Patricia Meyer Spacks, from “The Talent of Ready Utterance” [from Gossip]

Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Gossip celebrates “idle talk” and analyzes its role in novels, plays, and letters, as well as its aesthetic and moral ramifications within those art forms. In “The Talent of Ready Utterance,” Spacks discusses eighteenth-century moralists’ opinions about gossip, particularly feminine gossip; she then considers the role of gossip in novels from the period. The excerpts below focus on her discussion of Austen’s Emma; Spacks argues that gossip helps to create a subversive feminine subtext in a novel that otherwise generally upholds the conservative values advanced by male moralists.

Patricia Meyer Spacks, from “The Talent of Ready Utterance” [from Gossip]