate critique. I am not exaggerating."

other choice bits:

"While I am willing to accept some blame for misunderstandings, in the decorously insincere manner expected of any author, I am not willing to grant that the book's argument—and it is a single, continuous, and necessarily indivisible argument—is really all that difficult to follow."

"Now, to be fair, some of the book's critics have also complained about its 'tone,' which I cannot say is a first for me" lmao

"All that said, however, I suppose I do have to plead guilty to a certain breach of etiquette. I knew before setting out that there are some fairly inflexible rules about how one is allowed to discuss this topic, and I chose to ignore them. No one has ever written them down, of course, but everyone is tacitly expected to observe them, and anyone so tactless as to violate them—to raise serious questions in the wrong way [....]—risks the sort of censure that can scour a social calendar clean."

"The reason that this topic, more than any other in Christian tradition, has an almost magical power to provoke ungovernable emotions, I am convinced, is that most Christians do not really believe what they believe."

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If I were writing a novel, I would certainly not have any long (a page or more) passages be in italics, and I especially would not do that as a recurring thing. Even if those parts are flashbacks or dreams or a mysterious different narrator or something, I would find some other way to convey that those passages are A Different Kind Of Deal. Stop having them be in italics I don't like that cut it out

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A weird thing about when I'm reading fiction is I always experience something like cognitive dissonance whenever the scene being described has very different weather from the irl weather. If it's 28°C and sunny outside my window then that's by default how I'll picture whatever I'm reading about, and if the narration tells me it's actually pouring with rain in the middle of winter it will take real effort to incorporate that information into my imagining, often so much so that it significantly distracts me from the actual content of what I'm reading.

Weirdly--or not? I'm not actually sure whether this is weird or unweird as considered in the light of the above--I don't actually have a super strong visual imagination, I definitely don't have aphantasia but I also definitely don't have anything remotely like a cinema screen running in my head while I read. I guess the argument for this being surprising is that if I'm not imagining scenes strongly in the first place why is it so noticeable when the weather is wrong? And the argument for it being unsurprising is that maybe my weak-ass imagination is "borrowing" the weather from my actual sensory input when it renders scenes because it doesn't have the processing power to efficiently generate that kind of thing from scratch.

If this is at all a recognizable experience to anyone else I'd like to hear from you.

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Virginia Woolf makes for far better out-and-about reading than at-home reading imo. Always puts me in a people-watching mood, she might be the very best author for making plausible the illusion that everything everyone does is already maximally interesting and that art doesn't need to add anything. Maybe it's not an illusion if you have Virginia Woolf's brain. Or maybe it's the London that's the secret, maybe London's not bluffing about being the only real city, I mean how would I know? Maybe I gotta be in London. I'm not doing that though

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A small number of classics publishing thoughts

I wish it were way more common to see long books published in multiple volumes. I'm fine with long books existing but a 900 page paperback is not good to hold in your hands. It's bad to hold. It's heavy for example. I don't wanna do that. If there were two of them but smaller it would be fine.

And I get why this doesn't happen in general, if you need to buy two books that's going to be more expensive, customers en masse wouldn't like it. But I'm puzzled about classics publishing specifically, because this is where choice, in theory, abounds. If I want a copy of War and Peace, I can cheap out on a £3.99 Wordsworth edition that probably uses a public domain translation and will definitely fall apart before I finish it, I can pay £9 more for the privilege of real paper and footnotes from Penguin/Oxford/Vintage/etc, I can pay £9 more than that for a tacky Penguin Clothbound edition because a straight person on instagram told me to, and above that there's varying degrees of actually nice expensive gift editions, I mean the Folio Society has proven that there's really no upper-bound to what people will pay for a book that looks really good.

What I can't seem to do, for any amount of money, is buy a paperback that is the size of my hands. I literally can't do it. All of the above are single volume and between 1000-1500 pages. The Everyman's Library War and Peace is in three volumes but hardback, and hardback is a significant disadvantage imo but that's probably genuinely the best option still. And that's a special exception anyway, Everyman's doesn't make a habit of doing this, their edition of Middlemarch for example is one 900-page volume, same with the other longboys I checked.

Surely there is room in this variegated competitive market for one edition that prioritizes comfort, for people who want to actually read the book and have a nice time doing so. It seems like there's not. Oh well.

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I made fun of the Penguin Clothbound series above, and listen if you think they look cool and not like something conceived by a graphic design student who's just looked up what books are as research for their assignment then more power to you, but you still shouldn't buy them because they suck, like the quality is so bad! That coloured ink rubs off so easily it's insane. Part of my job involves picking books from the shop floor for online orders, and I hate seeing orders for the those ones because it's a very frequent occurrence that we'll have like six copies of the clothbound Frankenstein or whatever in-store and I still can't fulfill the order because none of them are remotely presentable, they've all got prominent scratches or faded parts, and this is before they've ever even been owned by anyone, this is just from existing in a shop and getting occasionally manhandled! It's so so sad. And the thing is a lot of books age gracefully, they look nice and well-loved as they get battered and worn, but these ones when the ink comes off just look like cheap pieces of shit! Please stop buying them, you do not want these books on your shelves trust me!

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tbh the normal-ass Penguin Classic black paperbacks aren't always great quality either. My copy of Wuthering Heights looks like it's been passed down through three generations but I bought it new and I've only read it 1.5 times:

And like sure I let it get jostled around in my bag a lot but I do that with all my books and they don't all look like this. Definitely part of the issue is that it crinkles white which shows up really strongly against the black, but even allowing for that it's really bad. Penguin just kind of sucks with their classics publishing in general I think. It's weird because you'd think with no living author to pay royalties to there'd be more room for investing in an actual quality product--seems not! Most of my others in this series are kinda beat up too although admittedly this is the worst example.

(I don't even like Wuthering Heights it's kinda boring! The 0.5th read was my first attempt, I fell off it and then forced myself to try again later. I probably wouldn't still own it if it weren't sadly too ugly now to give away!)

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Classics publishing! Just some thoughts.

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My favourite author is Iris Murdoch.

I don't think I have favourites in any other category, it feels like a bit of an artificial concept usually, but it would be silly to deny this one. I was halfway through my first Murdoch novel (at age 20 or so) when I felt certain I was going to have to read them all (there are 26). My feeling was that I would have stayed true to that even if every other book she wrote had been terrible. I'm sure that's not true, but I say it to illustrate that she inspired a deep and irrational loyalty in me very early on that hasn't waned over time. I've been reading between one and three of her books per year since I started, deliberately spreading them out so as not to deplete a valuable resource too soon, although presumably I'll just start rereading them at the same rate after I've finished. I've read 21 out of 26 so far.

Maybe someday I'll have something to say on here about what draws me to her books so strongly. Not right now though. What I want to say today is that I usually like her opening lines very much, she often starts with some very punchy compact moment that feels weirdly complete already even as it clearly stands in need of unpacking, if that makes sense to anyone else. This post is going to be simply a compilation of some good ones. Let's say 10 of the best, in no particular order.

I'm defining "opening lines" as not literally just the first sentence but enough to cover the first self-contained "moment" of the book, which is a bit of a judgment call for sure but you can be confident I've judged correctly in every case. For The Philosopher's Pupil (but no others) I've blatantly cheated by entirely skipping a sort of prologue chapter because I think the opening of the next chapter is both more opening-like and more compelling, I acknowledge that this is illegitimate but you'll just have to deal with it. Okay here goes.

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The Unicorn

'How far away is it?'

'Fifteen miles.'

'Is there a bus?'

'There is not.'

'Is there a taxi or a car I can hire in the village?'

'There is not.'

'Then how am I to get there?'

'You might hire a horse hereabouts,' someone suggested after a silence.

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An Accidental Man

'Gracie darling, will you marry me?'

'Yes.'

'What?'

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The Bell

Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.

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The Philosopher's Pupil

I am the narrator: a discreet and self-effacing narrator. This book is not about me.

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Bruno's Dream

Bruno was waking up. The room seemed to be dark. He held his breath, testing the quality of the darkness, wondering if it was night or day, morning or afternoon. If it was night that was bad and might be terrible. Afternoon could be terrible too if he woke up too early. The drama of sleeping and waking had become preoccupying and fearful now that consciousness itself could be so heavy a burden.

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

The boy was there again this morning, and the dogs were not barking.

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A Fairly Honourable Defeat

'Julius King.'

'You speak his name as if you were meditating upon it.'

'I am meditating upon it.'

'He's not a saint.'

'He's not a saint. And yet—'

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The Message to the Planet

'Of course we have to do with two madmen now, not with one.'

'You mean Marcus is mad too?'

'No, he means Patrick is mad too.'

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The Red and the Green

Ten more glorious days without horses!

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The Sea, The Sea

The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me. Perhaps I shall feel calmer and more clear-headed after yet another interval.

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Like many women authors at the time, Austen published her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literary lioness" (i.e. a celebrity).

Okay this is just Wikipedia and the source isn't checkable-to-me but... huh! I knew about the thing where women writers would often publish either anonymously or with a male pseudonym, but I guess I assumed that was all for marketing reasons, the fear that people wouldn't be interested in buying books by women. Which is presumably still part of it. But I hadn't heard about this other angle where a woman using her own name might be shamed for, I guess, trying to make it part of her identity to be a writer? Like writing and publishing books is fine if you're not trying to make too big a deal about it, if you pretend to mostly care about other stuff? I mean that's not really worse than what I previously thought was the explanation, I guess, but it is fucked up in a novel and interesting way!